<div dir="ltr">Have you all seen the new Framework laptop? It's designed to be Linux friendly and easy to self-repair and upgrade. Very modular with QR coded parts that lead to replacement instructions. I'm not ready for a new device at the moment but it's definitely at the top of my list to look at if I do anytime soon.<br><br><a href="https://frame.work/">https://frame.work/</a><br><br>On the other hand, I'm kind of leaning toward keeping the high powered dev box at work (desktop) and just keeping a small, thin, light browsing laptop that I can read the news on at lunch, take notes on at conferences and offsite meetings, and watch movies on at airports and during flights. <br><br>Scott</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 9:56 PM Jim Kinney via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org">ale@ale.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>I've spent $$ on laptops with good results.<br><br>BUT I was buying some top of the line gear from Dell or IBM. My 16GB XPS15 has 1TB NVME and dual GPU with quad-core Intel cpu and on cpu graphics AND a discreet Nvidia GPU with dedicated ram. But it was $1600 and the touch screen (disabled in bios) shipped with the 4K screen.<br><br>Spend that money on a desktop for a state of the art Ryzen with 32 GB ram and 1TB NVME and 12TB rust drives plus a decent monitor and graphics. <br><br>Yeah. Big box is cheaper.<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On November 15, 2021 7:02:09 PM EST, Steve Litt via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<pre>True Jim!<br><br>Laptops break my heart in so many ways. Relatively low clock speeds.<br>5400 RPM. No way to have both an SSD and a multi-terrabyte spinning<br>rust. Wifi that doesn't work with Linux. Graphics that doesn't work<br>with Linux. Fragile, dust-prone, overheats easily. A few drops of a<br>drink in the keyboard or a hit to the screen renders the whole machine<br>useless. Selling me the touchscreen I don't need and skimping on the RAM<br>I do.<br><br>And the Big Kahuna: DIY hostile.<br><br>I'm typing this on my self-built AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core (12 thread)<br>Processor, 64GB RAM, ventilated six ways from Tuesday tower format<br>desktop. I don't get into trouble opening 20 Chromium tabs. It has an<br>internal CD/DVD/Blu-ray reader/writer because dangit, I want it, even<br>if the Mac folks have declared optical to be dead. Root mounted on 1TB<br>NVme, all data partitions (like /home) mounted on a 14TB 7200 RPM<br>Western Digital spinning rust, so no worries about files for years to<br>come. And if I need more disk space, there are a couple more bays in<br>the case. Plenty of resources for a couple heavy duty VM guests,<br>including an Ubuntu/Jitsi appliance (which I haven't yet perfected).<br><br>Now it's true, I spent just short of $2000.00 on this monstrosity, but<br>a similar laptop with only 512GB NVMe is $2700, with no place to put<br>the spinning rust other than consuming a precious USB3 slot.<br><br>You're right Jim. Desktop's the way to go. If you need to take it on<br>the road, a simple low level laptop can be synced with your high power<br>desktop.<br><br>I've had countless laptops, and they've all broken my heart.<br><br>SteveT<br><br><br>Jim Kinney said on Mon, 15 Nov 2021 18:19:12 -0500<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(114,159,207);padding-left:1ex">It's pretty amazing the hardware ability $300 buys in a desktop<br>device. Even a 3-4 year old cheap desktop is faster than a 5-7 laptop<br>of the same price. Portable horsepower is expensive.<br><br><br><br>On November 15, 2021 2:32:22 PM EST, Steve Litt via Ale <<a href="mailto:ale@ale.org" target="_blank">ale@ale.org</a>><br>wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(173,127,168);padding-left:1ex">Neal Rhodes via Ale said on Mon, 15 Nov 2021 08:22:40 -0600<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">So, Thanks for the advice on helping friend with virus scan on their<br>6gb Dell notebook.<br><br>I think that got it to the point of occasionally running ok, but<br>also often needing more than 6GB for Win 10, and starting to thrash.<br></blockquote><br>I love Linux as much as the next guy, but did you try cleaning up<br>extraneous applications, getting rid of registry deadwood, and<br>defragging?<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex"><br>It's one of those Dells without a RAM door on the bottom.<br></blockquote><br>There's a special place in the devil's playground for those who design<br>and manufacture DIY hostile equipment and software.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex"><br>The recommendation from HL computer was to swap the drive with a<br>500GB<br></blockquote><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">SSD, and virus scan the new drive. They wanted $260 for that.<br></blockquote><br>You could buy that same drive from Newegg for $60.00 and install it<br>yourself, except for no door. Special place...<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex"><br>I'm seeing Walmart is peddling an HP I3 with 8GB RAM, 220GB SSD for<br>$270 this week.<br><br>Which is actually a better proposition. Friend's finances are<br></blockquote>limited.<br><br>If finances are limited, my suggestion is install a *low resource use*<br>Linux. And my further suggestion is that your friend put the $270<br>toward a new computer, and save money every month just so his next<br>computer can handle today's browsers and browser apps. It's not that<br>Linux is getting more bloated, at least if you use the right software<br>with Linux. The problem is that browsers are turning into RAM and MIP<br>sinks.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">I'm debating telling him I'll give him $100 for the old notebook and <br>reformat it for linux. Likely Ubuntu.<br><br>Guessing Ubuntu will run fine in 6GB.<br></blockquote><br>Not with the Ubuntu standard setup. I'd suggest:<br><br>WM/DE: Openbox or LXDE. Both are very light. Openbox is<br> significantly lighter.<br><br>Daemons: CUPS and SSHD. Nothing else.<br><br>Browser: For picky sites, use Chromium. For the rest, use something<br> like Dillo or Midori. With Chromium, keep only one or at the<br> most two tabs open.<br><br>Workflow: Don't have a lot of programs running at once.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">It's been a couple of years since I did that. Are there new hurdles <br>with doing a fresh install? EUFI? <br></blockquote><br>UEFI shouldn't be a problem because an old computer like that is<br>probably either MBR or UEFI with Legacy Mode. Your hard disk is much<br>smaller than 2GB, which is the cutoff (as I remember) at which you<br>lose space not formatting GPT.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">What about audio? <br></blockquote><br>More and more software requires Pulseaudio. I dislike Pulseaudio<br>because it's the land of a thousand hidden mutes, but I've never<br>thought of it as consuming resources. If you choose Unbuntu, they<br>handle<br>Pulseaudio pretty well.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">Audacity? <br></blockquote><br>If you're going to be editing sound files, I'd imagine that's pretty<br>resource intensive. I'd sure turn off all the browsers before using<br>Audacity.<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">TeamViewer?<br></blockquote><br>I don't know, but why would an individual like him need TeamViewer? If<br>it's so you can fix him remotely, why not use ssh -Y for a few<br>minutes, then set his sshd back to no-video?<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">Ultimaker Cura? <br></blockquote><br>I don't know. Depends on how they designed the software. Do they<br>malloc() hundreds of megabytes at a time, or do they work within a<br>megabyte or so of RAM?<br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 1ex 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(138,226,52);padding-left:1ex">Zoom?<br></blockquote><br>Zoom, Jitsi, BigBlueButton and especially GoToMeeting are extremely<br>taxing on the system, and prone to sound dropouts on anemic systems.<br>Also, my Daily Driver Desktop (DDD) uses Void Linux, which clicks and<br>drops out on all remote meeting software. My finding is that Ubuntu<br>sounds much better with such software.<br><br>By the way, you need Pulseaudio for Zoom, and my findings are that<br>apulse did not enable Zoom.<br><br>I've operated Jitsi on 16GB RAM and it worked as well as it could work<br>on Void, and perfectly on Ubuntu. I don't know about 6GB. Even more<br>unknown, does the Dell have enough CPU for the job? On my older 2<br>core, 1 thread per core 16GB DDD and Jitsi ran up CPU usage past 50%,<br>and Zoom and GoToMeeting pegged the 100% meter quite often. My new DDD<br>has 64GB RAM, but more important for meeting software, its 6core 2<br>core per thread CPU never pegs, and is usually below 20% over all for<br>Jitsi.<br><br>When operating meeting software, I use Chromium set to a Nice value of<br>-18, to minimize dropouts as much as possible. The shellscript<br>follows:<hr>#!/bin/sh<br>nice -n 18 chromium --disable-gpu<hr>I couldn't understand parts of your post, so I'm going to assume this<br>is for your friend. If your friend isn't married to Windows, I think a<br>low resource consumption Linux install would work to a pretty good<br>degree, always assuming he doesn't abuse his browsers.<br><br>By the way, you could set up a 6GB virtual machine with his CPU, his<br>hard disk, and test it on the various tasks you described. That should<br>give you some further information.<br><br>SteveT<br><br>Steve Litt <br>Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the<br>Successful Technologist <a href="http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques" target="_blank">http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques</a><hr>Ale mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Ale@ale.org" target="_blank">Ale@ale.org</a><br><a href="https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale" target="_blank">https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale</a><br>See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at<br><a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo</a><br></blockquote><br>-- <br>Computers amplify human error<br>Super computers are really cool<br></blockquote><br><br>SteveT<br><br>Steve Litt <br>Spring 2021 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful<br>Technologist <a href="http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques" target="_blank">http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques</a><hr>Ale mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Ale@ale.org" target="_blank">Ale@ale.org</a><br><a href="https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale" target="_blank">https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale</a><br>See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at<br><a href="http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo" target="_blank">http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo</a><br></pre></blockquote></div><br>-- <br>Computers amplify human error<br>Super computers are really cool</div>_______________________________________________<br>
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