The pain of using budget notebooks as a software developer | Hacker News Reader

The pain of using budget notebooks as a software developer

blog.l0g4n.me

12 pointsL0g4n21 comments

The problem described is the problem of their software approach (running a heavy IDE in a VMware Ubuntu VM on a Windows laptop), rather than of the hardware. Unless the cooling setup is terrible on L490, CPU and memory combo should be pretty comparable even to desktop CPUs of today, and only the GPU will suck in comparison.

While I don't use "budget hardware", I am sure L490 is not much slower than the same gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon — though I actually use even previous gen with i5-7200u.

If you are mandated to use Windows, exploring an approach using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) should improve things a bit. Or make sure VMware is passing through (instead of emulating) most of the stuff.

Modern software development is further slowed down by the devops approach where you develop using the "same" (but never really the same) dockerised setup as the deployed production. So you get a 10s unit test runtime for a 15ms unit test.

I am never sure why developers accepted this, but in all the jobs I've been, I only felt as if I was the only one frustrated with this.

If nobody else feels the same frustration you do, don't be surprised: others just take it for granted, but it is NOT a hardware issue.

That specific thing might kot be a hardware issue, but the rest of it is. Large corps issue these giant plastic behemoths of laptops that they buy in bulk, and they just suck so much ass to use as a notebook. Heavy, bad to type on, low quality screens sometimes, slow, locked down, giant but somehow flimsy, meant to be used on a dock.

They also load them for a million crap ware to look over employees, monitor software, slow antivirus, malware scans every day etc it's not the hardware it's overzealous IT management the problem and zero trust towards employees.

In addition giving developers the same hardware and permissions as business people who use word and is a big mistake.

I tried to use WSL but it didn’t quite work then like two months ago with the RubyMine 2021 edition. I am getting a full Linux client next week (same hardware), hopefully that should work better.

Run Ubuntu Server in text-only mode (reducing the amount of RAM allocated to the VM) and set up to ssh into it.

Then run RubyMine from Windows.

Make a work directory on Ubuntu that has the same branch checked out as your Windows work directory.

Then set up RubyMine: Tools -> Deployment -> Configuration... and set up remote rsync with automatic update of remote files from Windows.

Any file you change on Windows will automatically sync to Linux. You only need a script running on Linux to live update/restart your app on file changes.

I do a version of this for Ruby/Rails development with a cloud VM instance from Mac RubyMine editing machine.

Yeah, think cheap and distributed. Like Tsutomu Shimomura's quiet Xterminal connected to a noisy box in another room.

The alternative gamer-mentality of tightly coupled cpu, gpu, and storage with huge IO is quite costly.

That sounds like a good compromise for the windows machine. Thanks, I will definitely try that out.

The L490 comes with a spinning hard drive configuration.

That explains most if not all of the slowness if your configuration didn't come with an SSD.

Last year I pulled an old Mac Mini out of mothballs, installed Linux on it, and started getting really frustrated with it slowing down and temporarily freezing all the time (not even a GUI, just the console, and web pages it was serving). I realized it seemed to be I/O related, and replaced the HDD with a SSD, and the problems just magically disappeared. Was shocked at the contrast; it had been so long since I'd used something on spinning rust. Even Raspberry Pis with ok-ish SD cards were more responsive.

Replacing a HDD with a SSD, as well as adding RAM, can do so much for performance, without even thinking about the CPU or GPU.

Christ on a bike that explains everything. I can't believe laptops can still come with spinning rust, let alone giving one to a developer/software engineer.

Nope, it’s definitely an SSD, no HDD. I think the bloat of the window installation does not help either.

I'm using a E495 with 1 TB HD on purpose. It's one if the fastest computers in my park, and I'm running Fedora. well it's the AMD variant, and I've tuned my performance profile and always keep the fans clean.

His problem is certainly Windows 11 and the virus scanner, not the laptop. on some of my work laptops you cannot do any meaningful work because of windows. even the WSL is 10x slower on simple magit rebases. build times are 1-4 hours.

Sheesh, just get an SSD, clone the HD to it, put it in, and if IT figures it out and you get in trouble, walk. First I wanted to say "Put in a request for an upgrade to better computer, or an SSD" but since it's Siemens it would probably take weeks before they respond.

Alternatively since it has USB 3.1, get a SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD, install an OS of your choice, and boot from it, assuming the BIOS isn't locked.

Hi, IT director here. You wouldn't walk, you'd be walked out. By security. Then, likely sued.

Don't be a jackass. Discuss this stuff with your IT department.

Sued? Hyperbole. If you really do that as an IT director you are trash.

I guess I'm the IT manager and product/cloud SRE at my work (we're a very small shop).

Yeah, sued seems hyperbolic. From my perspective if a staff person was capable of cloning their HDD and putting in an SSD by their self, I'd be quite happy for them to go ahead.

But, we have an MSP that should and _will_ do this for you so I'd rather it was organised on your behalf and we took the necessary backups in case you borked it. Plus we could take ownership of destroying the original HDD would also be quite important.

IT Dir, can you explain why you'd react the way you would? Perhaps I'm missing some risk here but ensuring BitLocker (assuming they and you are running Windows) is running and other compliance controls are running like Intune or equivalent. I don't see any many risks here:

1) Data loss during the clone transfer 2) Need to ensure the original HDD is destroyed and certified as such.

I wouldn't sue, that's up to legal. None of what he suggested would even work in my environment. You'd be fired for moving company information out of our controlled environment if you cloned the drive, tampering if you replaced it.

All they'd need to do is tell me, and I'd get them a laptop with an SSD.

I cannot have lone wolves like that hanging around. They have the potential to do far more damage than someone from the outside.

In fairness this hypothetical situation shouldn't even exist, no one should get a laptop with a HDD in any case.

Very much agreed. Likely had that spare lying around "We'll, the specs aren't horrible, we will see if this works."

We need feedback! It's impossible to understand everyone's workflow. Trying to hack your way around something like that rather than communicating is pretty sophomoric.

The IT department should know better and offer the right hardware and software for each job. Unfortunately IT departments prefer conformity for easiest management instead of high performing and happy engineers.

As I said before, it’s not a HDD but a SSD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com