My hope is that with the end of Windows 10 coming up, laptops with 7th generation CPUs will become really cheap, such as ThinkPad P51 and P71. They are a decent budget choice < 1k USD/EUR already, but might drop way under 500 with top specs.
It’s not like they are useless, but the market for Linux users should be satiated quickly once a selling panic sets in.
For most use cases, including backend development, they’ll be good enough for many years to come. tbh, I’m still happy with my i5-2500 from 2011 and 16 GB RAM, and that is with local DB, application server, IDE and everything running locally.
When that happens, I can finally retire my Thinkpad x200 laptops which serve as print servers and diagnostic software VM hosts. One can never have too many Linux laptops
They already are. Last year I bought a 7700k with gtx1080 for 250, and bought a similar 8600k with gtx1080 for the same price around christmas. Those things run everything we throw at it, running Linux.
Part of growing up dirt-poor is making use of any hardware possible. I excel so much at that skill now thanks to all the open source projects out there (the WM, DEs, distributions, TUIs, …). I can really squeeze a lot from a tiny host & having this mentality as a dev now is some times appreciated 😄.
I don’t understand why my PC is so slow
It’s an old meme but it checks out
As someone who was forced to start using Windows again after ten years after ten years of exclusively running Linux: Why is it like this? Everything is so crappy and slow!
It’s always been like this. Those 10 years ruined you as a Windows user.
It’s definitely gotten more wasteful lately in particularly. You could run 8.1 on any computer that supported Vista, and IME it was even a little snappier, but 10 and 11 have each been significantly worse.
i3wm on a 32bit IBM thinkpad is still instantaneous-response-fast
i only recently moved my main home pc from 8.1. there’s configs and software on it that would be difficult or impossible to recreate on a new install or pc. i even have a spare identical mb and cpu in case it’s needed. 1st gen. mechanical disks (several, sata ssd wasn’t that much of an improvement with the old controller for everyday use so i opted to keep the higher capacity) 32gb ram and pascal gpu. i skipped all the way to a rufus’d 11 and it’s actually running well (with all the crud ripped out, though). it dual boots with endless on a loop device. the upgrade didn’t even mess that up.
I’m dual booting on my laptop cuz I need windows for something, but 8gb ram is too much on Linux and the same amount of ram is too little on windows, Like I have 170 processes and 6gb ram usage at idle with my apps running in background, very poor memory management.
Linux aint perfect either. Look at the memory usage of most modern “fully featured” distros. They’re using damn near as much at idle as windows is. Same thing going back 10 years in time.
The key is with windows you get one windows, and maybe some tweaks. With linux you could go with a hyper minimal DE with not much in the way of shiny features and go a whole lot further.
I switched to KDE Neon lately and holy fuck does it chug down my battery in a few hours time (though most of the consumption is from Firefox so can’t blame it completely on the distro)
I’ve never seen a distro take more than 2gb RAM ootb (ubuntu gnome and kde are probably the “heavy” contenders), excluding precached files. In either case, Windows or Linux, you lose big time the moment you launch a web browser.
The fresh install of Manjaro KDE on my laptop is using 2.6gb on a fresh boot right out of the box.
I forget what distro it was (maybe neon?) that was using like 3.X gigs of ram on a fresh install. That was the point that I realized this wasn’t the Linux of old.
It probably was Neon. I switched recently and (for me) it’s more resource hungry than Kubuntu, even.
For shits and giggles I just tested out Ubuntu 25.04 and it’s only 1.3 gigs with it’s stock Ubuntuified de.
For as much shit as Ubuntu gets it’s really not that bad compared to some of the others.
Not prefect, but c’mon. You can run Linux+GUI in a potato, but even KDE Plasma is not nearly close to Windows in RAM/CPU usage (excepting misconfigurations of baloo).
Realtime antivirus scanning is a big culprit. I’m sure all the advertising/telemetry junk doesn’t help either.
updates. the constant barrage of updates. the cpu, ram, and disk time needed just to ‘check’ for updates is horrible (it used to be a lot worse, too). and if you are still on an old-school mechanical hdd, those ‘cumulative’ updates are absolutely brutal every month with win10 or 11.
last week i booted-up a silverblue that hasn’t been run in a couple months. 8gb, mechanical disk, not a speed demon either–3rd or 4th gen. i didn’t even notice the updates were coming in until the notification popped up saying they were done.
windows 11 straight up requires 16gb of ram now.
it idles at almost 8 (!!!) fucking gigabytes for some stupid reason.
Well, Windows as such don’t need more RAM as some Linux distros, What is wasting the most RAM is all the telemetries, services not needed, trials, adware and other crap which Windows has by default when you buy it with a new PC. Windows need average users because of this capables to fix it, not needed in Linux. That is the difference. A gutted Windows is pretty fast, without all the trash which is loaded on boot. Eg,only diseable the hybernation service reduce a big part of the RAM, because it make duplicates of all open apps as temporary files, to load these on the next startup. same with the index service to find files somewhat faster, which waste memory to write any change to the index, not really needed in mdern PC and less with an SSD. Only diseabling this 2 services can increase the speed and respond more than 50%.
But the normal user don’t do it and only claimes that Windows becomes slower and slower, because it is more and more filled with temp and trash files. That is the problem with Windows, because MS sells you a car, but by default with a huge caravan which you don’t need, that must tow.
Not if you have Firefox open. Three YouTube tabs and my 4GB Pi5 is swapping so hard it takes forever to move the mouse anywhere.
Firefox fixed its memory hog problem for a bit after 2016 or so and immediately got to work on how to get just as bad again.
Well, to be honest, I went a little overboard and installed Cinnamon on Arch. My girly setup with 4gb can no longer do push-ups with one finger.
