Laptop for compiling.

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 11 May 2018 23:05:40 -0700
trent shipley <trent.shipley at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm thinking about getting a new laptop. 

Why not a desktop? My experience is I can get more power for a similar
price with a desktop. Especially if you already have hard drive cables
and fans and power supplies sitting around. I mean if you absolutely
need a laptop, fine, but don't rule it out jus because.

> Mine is several years old,
> and while it's quite serviceable, it boots really slowly, and it
> doesn't like to run a guest Ubuntu OS under Oracle VirtualBox. 

Try setting the guest's RAM really low, and giving the guest an anemic
CPU.

> Also,
> I foresee more compiling in my future, even though of late I've been
> rather truant about working on my own through my Haskell book. I will
> say no more about the R book. I don't game, because it is addicting,
> and therefore bad for me.
> 
> I tend to try to get as much life as possible out of a computer,
> because I am poor. I have heard good things about ASUS. I see more
> Linux in my future, but I have to have Windows and since Windows
> tends to come preinstalled, I expect it would be my native, host OS.
> 
> I'd like to spend $500, but could (and probably will) stretch to $700.

Let me describe my desktop machine: 4 years old and still giving me NO
reason to want it replaced.

It has a what in 2013 was a low level but reasonably fast dual core
AMD. It has 16 GB RAM: Remember you mentioned virtual machines? The
boot drive/root drive is a 256GB SSD, hosting all the non-changing
directories. Stuff like /home is a partition on a spinning drive,
mounted to the empty /home on the SSD. /var is on a spinner because I
don't want a lot of churn on the SSD. Bottom line, every program you
run loads from SSD, not from a spinner. Fasssst!

A lot of this computer's speed and efficiency comes from what it has,
but just as much comes from what it lacks. No KDE, no Gnome, no Unity,
not even bloatier by the minute Xfce. I'm using Openbox, assisted by
Suckless Tools' dmenu for running programs. My hotkeys have been well
thought out for the way I type (touch typist, 45wpm). This gives me
speed in two ways: My human interface is faster (no reaching for the
mouse unless a mouse is really needed like in Inkscape), and tinier
programs leave a lot more CPU and RAM available for programs that
really need it (compiling Haskell and whatever compiles your R book).

> 
> What could I expect to get for that, and what would you suggest.

There are many ways to get power and efficiency. I suggest you review
your priorities. Perhaps you really do need a laptop: In that case,
perhaps all that's needed is a < $100 SSD drive replacing your spinner,
and spend another $20 to turn your current spinner into an external
drive to host big files. Replace Gnome or KDE or whatever with Openbox
or LXDE or whatever, enhanced by Suckless Tools' dmenu, and you won't
recognize your old computer.

You mentioned boot speed. Why is that a problem: How often do you boot
it? Are you using either sysvinit or systemd to bring up your system?
Sysvinit is kinda slow, and although systemd has the potential of very
fast boot speed, the way it usually ends up on the end user's computer
is slooooowwwwwww booting. Consider leaving the well travelled path,
and going with Void Linux, which natively supports the superior and
simple runit init system. Whatever init system you use, get rid of all
the daemons and long running processes you don't need.

If you don't need a laptop, build a desktop with a small SSD root drive
assisted by a spinning disk for your own data and stuff that changes a
lot. Get 8, 16 or 32GB  RAM. The mobo should cost you under $100, same
with a dual core processor with a clock speed close to 4GHz. I'm not a
huge fan of multicore: I think clock speed is more important, and
for battery life and heat considerations laptops tend to have clock
speeds around 2.0GHz. Be sure to keep bloaty software off your new
computer. Yeah, you won't have the cradle to grave assistance of Gnome,
but you'll seldom need to wait for your machine.

You can either spend more money, or use svelte software, or explore
software you're not used to, but one way or another you'll need to
re-evaluate your priorities to get what you seem to need.

HTH,

SteveT