I'm surprised at this entire comment thread.

> Dual core is pretty weak

> I had 16 GB of ram in 2010 and it was not even a top computer at the time

> It has 16G of ram and a very recent 3.10GHz Intel CPU. What are you doing on your laptops? This is a deeecent laptop

What exactly are all of you people doing with your laptops? I'm running an old W500 Thinkpad at 2.8Ghz dual-core, 4GB DDR2, and a 500GB HDD. The only times this machine has struggled was when I was using a memory-leaking software (Firefox, etc.) or one that tried to load a whole large file into memory instead of chunks.

If I need to work with heavy graphics I can stick an eGPU into the PCI express or an FPGA if I'm doing specialized calculations.

But besides that, I don't understand why anyone needs all this gear.

> What exactly are all of you people doing with your laptops?

C/C++ project builds. Losing two cores just about doubles build times, and template-heavy C++ code makes the compiler want gigs of RAM all to itself. In principle I should do this on a desktop or server, but IT isn't on board with that.

I have to agree with the other poster on this. I only full compile once in the beginning and once at the end. Every other time, I just recompile the changed part and rebuild it with the unchanged object files.

But if you're talking about packages from source, then I agree. It's the one thing that sometimes makes me question whether or not I should upgrade. But, after a full night of compiling Qt5 from source, that lingering doubt usually vanishes.

Do you do full recompilations all the time? Don't you use incremental builds? If yes, the compilation time should only rarely be a problem. But reading people's comments I feel like there are many projects out there using a shell script like "gcc -c a.cpp; gcc -c b.cpp; ...; gcc -o prog *.o" out there.

Changing something closer to the root of a large dependency tree triggers a lot of recompilation. The lack of real modules and reliance of `#include` in C++ makes dependency graphs larger than they could be.

Not necessarily. Say I'm editing "bob.cc", and in the mean time edited "common.h" #included by many many files. While I'm editing "bob.cc", there is no need for me to rebuild the entire project until I want to see how it links to everything else (which can be postponed quite a bit if you have some tests); so I either run "make bob.cc" or "make test_bob.cc && ./test_bob". I don't know much C++ and all this is theoretical, but I think this is the ideal workflow with C/C++ development, and this is why incremental builds are useful, especially if the code is nicely separated into testable units.

Not full recompilations, but when we're working on a feature release, switching git branches routinely requires a lot of files to be rebuilt due to header changes.

ccache is your friend.

When you use templates, recompiling a single file can take ten minutes.

Is there an open source project where I can test this? I don't know much about C++ (I know some C), and would like to see this for myself.

Why are you using a fancy 2.8Ghz dual-core machine when you could be using a netbook from 2008 with a 1.6Ghz Atom and 512MB of RAM?

Is it that strange that people have different use cases from you? Plenty of things peg the CPU at 100% for extended periods of time: video encodes, 3D renders, building code, slicing for 3D printers, etc. Certainly I could do my work on a dual core machine, and I did until a few months ago, but there are competing machines that are cheaper and offer twice the performance. Why would you not want a quad core CPU when they are the exact same price as the old dual core models?

At my webdev gig last year I used a 2008 24" iMac with a Core2 Duo and 4gb of RAM and it worked perfectly once I put in a request for a 250gb SSD. The only time it choked up was using ImageOptim on a ton of images, and that could always be offloaded to a server. I think computers are lasting a lot longer than they used to.

I usualy work with at least 8gb RAM.

Linux is not very demanding of memory, but sometimes, I have to maintain legacy code writen in C#, so I use virtualbox with win7, visual studio, with is demanding for the memory.

Outside that, 4gb is survivable using Linux.

Yeah I agree with this, my Lenovo has the same CPU and 8GB of ram (the maximum) and I'm happy with the performance.

Dual core is pretty weak considering that the new 15W chips from both Intel and AMD are quad core.

I feel wastey when using a p8400 c2d instead of my l7500 c2d. I don't get people needs today.

in the year 2018 it's shipping with an 802.11n wifi interface in it. In a $1700 laptop. That's just terrible.

You don't get the point of Purism's product line. The focus of their offering is freedom. The rest are peripherals---and more than decent ones, those are. Given their size, you can't expect them to compete with the big players in prices. But disabled ME and a modifiable laptop is worth that price.

The totally closed firmware and ROM on the m.2 nvme SSD is no more or less open than a modern wifi card with full open source Linux kernel driver support, which has a closed ROM running it.

For some reason wifi vendors typically ship devices without any radio firmware at all, but leave it up to the driver to load it. Rendering the device 100% useless without loading some external proprietary blob.

Hard drives don't have that problem.

Hard drives definitely have proprietary blobs on them. You just have even less visibility on them.

A key difference is that a hard drive can't secretly send information out. I'm fine with an isolated component the rest of the architecture can treat as a black box (even sending only encrypted data to it). But the wifi chip can easily build its own IP packets and leak a bunch of information to the internet or it can have an easily exploitable backdoor.

a hard drive is a huge source of attack vector. In particular if you're running full disk encryption with a very tiny unencrypted ext2 boot/grub2 partition, malicious firmware on a disk can intercept the plaintext keystrokes for a passphrase-unlock on FDE. This is a known intelligence agency attack vector.

https://theintercept.com/2015/04/27/encrypting-laptop-like-m...

see the "attacks against disk encryption" section.

I wouldnt describe that as a huge source considering it requires a tpm vulnerability in secure-signed envs.

This specific platform has all of the tpm module feature set disabled, no? Since the code running inside the tpm is proprietary and closed. To the best of my knowledge super gpl zealot users rarely choose to store a key in the tpm for full disk encryption unlocking purposes.

Does the SSD have network access?

It can if it wants to.

Care to elaborate?

The SSD runs its own proprietary firmware that controls the raw disk device itself. If it wants to insert a blob of code into your bootloader or grub2 that can do keystroke interception on a full-disk-encryption unlock, it can. This is the same idea as a technique used by intelligence agencies with a typical "evil maid" attack.

Ah yes, if you execute unsigned code from it then that's definitely possible.

Signing the code doesn't help. Where are you reading the signature-verification code from?

Presumably you use TPM and the various trusted boot technologies.

I think you’ll still have the problem with this thing being on a pci-e bus though.

Yes, I was more curious if a malicious actor (the hard drive) with access to the nvme bus could manage to exfiltrate data directly via the network interfaces without involving the OS.

I suggest you look into TPM and the full signed-code architectures it enables.

It's in an m.2 slot, and good Linux-friendly ac cards are less than $20. Sure, it's wasteful to buy a device with a part you know you'll throw away, but it shouldn't change your purchasing decision.

Are there AC adapters that don't require proprietary firmware to run?

I'm not really that surprised myself.

It's becoming increasingly more okay to just bleed resources and pay your technical debt off or lower your development costs by requiring users to have stronger machines. It's like implicit crow funding but in a very stupid way. Steve Jobs said it best in [0].

I recognized the author instantly (I know him because of his Pepper & Carrot comic which he notably does in an all FOSS set up and puts under CC-BY-4.0) and if he says the laptop looks nice, is quiet and works well for his typing and art then it should be a glowing endorsement but people are inventing flaws, pointing out the GPU is a weak integrated one, that the CPU is dual core and too weak for compiling lots of C++, that 16 GB of RAM is too little (I happen to have 32 GB but 16 GB is not little at all) and also totally ignoring that this is clearly a slick small ultra book (with an ultra lower power CPU [1]) and meant to run all FOSS with no fuss (feel free to steal that catchphrase), meaning no Windows, no AAA games, etc.

I do personally use a more noisy, bulky and powerful laptop with even more than those "just 16 GB" of RAM[2] but I'd not call Librem13 weak, especially if it fits the owner's desired usage and does it in a slim and convenient for his travel patterns size.

I do wonder if my perspective comes from the fact I try to use stuff the best and fullest I can. E.g. for 5 years (2011/2012 - mid 2016) I ran a bulky business-y hands me down HP laptop bought in like mid 2010 (IIRC) with a dual core Intel CPU, 2 GB of RAM, integrated weak GPU with support for only OpenGL 2.1, 500 GB HDD. It came with SLED preinstalled and the only Fedora spin it could run well was Xfce and before Fedora when I ran Windows 7 on it I had to disable Window transparency and all the Aero baubles. I abandoned it only after the keyboard broke and by that point the battery was no longer holding charge too so I decided it's not worth it to sink cost into fixing and upgrading it to fit the times (battery, SSD, new keyboard, more RAM, etc.) and moved to a brand new laptop and Windows 10. It wasn't a money issue (or I'd go with keeping that husk of HP alive) but more of a personality issue, I didn't do anything power hungry regularly so that laptop was very fine for my web browsing, learning PHP, C, C++ and Lua, doing university work, writing LaTeX, etc. and I knew I'd move back to Windows from Fedora which would be an effort in itself too.

[0] - https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

[1] - https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/processor...

[2] - http://www.x-kom.pl/p/293547-notebook-laptop-156-msi-pe60-6q...

It seems to me that people don't know their use cases very well, and then don't really know how to map that to hardware. That's okay for the "end user" type, but we're mostly programmers---professional or amateur---here I believe, and this is bad. I have never used a computer with more than 8 gigabytes of memory, and I haven't ever needed one. What I do with my laptop: run Emacs (negligible CPU, 200-300 megabytes of memory) and Qutebrowser (negligible resource usage, not always open) on Debian with a couple systemd jobs and Xmonad. I can easily get working on a RPi (theoretically, never tried), and my 4GB and 1.80Ghz (i3) laptop is way more than enough. If there was a codebase that required 30 odd gigs of ram, I simply won't run/compile that on my laptop. If I'm doing graphics, then I know I need a better machine for that. But people don't consider these variables, and buy the machine with biggest specs they can afford. And then there are those C++ programmers that are complaining they need crazy amounts of memory because templates. Now if a file takes multiple minutes to compile, the problem to fix there is obvious. But people choose to throw money and silicone at it instead. And they do whatever they want to do, but must quit their BS calling a machine like this weak.

> totally ignoring that this is clearly a slick small ultra book (with an ultra lower power CPU [1]) and meant to run all FOSS with no fuss

Yeah. We complain we can't have a decent laptop with FOSS and a couple years later when we have one we whine it can't hold entirety of english wikipedia in its memory or that it has a right shift key slightly shorter than what we like. So ungrateful.

I also don't get it.

Being a developer does not mean everyone is running hundreds of docker instances on their laptops.

I am yet to own a machine with more than 8GB and most of the time it seats idle on 4GB, even when compiling C++ code.

I searched GitHub for the most starred C++ projects, and then downloaded and compiled Godot engine, because it did not require Docker and seemed fairly straightforward to build. The initial build took 30 minutes, then I added a random semicolon to the file editor/connections_dialog.cpp, and recompiled, it took some milliseconds shy of a minute, the bulk of which was not the compilation of that file (I re-ran the whole build, including linking; if I only recompiled that file it probably would be quicker, but I don't know how to use SCons). None of that process was seemingly bound by memory or processor capacity, in fact I continued my sunday computational tasks (i.e. watch silly videos, skim reddit) while it compiled, w/o any slow down. And this is a whole, complete, very widely used game engine, with included a game editor, which is obviously a graphical program. I wonder how quicker this program would compile on a machine like many people here claim they need to use.

Godot might be a special case because it's so well made by some Brazilian industry veteran (gaming is kind of a spartan environment, especially on consoles) and is very polished and kinda well funded FOSS project, it's like a crown jewel.

I remember (I hope I'm not misremembering, I can't find it now) that Firefox took more than 4 GBs of RAM when being linked which ironically made it so the 32 bit version was being built in a 64 bit environment. Then again - who builds regularly rebuilds Firefox on their laptop (yes, the devs, by definition, do, but that's a very small subset of the population).

C++ has shortcomings with regards to build times, small change triggering a rebuild and linking time blowing up and so on but it's clearly the only one that fits the niche it sits in (maybe C can compete but it's a bit too spartan for some people, and maybe Rust in the future) but there are mitigations (like pimpl, forward declarations, etc.) and some of the criticism is just goofy to me.

E.g. there was story[0] of a hell like project with more managers than programmers, no working coffee machines nor toilets, crazy turn around of employees, employees not knowing how to code properly, changing version tracking software a few times and throwing away the entire history each time, simple operations taking seconds or minutes, physical paperwork to apply to edit a file, entire thing was bordering on a scam, etc. Main takeaway of the author that he reiterated in 2018: C++ is bad.

I mean, I guess you can dislike it for all its warts (and it has plenty), but would everything be fixed if this was a Rust, Python or C# project and all of the other craziness remained?

Maybe I'm just biased because I know C++ pretty well inside and out and even kinda like it but also never got forced to work on a bad legacy project made in it (but than again any crazy legacy code is bad, regardless of the language..) but lots of people are just bashing C++ so mercilessly, even here on HN people go and say that it's impossible to write in it (using a web browser that's certainly in C++ and relying daily on compilers, OSes and runtimes made in C or C++ that host their language, unless they're all Free Pascal developers or something (FPC is self hosting) and the joke is on us for not using Free Pascal).

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16793884

> It has 16G of ram and a very recent 3.10GHz Intel CPU.

I had 16 GB of ram in 2010 and it was not even a top computer at the time

I don't know what you mean by "top computer", but 16gb is still not very usual amount of RAM in laptops even today.

Finding a laptop with 32 GB of RAM for sale is pretty rare even. Dell only seems to offer it on their Alienware laptops (over $3000 each).

They are rare (and it's hard to google for them..) but I got one in the summer of 2016 for just under 5000 PLN (about 1400-1500 USD and that already includes 23% Polish VAT)[0].

[0] - https://www.x-kom.pl/p/293547-notebook-laptop-156-msi-pe60-6...

They are pretty rare. Been looking for one myself for a while now.

There are others, inclusing Lenovo and Systems76. They’re all top of the line though, same price levels as the Dell you mention.

And I personally won’t buy Lenovo.

I bought my new work laptop from System76 in January this year with 32 GB RAM for around $1800 (including VAT paid upon importing the device into the EU). They are one of the few vendors that make it simple to configure a laptop with 32 GB RAM.

Their XPS line also has 32gb

I guess that XPS model is region limited? It's not showing up for me in the Netherlands. (Or their filter function is broken.)

You don't have a real computer unless it has at least 128gb of RAM.\s

I make do with 4GB RAM and 1.8GHz CPU. If I need anything that exceeds the capacity of that, be it games or graphics or compilations, I invest in a proper device or service for that. And if you need GBs of RAM for each compilation, you have to fix your build system, switching from detrimental builds to incremental builds. We're talking about a thir-teen-inch laptop here, i.e. sth one can shove in the pocket of some older overcoats.

Did you replace all the tools you used to use in 2010 with Electron versions of themselves or what changed since then?

The web happened.

The web works fine on my 2009 computer with 8GB RAM.