Why I use old hardware

Re:Why I use old hardware by antoineMoPa on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @12:12PM (#18980138)

I have 8GB here, under Debian. I can easily run docker (with a rails server), firefox (discord, slack, facebook, youtube, online radio + outlook webmail, all at the same time), with many Emacs windows.

I think I could manage to have less RAM (I frequently code on my chromebook with 2GB RAM). My theory is that the ram expands to the amount available https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

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Re:Why I use old hardware by asark on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @12:36PM (#18980404)

IIRC at my last employer an Asana tab + Slack ate ~1.5GB all on their own, and Asana was so slow to load that one hated to close it.

Jira's not as bad as Asana but depending on the set-up it can be pretty close. Then there's Invision, et c which are much lighter than those but still pretty damn heavy, if you're trying to get by on 4GB or less. And/or maybe you've got Outlook and Teams and all that. And that's just the communication & collab tools, not even any of the stuff to produce actual work output. Temporarily having to use a 4GB machine with that kind of workflow is why I'm now permanently on Basic HTML for Gmail—it loads fast enough I can close it, and uses so little memory there's no reason to. I couldn't spare the 300+MB for Inbox or whatever with all that other junk open, and besides, Basic HTML's much faster.

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Re:Why I use old hardware by WrtCdEvrydy on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @02:34PM (#18981839)

No, it's that developers write their code on 16GB of RAM Macbooks running the minimal amount of software required.

If you're not seeing performance issues in your developer machine, you'll hardly see a developer running on 2GB of RAM.

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