Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

Browsing is the one thing that seems fine. How does the lack of memory manifest itself? It may be due to my particular activities, but for more than two decades I've been aware of what is considered the minimum RAM for a developer system at any given time, and have gotten away with 1/2 to 1/4 of that amount, typically due to starting out with a cheaper system and then keeping it for a long time.

Using a cheaper system, if possible, is my "protection plan." I like to stay within what I could afford to replace out-of-pocket if something happens like the device gets stolen or I crash my bike.

But your point is well taken, and a developer should consider the typical system for their own preferred environment, which is likely to be more sophisticated than mine.

I bought a used XPS 13 and put Ubuntu on it - I'm very happy with it. Dell ships it with linux stock, so support is good, and the battery can be replaced.

Might be worth a look?

I recently bought the Xiaomi Mi Air 12.

tl;dr, it's the best ultrabook/notebook I've ever had and run Arch on it.

I was looking for a light notebook also for programming for a long, long time (and I wanted this time Linux because of tiling window managers like i3). I finally got this Chinese model and what can I say, inside it's all Intel (Wifi, BT), Arch works flawlessly, touchpad is a glass trackpad and is for a non-Macbook just great, smooth and responsive and with Synaptics generic Linux driver you can really configure every tiny piece. I like the keyboard very much and the 176ppi screen is fantastic. It's also fast for a passive cooled device (it has a Skylake m3), and I get with Arch and 'powertop --autotune' easily 11 (!) hours surfing, sshing and coding. Only drawback it the 4GB RAM but it still works surprisingly well with the 4GB. And it has two SSD slots and one is even with the fast NVMe protocol. There's also a 13 inch model with 8GB and an i5 but way less battery time and it's slightly heavier (I always wanted a real ultrabook which also stays cool).

I got it directly from a Chinese shop for €450 in an xmas sale. I think now it's around €530.

However, it was so hard to find a notebook in this space. I you want a really light but somewhat powerful notebook you look at the Thinkpad X1C which is in some countries priced ok but in many, especially Europe super expensive (as the X260). But the X1 is still a great piece of hardware and as light as the Xiaomi at 14". Then we have the Macbook which is light, powerful but super expensive and runs well with macOS and Windows but people have mixed experiences when running Linux on that device. I looked also at HP (not really bad but also not exciting, the last gen Envy 13 is ok though), Acer have some new light ones but they are expensive and ASUS has the light Zenbook series which is ok but not that cheap.

So considering that this was Xiaomi first gig in the notebook space they did it quite well.

What languages do you program in and what toolsets do you use?

if you want ultra-cheap, the lenovo ideapad 100s is a good candidate. i bought it specifically to be taken to places where theft or damage are likely. as a performance benchmark: running visual studio by itself is snappy, but add firefox with a few tabs into the mix and you start to notice the lag. i usually run (without lag) atom, firefox (~10 tabs), 2 ssh sessions, and xampp localhost http server. it's $180 new, and ships with windows 10. terrible linux support, can't enable windows subsystem for linux.