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The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

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Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#31

Post by adrian_b »

darkclouds wrote: post #26
cbsks wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a desktop that I can remotely access. So I can do development on my fast computer from anywhere. It’s always on so it’s easy to run long jobs. Since my laptop is basically just a thin client used for ssh, vnc, and a web browser, it’s super easily replaced.

I've yet to find an offline desktop which can be secured, let alone work on it from a remote location. Cant people detect when their offline machines are being/have been hacked?

If the desktop is insecure, it is always possible to put it behind a secure firewall implemented with a small computer, e.g. a NUC-like computer or one of the many cheap, small and fanless computers with multiple Ethernet ports that are available now exactly for implementing firewalls, routers or other similar network appliances.

Of course, configuring correctly a secure firewall requires some expertise, but it should not be too difficult to find online resources or someone willing to help.

I have done exactly like this for accessing remotely my desktop during the last two decades, without any problems whatsoever.

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#33

Post by retypepassword »

mfashby wrote: post #28
rhamzeh wrote: post #5

I'd be much more interested in the Linux situation on this laptop. Most of the UI applications I use casually or CLI apps are available on ARM (I have them running fine on a Pinephone, so the experience on a laptop will only be better). But not sure how the dev workflow would be: Podman, IntelliJ, Sublime Text, etc.. And some casual stuff like Calibre, Thunderbird, Joplin. Oh and how much would the battery life impro…

I use a pinebook pro (same company as the pinephone). Sublime works a treat. So does thunderbird, calibre. Intellij doesn't have aarch64 Linux distributions, you can kind of hack it together it's completely unsupported. Not sure about Joplin but I expect it would be ok (I think it's electron based? VS code works ok too). Re locked-down: pbp can run many different Linux variants, and boots with tow-boot bootloader. Ho…

> Intellij doesn't have aarch64 Linux distributions

https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/download-thanks.html...

https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/download/download-thanks.htm...

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#34

Post by ianai »

cbsks wrote: post #20
goodoldneon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love the power of a desktop but I can’t leave my house with it

Wireguard+SSH+VNC works wonders for me.

Does VNC get laggy once you’re in more restricted bandwidth ie hotel/cell/etc?

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#35

Post by adrian_b »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #14

> Luckily (or perhaps shadily), you will rarely ever pay the full price for the Thinkpad x13s. As is tradition, Lenovo seems to be perpetually running deals, taking up to 40% off (at time of writing, 45% time of purchase), bringing the laptop to a much more reasonable $1479.60. If something has a $2500 price tag but always has a deal where you can take it only for $1500 then the real price is $1500, not $2500.

Lenovo is not the only vendor who uses these tricks.

I have not looked recently at the Dell site, but in previous years, for many years, every time when I have looked at Dell Precision mobile workstations, they always claimed that the price that what listed at that moment was more than one thousand dollars less than the "normal" price.

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#36

Post by nikanj »

adrian_b wrote: post #35
justsomehnguy wrote: post #14

> Luckily (or perhaps shadily), you will rarely ever pay the full price for the Thinkpad x13s. As is tradition, Lenovo seems to be perpetually running deals, taking up to 40% off (at time of writing, 45% time of purchase), bringing the laptop to a much more reasonable $1479.60. If something has a $2500 price tag but always has a deal where you can take it only for $1500 then the real price is $1500, not $2500.

Lenovo is not the only vendor who uses these tricks. I have not looked recently at the Dell site, but in previous years, for many years, every time when I have looked at Dell Precision mobile workstations, they always claimed that the price that what listed at that moment was more than one thousand dollars less than the "normal" price.

They cost the normal amount when the government is buying them

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#37

Post by didntcheck »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #15
jillesvangurp wrote: post #13

Like the author, I also do a lot of Kotlin development and use intellij and pycharm a lot. This sounds like an awful laptop to do that on. Kotlin is great but it's compiler is rather slow and you end up waiting for that a lot. So, faster is better. I noticed about a 2.5x build speed improvements when I upgraded my cheap Samsung i5 laptop (a temporary thing I used for a while) to the M1 14" Mac Book Pro. On a typical…

Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.

My personal machine is a desktop, and I have a laptop that I use for light portable web browsing occasionally. But for work I've come to expect to be given a laptop. It means you can easily WFH, take it to a meeting, or hot desk, without needing to RDP/VNC. And neither I nor my company would want me doing work stuff on my personal desktop. I do know some developers who work by remoting to a VM instead (often as part of a compromise to let developers have admin/root access for development tooling)

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#38

Post by dantaro »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #8
jeroenhd wrote: post #4

> Other tools, such as MySQL, node, git, etc. have no issue when running under emulation, at least in the context of development I'm surprised the author is using these under emulation. Surely they'd run at completely native performance if you just rub the through WSL2? Linux distributions have had ARM based distributions for ages.

It may be because he couldn't get IntelliJ to work native in a way that let him access WSL, ( "It also wasn't able to access WSL, meaning I was locked out of using Linux tooling all together." ) So that tooling was awkward. If he was stuck using windows, maybe best bet would have been to run an X server and run IntelliJ etc inside WSL itself.

Hi, author here, you are correct! WSL tooling was locked out for a long time due to IntelliJ not being able to access WSL until the native build came down. Unfortunately, WSL on ARM still has some bugs around the VM hard locking itself when waking from sleep. It's frustrating, because when it does work it's fantastic.

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#39

Post by justinclift »

The 14-inch MacBook Pro pricing quoted in the article seems wrong.

Looking at the US Apple Store right now, it has the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro (10-core) cpu + 32GB ram and 1TB storage as US$2599, rather an US$3099.

Seems outright cheaper than the Thinkpad x13s.

Re: The ARM powered ThinkPad x13s, as a developer

#40

Post by dantaro »

jasaldivara wrote: post #22
throwaway2990 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Chrome is such a terrible browser to begin with. How is it a deal breaker?

In my own experience, Chromium browser (which is the base for Google Chrome) works much better (faster) than Firefox on my Pinebook Pro (ARM, Linux). But I think the author is using Chrome under emulation, so bad performance is expected.

Correct, I didn't grab the ARM Chromium build, only Chrome. If you want to avoid using Edge then Chromium or Firefox is the way to go.
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