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I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

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Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#501

Post by Delk »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #495
Delk wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And with auto-leveling all you really need (if you care that much) is to.. increase the swap size, so there would be less evictions from the swap => less writes. How does that work out? To where would data be evicted from swap? Increased swap size might of course help with wear leveling if that means there's just more unallocated space on the device. > But anyway, even modern TLC drives would be fine for a decade i…

> To where would data be evicted from swap? This is actually an interesting question, but this is quite obvious if you know how it works. Consider this scenario: Some app loads data (it goes to RAM), sometime later this data is moved to the swap. Now the app is trying to access it, so there are two ways: there is no free RAM (eg other apps locked the physical memory), so the access is going through the swap there are…

Right. So, when swapping pages back into RAM, a typical OS will not actually remove the pages from swap despite them now being in RAM as well? So if the memory needs to be freed again for another purpose before the pages in memory have been modified in the interim, the OS can just drop the pages from RAM without having to write them into swap again?

And thus thrashing causes more swap writes when there's limited swap space.

That's the only scenario I can think of. I didn't think about pages not being removed from swap when swapping in.

> I've seen a server with 850/860 Evos

Well, that's desktop-grade hardware in a server. Might work, but if it doesn't, you get what you asked for.

> and LUKS (so the worst case: cheap drives and all writes are new)

How does LUKS affect that?

> people are forgetting what 3MB/s * 3600 * 24 is whooping 259GB a day, and you need to write ~259GB a day for 3 years to totally deplete the [official] write endurance (YssdMV).

Right, this was my point. That's not an impossible amount of writes but it is a lot more than almost anybody does on a laptop/desktop.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#502

Post by prmph »

scq wrote: post #309
prmph wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swore off those Chinese manufacturers (Lenovo, Asus, Acer, etc) many years ago for similar reasons and haven't looked back. I just don't buy any products from them, laptops included. Surprised people are still having to learn the hard way that their products are crap.

Asus and Acer are Taiwanese, not Chinese, and none of them actually manufacture their own laptops in house, that is outsourced to manufacturing partners. Nearly all laptops on the market, regardless of brand, are manufactured by 6 Taiwanese companies: Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec, Pegatron, and Foxconn. And yes, that includes Framework, who use Compal as their manufacturing partner.

This response does not actually address the thrust of my comment. How is Apple able to put out very high quality hardware, even as it uses the same few factories that others use?

It is the customers of these factories that provide the designs and dictate the quality of manufacturing and tolerances that they want, no?

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#503

Post by simonblack »

jacknews wrote: post #324
simonblack wrote: post #291

I really like the idea of using an SD card for the home directory, because that's the thing that changes constantly, and it's a pain trying to synchronise the home directory over several machines. With one instance, that's backed up regularly, it makes life fairly simple. Now I just have to work out the mechanics of implementing it smoothly. I have an archive disk/directory that holds all the 'write once, keep foreve…

A portable home dir works if you have the same os and software on all the laptops. When I bought a macbook the first time (ostensibly to develop for iphone), I hated the UI, so ran linux in a virtualbox as my main os. I think that would work really well from an external drive - but an sdcard is way too slow, it should be on a usb c nvme.

but an sdcard is way too slow, it should be on a usb c nvme.

Hmm, yes, that would probably be better and faster. And not only that, it could be possible to include a grub boot partition as well. I wonder if that would easily be doable, or would be just another can of worms.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#504

Post by Gigachad »

mkesper wrote: post #463
Gigachad wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asahi Linux basically works. The main issue is that Linux software, especially proprietary, does not play nice with ARM.

That can only be proprietary sw. Almost every program I know works on arm64, thanks to availability of the platform through raspberry pi.

Discord, Spotify, and MS Teams desktop apps are not usable. Some of them you can use the web apps, but for things like Spotify, not even the web app works since the web DRM doesn't work on ARM.

My point is that this isn't Apple's doing. The hardware works fine and is mostly unrestricted. It's the end user software that causes major issues.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#505

Post by Gigachad »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #499
Gigachad wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get the battery replaced at an official repair location rather than a middle of the food court business. Apple has a whole setup of gear that will get a perfect result pretty much every time. And they will just give you a new phone if they break it.

I replaced it myself, perfectly happy with results. Cost me $20.

I do wonder how considering the iphone battery on iFixit costs $64AUD which doesn't even include the adhesive to reapply the screen. If you got one of ebay or similar, it's not a new battery, it's one that's been salvaged from a stolen phone and likely preworn.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#506

Post by klardotsh »

leetcrew wrote: post #209
cj wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s delusional is highly paid engineers not investing money in essential tools to get their work done. A new laptop is 1-2% of the annual salary of many people here.

is BYOC that common at software companies these days? even if I wanted to "invest money in essential tools", I wouldn't be allowed to connect them to any company networks. in any case, the most resource-intensive thing my work laptop does is have outlook and firefox open at the same time. the "heavy lifting" is done on a cloud instance that can be easily scaled up or down depending on what I'm currently working on.

I haven't used a company issued machine since 2017+18, and prior to that, literally never. So 13 months or so out of a nearly decade career. It helps I guess that I'm upfront with companies about being picky about hardware and Linux being a strict requirement (that one job was the lone and exception), they just shrug and go "sure, go for it dude".

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#507

Post by justsomehnguy »

Delk wrote: post #501
justsomehnguy wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To where would data be evicted from swap? This is actually an interesting question, but this is quite obvious if you know how it works. Consider this scenario: Some app loads data (it goes to RAM), sometime later this data is moved to the swap. Now the app is trying to access it, so there are two ways: there is no free RAM (eg other apps locked the physical memory), so the access is going through the swap there are…

Right. So, when swapping pages back into RAM, a typical OS will not actually remove the pages from swap despite them now being in RAM as well? So if the memory needs to be freed again for another purpose before the pages in memory have been modified in the interim, the OS can just drop the pages from RAM without having to write them into swap again? And thus thrashing causes more swap writes when there's limited swap…

> OS will not actually remove the pages from swap despite them now being in RAM as well

Now the hard part: I don't have an idea, because I'm no that versed in OS VMM, but it does make sense even if it is 1993. But this is the basics and I doubt it works some other way. I would be happy if someone more familiar would chime in (and the reason why or not), but in my experience this is what happening.

> Well, that's desktop-grade hardware in a server. Might work, but if it doesn't, you get what you asked for.

Extremely often and works not just 'quite well', but well enough. Similiar servers (literally, just without LUKS) were fine, with > 90% of 'SSD health'

> How does LUKS affect that

Every write is different, because the bytes on the storage are already encrypted. Ie you write the same bytes to the same blovk pn the FS, but the underlaying, encrypted, bytes are not the same => new write.

> Right, this was my point.

Yep.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#508

Post by Delk »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #507
Delk wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. So, when swapping pages back into RAM, a typical OS will not actually remove the pages from swap despite them now being in RAM as well? So if the memory needs to be freed again for another purpose before the pages in memory have been modified in the interim, the OS can just drop the pages from RAM without having to write them into swap again? And thus thrashing causes more swap writes when there's limited swap…

> OS will not actually remove the pages from swap despite them now being in RAM as well Now the hard part: I don't have an idea, because I'm no that versed in OS VMM, but it does make sense even if it is 1993. But this is the basics and I doubt it works some other way. I would be happy if someone more familiar would chime in (and the reason why or not), but in my experience this is what happening. > Well, that's desk…

If the OS didn't keep the pages around in swap after they were swapped back into RAM, I don't see how having more space in swap could reduce writes to it.

> Every write is different, because the bytes on the storage are already encrypted. Ie you write the same bytes to the same blovk pn the FS, but the underlaying, encrypted, bytes are not the same => new write.

How are they not the same as the previous encrypted version of the same bytes if the encryption key stays the same?

Are you sure TRIM/discard just wasn't enabled on the LUKS?

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#509

Post by stetrain »

littlestymaar wrote: post #157
stetrain wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

18 hours advertised is usually running a locally stored video file on loop at medium to low screen brightness and some light web browsing. My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, which is still fantastic compared to the 2-3 hours I would get at similar tasks 6-7 years ago. Another big change is improvements to sleep and standby time. I can use half the battery, close the lid, and be reasonably c…

> My 18-hour laptop is more like 8-10 hours of real work usage, Ans in which context do you find yourself needing to be even 8 hours in a row on your computer without being close to a power plug? You can even charge your computer in planes now!

Need? Fairly rarely. Not having to watch the battery percent tick down like a clock is nice though.

It charges when docked to my monitor at my desk, and I basically never have to worry about running low in any normal situation.

I can be in meetings all morning, plug it in over lunch, and be in meetings all afternoon without issue.

When working at home I can use it on the couch, or the patio, and when I'm done put it back in the bag for tomorrow without running to the charger.

Do I need it? No. I also don't need a nice keyboard, or a good monitor, or an ergonomic desk setup.

Re: I stopped buying new laptops (2020)

#510

Post by stetrain »

kibwen wrote: post #214
mitchell209 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want my EV to last a month on a single charge and yet some people are arguing against battery improvements. Crazy.

This is a straw man. The argument is not against improving batteries. It's about engineering products for what people actually need , and not over-engineering them for the fantasies that we construct regarding what their needs are. To continue the EV example, the majority of trips by car in the US are less than 3 miles. You could comfortably reduce an EV's range from 300 miles to 30 and sell a car that still suffices…

Most people don't need a lot of things that they have.

Most people don't need laptops, or nice monitors, or ergonomic desks and chairs.

The issue with arguing about need in this way is deciding who is the arbiter of what people need versus letting them buy things that they find useful or convenient or just nice.

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