Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

dell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 140 posts

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#101

Post by EthanHeilman »

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

I run out of 8GB on a daily basis and curse the fact I don't have 32GB on my laptop. Often I need to run many different VMs running different Operating Systems, wireshark, pdfs, a latex editor, IDEs. If a task is taking a long time I will often switch projects while leaving the test running.

I would never buy another 8GB laptop as long as live.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#102

Post by flurdy »

draven wrote: post #51
flurdy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:( 8GB rules out me.Fitting inside that with constant swap file writes will kill the SSD quickly. 16GB is fine for now but it wont be long beofer I need to look for 32GB. Multiple VMs, Docker clusters with several memory heavy JVM apps (Scala), too many browser tabs, etc. just don't play nice with 8GB anymore. A nearly $2K laptop aimed at developers with 8GB is a bit of a joke to be honest. Shame, as otherwise it see…

Honest question: why run all that stuff locally? It looks like you're looking for a portable server. I'm working on a Macbook Pro w/ 16Gb of ram but I'm not doing anything I couldn't do on a machine with 8 or even 4 Gb of ram (replacing Intellij w/ Emacs, as I'm planning to do anyway.)

True, a personal development server(s) may offload my needs but remote servers don't work well when offline a lot, or intermittently offline on my long commute by train. Not having the full stack locally is usually very frustrating.

Whilst I also use clients and my own aws or gke servers etc, but that is more for staging integration testing not during development.

Oh yes I forgot the memory hog of IntelliJ, especially with Scalaz, and if multiple projects/windows openend at once... Currently using 9GB on my mbp, used mostly by chrome, intellij and sqlserver in a vm and without any sbt, tomcat or docker containers running.

Sure this memory hog is down to my chosen tech stack and tools, and how I choose to use them. But I already use multiple vagrant dev boxes and will spin up more and more docker containers for minute tasks so I can't see my memory needs go down.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#104

Post by ntw1103 »

jraedisch wrote: post #43

Having a lot of ram is nice, but every time I read that people need at least 8gb for development, I ask myself what it is that they are running. I am running chrome, sublime, docker, hbase, redis, memcached, mongodb and probably some more stuff and I hardly swap with 4gb, or maybe I just do not realize it because of my ssd. Am I missing some ultra useful, memory annihilating dev tool?

It depends on what you are doing. Virtual machines IDEs(NetBeans,Eclipse,Visual Studio) MSSQL Browsers Communication software (Outlook and lync) Remote access software Password management software They all add up, and depending on how development is done, different programs could be required. On my work computer right now, no single program is using more than 400,000k of ram, but I'm using 13.8GB

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#105

Post by Someone1234 »

_halgari wrote: post #84

Sadly I can't get too interested in a machine like this. What I want in a work machine is the following: 1) 16GB RAM (or more) 2) High density display 3) SSD drive 4) Quad core or better CPU 5) Small and thin 6) Discrete NVIDIA GPU (not the Intel integrated crap) Apple's MBP is the only machine I know of that fits this bill. I'm becoming less and less a fan of OSX, but you can't argue against the hardware. Can anyone…

Only Apple's top end machines ship with a Nvidia card now and in my experience those same machines have quite serious overheating problems.

Thinkpad's T series fits some of your bill but I doubt the screen is high density enough.

PS - I must be the only person on earth who thinks the user experience with 1080p is better than super-high resolution. Currently most operating systems (Windows, Linux, and OS X to a degree) suck at high DPI so your fonts and UI elements shrink as the resolution increases.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#106

Post by dntrkv »

Alupis wrote: post #91
dntrkv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome, IntelliJ IDEA, and 4 Java modules running simultaneously goes through 8gb without any hesitation. Hell, IntelliJ alone uses over 4gb sometimes.

> Hell, IntelliJ alone uses over 4gb sometimes. And I thought my Eclipse install was a hog, weighing in at 500MB's through 1GB sometimes.

Yeah I don't remember Eclipse using this much ram, but then again, I never had such a big project indexed in Eclipse. Either way it's worth it, IntelliJ is amazing.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#107

Post by ntw1103 »

_halgari wrote: post #84

Sadly I can't get too interested in a machine like this. What I want in a work machine is the following: 1) 16GB RAM (or more) 2) High density display 3) SSD drive 4) Quad core or better CPU 5) Small and thin 6) Discrete NVIDIA GPU (not the Intel integrated crap) Apple's MBP is the only machine I know of that fits this bill. I'm becoming less and less a fan of OSX, but you can't argue against the hardware. Can anyone…

The Lenovo Thinkpad w541 meets those requirements http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/w-series/w541/...

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#108

Post by kbenson »

maccard wrote: post #53
grayfox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... intense. An extreme case, for sure. You likely would be remoting into this machine to compile this work, in any scenario involving you working on a mobile device. With that being said, 16GB would preclude you, too. Like the fellow above, still genuinely curious how 8GB is repelling a significant amount of people for a development machine. A pixel2 with 8GB is a rocket ship, for my general full-stackery and…

> still genuinely curious how 8GB is repelling a significant amount of people for a development machine. If I'm only remoting into the machine, then it doesn't count as a development machine. I could remote in from a machine running a P4 with 512MB ram by that logic.

Yeah, but you may do different kinds of development. Your work C++ dev may not use the same system resources as some side project (which you may not want to use the work machine for anyways). Additionally, the hi-res screen could be useful.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#109

Post by ntw1103 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #76

Why oh why does it have a buttonless clickpad? I've got a ThinkPad T440p and it's terrible. I despise every minute of working on it and have to bring a mouse around. Is this just copying Apple for looks? I'm dying to buy a laptop that's as good as my X201 (and keeps 12" format, though thickness doesn't matter much), but with modern specs. I'm probably gonna break down and get an X250, which is limited to 8GB of RAM f…

If I had a t440p, I would buy one of the touchpads, with buttons and install it. Like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Touchpad-Left-Right-Three-Keys-for-L... I had an x201s, That is a very hard computer to move away from, as not much is better. Currently I'm using a t430s. I miss the smaller size, and the screen res on the t430s isn't the greatest.

Re: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition

#110

Post by Someone1234 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #82
djhworld wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Chrome takes up at least 2.5GB on my Mac, 8GB is a complete joke

I moved to Safari because of that. I like Chrome better functionality wise but Safari seems to be better optimised at least for Mac OS X.

I've read that Safari on OS X (and IE on Windows 8) use less battery than third party browsers these days. So that's a good reason also.
Post reply on HN