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

Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 165 posts

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#11

Post by RossBencina »

It doesn't look like Cherry Trail Z8300 has VT-x (hardware virtualization) -- that's something you might want to consider.

Not a tablet, but I recently bought a factory reconditioned ASUS Zenbook 305CA (8GB, M-5Y71 CPU) for a similar purpose. So far so good. It seemed to me to be at the bottom end of the premium ultrabook market and about half the price of a XPS 13, much cheaper than an X1. Also, Linux support is good.

Windows 10 memory management seems better than Windows 7. You might get away with 4GB for some things but my gut feeling is that 8 would be preferable. My Win 10 desktop is currently sitting at 7.3 GB with Visual Studio and a bunch of Chrome tabs open.

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#14

Post by BoorishBears »

jagtesh wrote: post #7

If you are a power multi-tasker (20+ browser tabs at any given time) running IntelliJ with a couple of electron apps (Slack, Spotify), it will slow down your system with constant disk-thrashing on a 8 GB machine even with an SSD. I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore. No more WebStorm or RubyMine. Vim is the only way to go! You're a little bit in luck as Windows m…

> I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore. No more WebStorm or RubyMine. Vim is the only way to go!

I use an identical i5 model with Android Studio (think IntelliJ with more resource usage), an Android emulator/VM, a Gradle daemon taking up 2-3GBs for builds, Safari with umpteen tabs, Slack, Outlook and Spotify open and don't have issues with disk thrashing (or at least, none I can tell based on usage and the Activity Monitor memory pressure).

I don't know how you're forced to use Vim.

I've noticed that OSX will do what I'd like any modern OS to do and use the majority of my ram with a few things running things running. But adding more of a workload when it's using nearly 8GB doesn't instantly make it "run out of memory", more paging occurs but not nearly enough to cause disk thrashing (or be easily perceptible)

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#15

Post by nmstoker »

Is it a given you'll be wanting to develop whilst unconnected? (with travel that could be likely but it depends on where you're going and how much you'd make the effort to seek out WiFi)

If you are able to be connected, maybe consider going with a physically small but well built machine but with specs inline with your budget and then remote to a development PC (ie at home) that has the kind of ram and specs you need. This will probably not be good for more GUI heavy development but command line stuff would be largely okay. Clearly you mentioned some tools that are GUI heavy, so YMMV, but thought it worth weighing up too

Re: Ask HN: Ultrabook for programming?

#17

Post by dagw »

jagtesh wrote: post #7

If you are a power multi-tasker (20+ browser tabs at any given time) running IntelliJ with a couple of electron apps (Slack, Spotify), it will slow down your system with constant disk-thrashing on a 8 GB machine even with an SSD. I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore. No more WebStorm or RubyMine. Vim is the only way to go! You're a little bit in luck as Windows m…

I use a Macbook Pro 2015 (8GB RAM/128 GB SSD) and I cannot run a fully featured IDE anymore.

I use a 2010 MBA with 4GB of RAM and run WebStorm or PyCharm just fine.

Post reply on HN