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I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

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Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#231

Post by robomartin »

I cooked two HP 17 inch laptops running finite element analysis tools for --the irony-- a thermal management project. They just couldn't handle the sustained load, even with external fans aimed at their air intake areas.

I've always used self-built desktop towers. When it's time to upgrade we build them five or ten at a time so every system matches. It makes for a much simpler build and bring-up experience.

In this case I needed to continue working, and so I decided to task two HP laptops on the network as external processors for the FEA tool. I have to say, they worked great for about four weeks. During that time they experienced about 18 hours per day of continuous processing. Fun while it lasted.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#232

Post by bigmadwolf »

bartread wrote: post #138
japhyr wrote: post #45

Does anyone have any recommendations if I want to keep using macOS, but I'm not tied to a MacBook? I realized I hadn't taken my main MacBook off the dock in 9 months. When I go out, I have an older one that I'm happy to use away from my desk. Since it's acting like a desktop now, I though maybe I'd replace it with a higher-spec mac desktop. But a high end mac mini isn't much different than a high-end MacBook. It seem…

The high end iMacs are quite nice, as long as you don't mind their all-in-one nature (including the monitor obviously). Back in the day I might have suggested Hackintosh, although that's always seemed like quite a hassle to me, and certainly less appealing now Apple are moving over to ARM. If I buy another Apple laptop it'll probably be a 16" Macbook Pro. In fairness to Apple I usually get at least 5 years out of one…

You'll still get a good five years out of a Hackintosh box. If you build it from the right components and use OpenCore https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Install-Guide/ its really not too hard. After Apple drops Intel support you can always switch it over to Linux or Windows.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#233

Post by walterbell »

Even "appliance" devices can be used in a manner which increases freedom, e.g. retain iPad flexibility and reliability while using it as a thin client for self-hosted content and services on FreeNAS/TrueNAS on open hardware. Choose iOS apps (e.g. Omni, 2Do, DevonThink, GoodReader, Codebook, Netnewswire, LumaFusion, Textastic, Working Copy, Secure Shellfish, PhotoSync, Jump, Screens) which support synchronization protocols like CalDAV, WebDAV, ssh/scp, SMB, DLNA, RDP etc. With the recently introduced iSH (user-space Linux) on iOS, more integration options are available. You can also use an iOS remote desktop with mouse/keyboard to drive remote desktops and VMs that have less OS/app restrictions.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#234

Post by cameronh90 »

Silhouette wrote: post #211
jnxx wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when the power goes out. Oh, are you from the US?

Not sure what this means. FWIW, I'm in the UK, and short brown-outs are not uncommon if, for example, the national grid is adapting to a failure somewhere during severe weather. For a while when there was a recurring equipment failure a year or two back, my whole area had several full power cuts, even lasting for multiple hours once or twice, until they finally figured out the root cause and fixed it. The UPSes we ha…

I'm in London for the best part of a decade, and haven't ever had a power cut at home, but a few years ago we had a brief brownout in the office (monitors and lights turned off, but servers and desktops carried on running).

I guess YMMV... but it's not something I've personally had to worry about, and won't do anything about it unless the electricity supply gets significantly less reliable. They are saying that the move to renewables might make the grid less stable over the next few years though, so worth thinking about perhaps.

Frankly, I find nowadays I can't do much without an internet connection anyway... Maybe we should put ~5 second batteries into desktops just to sync disks and power off safely.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#235

Post by reitzensteinm »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #41
agloeregrets wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually true anymore? I mean, hardware wise they are not much faster, but cooling is a different story.

Use a $3,000 gaming laptop. I guarantee it'll stutter and throttle and perfom less well than a same-gen $1,000 PC. More expensive, less performant, and less serviceable with a suite of proprietary bloatware on top.

My Aero 15 would never throttle, with a 7700HQ + 1060. There was a 700mhz penalty in that generation (3.5ghz vs 4.2ghz for the 7700k), but I kept it pegged for hours and it was rock solid.

Most laptop cooling is awful, but you can certainly find laptops that are well built if you look for it.

Not sure you should weigh bloatware, either. You can trivially install a fresh Windows or Linux and you have to on a custom built PC anyway. If you buy a premade PC, it probably comes with the same crap.

For what it's worth, I switched to a desktop once the core race heated up - now I've got a 12 core 3900X.

I can't believe how much faster it is when it's using all the cores. Night and day. Highly recommended. And 12 cores is barely scratching the surface of the crazy workstations you can build these days.

For tasks 4 threads and less, it would be a bit faster than a current gen Intel laptop chip, but I don't think it would have been worth the portability penalty to me personally if that's all I did with it.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#236

Post by sudosysgen »

bartread wrote: post #117

I've been thinking along similar lines, especially now that - with WFH likely to be the norm for the foreseeable future - my need for a portable computer is much diminished. I could get a lot more bang for my buck and build a system that was specced exactly the way I want. The rub for me is that I really dislike Windows. I use it for work - I have to - but it's not an OS I'd choose for myself[0]. I like OSX but the p…

Dual booting is a good solution, but you actually could also buy a bit more RAM and run Ableton in a mixed VM Windows-on-Linux.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#237

Post by drdeadringer »

013a wrote: post #223
geocrasher wrote: post #5

From the article: "What worries me as much as the end of general-purpose computing for the masses is that so few seem to understand that it is ending." Correction: Has Ended. The vast majority of people using computers has shifted to phones and tablets. I have a friend who's a millenial who barely knows how to use his desktop PC (It's a Mac) but is fluent on his iPad/iPhone. Most people are not content creators, they…

> I have a friend who's a millenial who barely knows how to use his desktop PC (It's a Mac) but is fluent on his iPad/iPhone. This worries me not because of any open computing concerns, but because of how FUNDAMENTAL general purpose computers are to nearly every decent paying professional job out there. All of them. No one daily drives Excel or Salesforce One or edits video or codes websites or balances accounts in Q…

> Companies like Apple endlessly mouth their desire to get more kids to code, then their arms release devices so closed off that even trying to take a quick peek at how they work triggers eighteen system integrity protection alarms. You can't have it both ways, Apple.

Apple C-Suites: "We want kids to code."

Apple Ads: "What's a computer?"

Whilst it might be me, somebody somewhere doesn't understand something.

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#239

Post by dontbesquare »

atq2119 wrote: post #72
avalys wrote: post #21

I have been reading this same article for the past thirty years. Yet, I can still install and run whatever operating system and software I want on my laptop _and_ desktop, and I don't see any sign that that freedom will go away anytime soon. It is true that the billion-dollar media companies have decided a subscription model is more lucrative than a one-time-purchase model for the mass-market content they produce (mo…

I can still install and run whatever operating system and software I want on my laptop _and_ desktop, and I don't see any sign that that freedom will go away anytime soon. The question is how much of that is thanks to this kind of article appearing for the past thirty years. It's kind of like saying Y2K wasn't a problem: it would have been a problem if we hadn't prepared for it.

Exactly. What happens in the future when people quit caring about computing freedom?

Re: I am seriously considering going back to desktop computers

#240

Post by yyyk »

WalterBright wrote: post #16

I prefer a desktop because: 1. I like big, big monitors. 2. I prefer a full size keyboard. 3. I prefer a separate mouse. 4. I prefer big freaking disk drives installed. 5. I put the desktop under my desk, and with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, there is much less of a snarl on my desk. 6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use. 7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use. 8. I can repla…

There's a middle ground, where one buys a small form factor desktop (SFF, NUC, or a "Mini PC" like the ASUS PN50), and uses USB3/Thunderbolt/NAS for extensions/eGPU/extra storage.

This keeps most of the advantages (the processor is weaker on the smaller form factor thanks to the cooling requirements), while also keeping some size, mobility and power-saving benefits.

I got into this because I got tired of opening up the large cases, moving to a smaller form factor and external devices was much easier. I don't care for working on the move, and every place I'm likely to ever want to use the computer at will have spare monitors/keyboards/mice.

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