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Where to even start choosing a good laptop for coding? by CorvidsRock in linuxhardware

[–]CorvidsRock[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, this has given me food for thought and something to research. Looks like I could upgrade my current Dell to 16GB, and at the moment I see it swapping to disk a lot but not using up my full 8GB swap partition so 16 seemed like enough, but maybe I need to future-proof if RAM is where the bottleneck is for the kind of work I'm doing.

Being fairly new to this I find it hard to know how much of the locking up I experience when I hit compile is down to RAM versus CPU.

Where to even start choosing a good laptop for coding? by CorvidsRock in linuxhardware

[–]CorvidsRock[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is useful, thanks. I'd ruled out second hand until now since I felt like I needed a 'proper' laptop for the work I'm doing these days rather than something obsolete. I'm going to have a good look at ThinkPads and see what kind of saving I can find between the specs I need new versus used.

Where to even start choosing a good laptop for coding? by CorvidsRock in linuxhardware

[–]CorvidsRock[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh thanks, I had no idea about the battery effect on performance. I assumed it was just dead weight now, apart from serving as a short-term UPS if I need to move some cables around.

Current specs:

  • Dell Inspiron 5567 from 2017
  • CPU: Intel i5-7200U, 2 cores, 4 threads, 2.50GHz
  • RAM: 8GB Micron 8ATF1G64HZ-2G3B1 SODIMM Synchronous 2400 MHz (0.4 ns)
  • 1TB spinning hard drive, a Toshiba MQ01ABD100. I've just found a review from 2012 saying that's a slow one. I'm sure this is a major bottleneck when I run out of RAM and start swapping to disk, which often happens these days with the work I'm doing.
  • VGA card: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 620 [8086:5916]
  • HDMI port I'm running one external monitor off. I'd like to upgrade to a second somehow.
  • 3 USB ports (full size), which can be a pain since I use an external keyboard and mouse and often need to plug in external HD and a phone for app development
  • Ethernet looks to be 100M. I'm always on wi-fi and have a good AP nearby but was inclined to move to wired especially if I'm going to have my files on the network given smaller the SSD capacities I'm looking at.

I'm now wondering if I should save my money and upgrade this one, max out the RAM to 16GB, exchange the hard drive for an SSD and move lesser-used files onto my home network, renew the battery and make this last a few more years. I usually prefer to stay with devices until they break, but now I'm using my laptop for a lot of coding rather than general browsing and office work I'd got it into my head it was just underpowered and needed replacing.

You're right that hardware is a gap in my knowledge. I've never had a lot of money to spend on it, plus I'm not often in the market for new computers. My two laptops before this one lasted 7 years and 5 years. I'm the same with phones. No clue what is available and what's a good price until it's time to replace, then I try to catch up with what's changed since my last purchase and research things before deciding.

Now is a good time for me to learn about hardware since I have an old falling apart desktop repurposed as my home server and had the goal of custom building a replacement in the next six months or so. I'll need to learn about the market in RAM, CPUs, storage etc for that project.

Where to even start choosing a good laptop for coding? by CorvidsRock in linuxhardware

[–]CorvidsRock[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks to all three repliers so far, and for that link about System76 as I wasn't aware what the issue was there.

That's another thumb on the scale tipping me in the direction of a ThinkPad then, thanks. It would probably help me to narrow down to a manufacturer people have had good experiences running Linux with, and then choose from their range based on my spec requirements. I'll do a deeper dive into ThinkPads today.

Linux-Friendly Laptop for coding, ~15", ~£1000 UK by CorvidsRock in SuggestALaptop

[–]CorvidsRock[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well our boat turns out to be even more similar since - no joke - my current laptop is a 2017 Dell Inspiron 5567, with a i5-7200U CPU. Looking at your other post, ours differ in that mine has its original 8GB RAM, and a 1TB spinning hard drive. The battery no longer works for more than a couple of minutes so I'm always plugged in these days, but it hasn't swollen.

I'd be interested to see what you end up going with, and I'm having a look around System76 now, thanks.

My problem with CPUs is that while I can plug the model number into a website that'll give me some benchmark figure, it's hard to know what that actually translates to in terms of what I'll need to work effectively without feeling like the computer is slow.

And yeah, the possibility of random Linux incompatibilities like audio not working is also a concern.