[Arm-netbook] new development laptop needed, looking at dell xps 13 9350

[Julie Marchant]

Just my 2 cents:

From what I've been gathering, Luke, this is the situation: you are used
to a very high spec setup capable of really large amounts of
multitasking and don't want to give up your current way of doing things,
so you are looking for a new laptop capable of this. There's nothing
wrong with that if you can find it. But maybe it would be worthwhile to
adjust your workflow so that it doesn't need an ultra-HD screen and
16GB+ of RAM? There must be some way you can achieve that.

These are the thoughts I have, in particular:

* From what I understand, you use a DE that basically tiles all of the
programs you have open into whatever screen space you have, right? Have
you ever tried GNOME? That might be a good replacement for that if you
can get used to it.

* Is it really necessary to have all of those programs open at the same
time?

* Is it really necessary to use Chrome or Firefox? There are more
lightweight browsers out there, including text-based ones like elinks.
Disabling JavaScript can also help a lot with performance in general.

* What if you had one laptop for openscad and other heavy or important
stuff, and another, cheaper laptop for Web browsing and other stuff like
that?

* I'm wondering about that SSD. Are hard drive speeds really so bad that
you need one? Big SSDs are much more expensive than big hard drives. My
experience with a hard drive is that it's mostly start-up times that are
affected, so what I tend to do is log in and then go do something else
while everything loads, and then use the suspend to RAM feature if I
need to conserve battery for a short period of time.

I'd also like to point out that learning to live with less than you're
used to would be really good for your public image, since after all, the
hardware you'll be selling for quite some time is nowhere near those
capabilities. ;) As it is now, for example, if someone says that what
you're selling isn't good enough, they have you as an example to back
that claim up. But if you manage to reduce your needs and eventually
meet what EOMA hardware can achieve, then you would have your own
example to refute that, and you would even have experience that you
could use to advise people on what sorts of changes to make to the way
they do things. Food for thought.

-- 
Julie Marchant
https://onpon4.github.io

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