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

[Julie Marchant]

>  by contrast: fvwm2 is an 8 *megabyte* install size.  gnome is...
> what... several hundred megabytes?  latest versions force you to use
> wayland?  and systemd?? fuck that!!  absolutely no way i'm tolerating
> that.

GNOME does not force you to use Wayland. I don't know where you got this
idea from. Wayland is still supported experimentally (X is used by
default, Wayland support is quite buggy) last time I checked. As for
systemd, GNOME requires logind, but not the entire systemd package.

>  a lot of the forums i access for information and for communicating
> require javascript, and require passwords (and captchas).  i use the
> browsers to remember the passwords...
> 
>  i've always been meaning to try disabling javascript: i did actually
> try netsurf for a while... it didn't go very well.

On that note, I'd recommend for Firefox (if that's what you use) an
extension called QuickJS, which gives you a button in the toolbar to
enable and disable JavaScript.

>  ok.  if i was someone who actually *did* standard office work, then
> i'd be able to do that.  if there were people who *also* needed to do
> advanced PCB CAD and 3D CAD design work, and there were EOMA-compliant
> products (affordable ones as in affordable to *design*) available, yes
> i could recommend them.

To be clear, I wasn't suggesting trying to do your work on an A20 card,
or anything else you produce in the next few years. That would be
absurd. More that maybe it would be a good idea to optimize things so
that you don't have to keep upgrading and eventually an EOMA card of
some sort can catch up.

It seems even just managing to reduce your screen need so that a 1080p
screen would suffice would be a huge help. Then you could just focus on
getting a multi-core system with lots of RAM and a big hard drive (or SSD).

By the way, have you considered turning off swap? Linux will
automatically terminate programs when there just isn't any RAM left, so
that would at least prevent your system from slowing to a crawl. Also,
using swap on an SSD is probably really terrible for the SSD. I don't
know if you can control what programs get closed when that happens, though.

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

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