The pain of using budget notebooks as a software developer(blog.l0g4n.me) |
The pain of using budget notebooks as a software developer(blog.l0g4n.me) |
While I don't use "budget hardware", I am sure L490 is not much slower than the same gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon — though I actually use even previous gen with i5-7200u.
If you are mandated to use Windows, exploring an approach using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) should improve things a bit. Or make sure VMware is passing through (instead of emulating) most of the stuff.
Modern software development is further slowed down by the devops approach where you develop using the "same" (but never really the same) dockerised setup as the deployed production. So you get a 10s unit test runtime for a 15ms unit test.
I am never sure why developers accepted this, but in all the jobs I've been, I only felt as if I was the only one frustrated with this.
If nobody else feels the same frustration you do, don't be surprised: others just take it for granted, but it is NOT a hardware issue.
In addition giving developers the same hardware and permissions as business people who use word and is a big mistake.
Then run RubyMine from Windows.
Make a work directory on Ubuntu that has the same branch checked out as your Windows work directory.
Then set up RubyMine: Tools -> Deployment -> Configuration... and set up remote rsync with automatic update of remote files from Windows.
Any file you change on Windows will automatically sync to Linux. You only need a script running on Linux to live update/restart your app on file changes.
I do a version of this for Ruby/Rails development with a cloud VM instance from Mac RubyMine editing machine.
The alternative gamer-mentality of tightly coupled cpu, gpu, and storage with huge IO is quite costly.
That explains most if not all of the slowness if your configuration didn't come with an SSD.
Replacing a HDD with a SSD, as well as adding RAM, can do so much for performance, without even thinking about the CPU or GPU.
His problem is certainly Windows 11 and the virus scanner, not the laptop. on some of my work laptops you cannot do any meaningful work because of windows. even the WSL is 10x slower on simple magit rebases. build times are 1-4 hours.
Alternatively since it has USB 3.1, get a SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD, install an OS of your choice, and boot from it, assuming the BIOS isn't locked.
Don't be a jackass. Discuss this stuff with your IT department.
Yeah, sued seems hyperbolic. From my perspective if a staff person was capable of cloning their HDD and putting in an SSD by their self, I'd be quite happy for them to go ahead.
But, we have an MSP that should and _will_ do this for you so I'd rather it was organised on your behalf and we took the necessary backups in case you borked it. Plus we could take ownership of destroying the original HDD would also be quite important.
IT Dir, can you explain why you'd react the way you would? Perhaps I'm missing some risk here but ensuring BitLocker (assuming they and you are running Windows) is running and other compliance controls are running like Intune or equivalent. I don't see any many risks here:
1) Data loss during the clone transfer 2) Need to ensure the original HDD is destroyed and certified as such.
All they'd need to do is tell me, and I'd get them a laptop with an SSD.
I cannot have lone wolves like that hanging around. They have the potential to do far more damage than someone from the outside.
We need feedback! It's impossible to understand everyone's workflow. Trying to hack your way around something like that rather than communicating is pretty sophomoric.