I fucking hate it when I see videos or read articles saying "you don't need a powerful laptop for development"

Do you even code?
From mobile to web Dev. Every tool now demands a lot ram and cpu power to run.

You at least have an ide and chrome open. These with the OS can reach the 8gb ram limit.

Also the screen, you need atleast a 1080p! I had a 15in 768p laptop for 5 years. I hated development on that.

Fucking hate people who think we can develop on a potato.

droid studio, 2gb, 20-30% cpu
eclipse, 800mb, 10-30% cpu
vscode, 500mb, 10% cpu
ffox, 800mb, 20% cpu

i could use all of them together and still have some power left on my $300 pc

yeah also, i use 2 screens, getting the third one sometime later, that one is true

Ditch the bloatware and you'll have no issues

1080p yes. Defiantly. Or at least have a second screen at home to plug it into your mobile device. But a old 800p screen (you'll get them for 5$ or just from some dumpster) as second screen is good.

Using Linux with an efficient desktop like XFCE, i3 or even Cinnamon will run fine on nearly everything. Even a 200$ chinese laptop/convertible with the cheapest Intel Atom processor is powerful enough to run Atom.io or Sublime and a terminal with compiler, a debugger and everything. Even webdevelopment with Chromium is running smooth.

Unless you are developing android roms or something graphical with a lot of textures and assets, you also won't need much storage space. About 64GB is enough.
Storage speed is most important in my opinion. Use SSD or at least some fast-ish Flashstorage. Don't use a HDD. It's terrible.

Don't use Windows >=7 on it with some terribly big IDE like Visual Studio or Eclipse. And don't develop graphics-heavy applications on a device that can't handle them.

I dev on a cheap pc (cost me $170 before I threw in a $150 graphics card for gaming)

Intel Core 2 Duo

4GB RAM

I use VScode for pretty much everything (not for performance reasons, just because I like it, and I don't like having to use multiple editors) from Java to Python, XML, HTML, etc.. to standard writing.

I also use chrome, with enough tabs that I can't read the labels anymore.

Also, VirtualBox occasionally. Usually run with 2GB dedicated, and VScode and Chrome open.

I do get performance issues with that last one, obviously, but other than that, I get no issues unless I forget to close chrome and try and open up a game.

I'm also a game developer.

And then here I am...
I have Mac OS... that alone takes ~6 Gigs of RAM...
And I have open:
Nylas mail
Whatsapp ( for Mac )
Gitter
Slack
iterm
Chrome with just 4 YouTube tabs
Discord
Telegram
Emacs
VLC

Running on 10.4 Gigs of RAM right now 😊

@Alice my usecase is developing Android apps. Machine learning. Java web development.

Every ide consumes around 1.5-2gb ram.
Compilation takes up so much time if the cpu is weak. Training takes a lot of time on atom processors.(as people suggested below)

And my chrome definitely doesn't just have 10 tabs as shown . It easily crosses 30 tabs. That alone takes of gigs of ram.

Then there is Mac os. (I used Linux before, it was better but not stable enough)

@gsharm5u agree 😂😂

@Alice do you seriously believe that chrome consumes 150mb? 😂

Do one thing for me. Sort running process by name check how many are by the name Google Chrome.

Eg

Sorry to burst your bubble but not everyone uses an IDE. I know people working the full web stack who only work with vim. So no you don’t necessarily need a powerful computer to develop software.

Chrome consumes more ram the more your system has available. With 16gb of ram it will eat 3+gb easy. On lower spec systems it consumes much less, and is then slightly slower.

I work on full stack development, using in memory Mnesia database, I use VS code and Firefox, and I work on a HP Pavillion from 2003, with 1Go of RAM, and a monocore CPU

@Cyanite if you could stop my respect for you from increasing, that would be great

@htlr dude ur using 114 / 128 GB of RAM 😳😳😳😳😳😳
What ARE u doing?????

@Electrux 9999999x9999999 matrix multiplication and transformation using numpy.

@htlr umm... wow 😳😳😳
How long has the code been running 😅
And y even do that??

@Electrux about a minute or so, was testing the limits of that beast. Its not my PC btw, it rests at my college for machine learning purposes. Had a chance to get my hands on. 😂

@htlr lol my condolences for ur poor college 😂😂😂😂😂

@Electrux ah I see you are an Indian 😂 how much time did it take to get the stickers?

@htlr ~3 weeks I believe 🤔

You definitely can develop software on week machines.

There are a few restrictions (machine learning, game development, huge compiled projects), but in most cases it's not an issue.

I myself am still doing web/java/python dev on a 5.5 years old laptop occasionally.

Kinda depends on your setup I guess. I personally used sublime and a buch of command lines tools for a while barely used more than a gig. Also I have noticed that apps seem to use waayy more memory on Windows(no hate just saying). But yea once you start using the big IDE's and a VM it is nice to have some power under the hood, not needed but nice.

@Alice My eyes jumped to Telegram Desktop! Telegram is bae ❤️
Fuck whatsapp

I'm currently developing with a computer that has a Pentium processor 😂

i am "coding" on a Alienware area 51 with i7 6900x, 32 gigs of ram, 2 x 980ti sli and 500 gb nvme ssd + 1tb eSATA ssd + 3 tb hdd

"i thought you write code in notepad"
"we'll just code in word"

A browser* not everyone uses Chrome!!

@linuxxx I actually thought of you when I read 'chrome ope' haha

@cwizard ope? 😅

@linuxxx *open, It has been a long day ok? 😉

@wolt that laptop was a 1179 dollar laptop when new. It's a fairly powerful machine.

I am talking about atoms or celerons or even Pentium. You have a dual core hyper threaded i5.

@wolt It's because hardware usually has a limited life time - SSDs and RAM for example might likely fail after 5-7 years (depending on usage), so there's always a risk involved when buying old hardware.