Finally time to get a PC for SW developement.

[Jeroen3]

I would double check that the "2tb SSD" is a fast cached one, and not a single-chip M.2 2230 OEM one.
Compilation is very IO heavy. You don't want to to waiting for new flash blocks to be cleared.

If you can't find out, see if you can fit an extra ssd in the machine.
And check if dev drives is a feature you can use.

[brucehoult]

I would double check that the "2tb SSD" is a fast cached one, and not a single-chip M.2 2230 OEM one.
Compilation is very IO heavy. You don't want to to waiting for new flash blocks to be cleared.

I don't find that to be the case at all.

Compilation is very CPU-heavy and light on IO. Even running on a machine with a large number of cores you'd struggle to use all the bandwidth available from a 60 MB/s SD card, let alone the slowest SSD — certainly once you have enough RAM to cache the common header files and compiler itself. Writing from the disk cache to the physical media is asynchronous so you're never waiting for flash blocks to be cleared. Output object files are much smaller than the source code and headers read to create them.

[Jeroen3]

Your projects may not be big enough 

I experience it to be very io heavy, lots of small files to read, small blobs to write, files to copy to output.
But perhaps this is a modern .NET/npm issue.

[brucehoult]

Your projects may not be big enough 

GNU toolchain: binutils, gcc, glibc, built in sequence.  LLVM.  Linux kernel.

Not small projects.

[Jeroen3]

My experience is not valid on linux, this has a much better filesystem and I expect better caching.
Maybe it also triggers less anti-malware hooks than on windows.

So basically, get a fast ssd to compensate for Microslop. 

[David Hess]

That said: in the past, used desktop mini PCs were a good bargain.  It's worth considering if you are going to be using an external keyboard and mouse and display.

If I was using my laptop in a fixed setting, I would be using an external keyboard, mouse, and display(s) anyway.

For your description I would probably look for a 15-16" laptop whether consumer or bisiness. These are usually better for performance per dollar.  The smaller laptops are optimized for weight,  portability, and battery life. They aren't cheaper.

I almost bought a 13" laptop for travel, but bought a 15" one instead.  In retrospect, 16" would have been better.  I did not have any choice on aspect ratio so ended up with 16:9 HD, but 16:10 or taller would be my preference like my desktop monitors.

Something with a lot of cores.

I have a PC built 10 years ago, twin E5-2687W Xeon cpus with 24 cores each, so 48 logical processors. And 256Gb DDR4 memory (bought when memory was a lot cheaper). Since Visual Studio can make use of those cores while compiling a large-ish project with a few thousand files split into 20 dll's, it's still reasonably fast today, although my Mac M3 laptop feels faster.

Does that matter on a laptop?  My thick laptop thermal throttles if I take advantage of all of its 8 cores, lowering clock speed to 75% or 50% depending on the power setting.

It has all the ports you mention, both USB-As and USB-Cs (including PD and DP). There's an empty socket for a 2nd SSD (or you can fill it when you order).

My 2021 Lenovo ThinkBook 15 G3 ACL has 2 USB-Cs which both support PD and DP and I now consider this a must have feature.  If one should fail, then the laptop is still usable, unlike say my phone.  Ports can be replaced on the Framworks laptop so that could work also.

[ejeffrey]

Does that matter on a laptop?  My thick laptop thermal throttles if I take advantage of all of its 8 cores, lowering clock speed to 75% or 50% depending on the power setting.

Having a good number of efficiency cores is useful on a laptop because they can do more work in the same thermal envelope when throttled.

[brucehoult]

Does that matter on a laptop?  My thick laptop thermal throttles if I take advantage of all of its 8 cores, lowering clock speed to 75% or 50% depending on the power setting.

Having a good number of efficiency cores is useful on a laptop because they can do more work in the same thermal envelope when throttled.

Yup.

I just checked on my 16" i9-13900HX (8P+16E cores) laptop.

With the lid closed and running in "balanced" mode — hitting Fn-q cycles between economy (2.2GHz fixed), balanced, and performance modes — and compiling a Linux amd64 defconfig kernel, the P cores are running at

3.8 GHz first 30 seconds
3.0 GHz until 65 seconds
5.4 GHz doing linking and stuff until finished at 76 seconds

In Performance mode:

4.5 GHz first 10 seconds
4.4 GHz until 20 seconds
4.2 GHz until 26 seconds
4.1 GHz until 38 seconds
4.0 GHz until 43 seconds
3.9 GHz until 46 seconds
3.6 GHz until 53 seconds
5.4 GHz until finished at 64 seconds

It's a LOT louder. My phone with an app, sitting between me and the centre of the front edge of the computer says says a maximum of 47 dBA in performance mode vs 42 dBA in balanced mode against 30 dBA in this room when it's at idle (and with my Pecron E3600LFP quietly humming away taking in solar power about 3m from me ... it gets to 42 dBA for a few minutes from time to time when the fans crank up a bit).

In economy mode it's just a flat 2.2GHz and 30 dBA indistinguishable from idle sound output for the whole 130 seconds of the build. And uses a LOT less battery if you're on battery.

Note: when my aircon cycles on, on the opposite side of the room, that's 48 dBA.

More notes: what internet has to say about sound levels...

High Concentration / Deep Focus: 35 to 40 dBA (similar to a quiet library or soft hum).
General Office Work / Routine Tasks: 45 to 55 dBA (comparable to a quiet suburban home or background refrigerator hum).
Collaborative Areas / Open-Plan Buzz: 50 to 60 dBA (similar to quiet background conversation)

Legal limit in NZ without the employer providing hearing protection: 85 dBA averaged over an 8 hour shift. Holy shift!

All measurements made with the free "Decibel X" app on an iPhone SE 2022.

[Zucca]

Are you 110% sure you want a Win11 machine?

[David Hess]

Does that matter on a laptop?  My thick laptop thermal throttles if I take advantage of all of its 8 cores, lowering clock speed to 75% or 50% depending on the power setting.

Having a good number of efficiency cores is useful on a laptop because they can do more work in the same thermal envelope when throttled.

That is a good point.  I have not thought in terms of efficiency cores because I have avoided Intel CPUs since they dropped ECC support after the Pentium4, and AMD has not had efficiency cores until recently.

I did some browsing and it seems that underclocked performance cores deliver better performance per watt than efficiency cores, but efficiency cores are so much smaller that more of them can be included for better total performance.  I used x265 as my benchmark so maybe it would be different with a more typical and likely bursty workstation workload.  If I was waiting for a task to finish, like compiling, then I would prefer greater total performance rather than power efficiency anyway.

Something I just noticed looking through available laptops is that unlike my 2021 Lenovo ThinkBook 15 G3 ACL, most do *not* support more than one mass storage drive.  I would prefer to have two nVME drives for more convenient and total storage, but this becomes irrelevant in a fixed desktop environment where the laptop will be docked, as mine usually is.

[BrianHG]

Are you 110% sure you want a Win11 machine?

I would prefer Win10 Pro, but the current free VisualStudio will only install on Win11 Pro.  You need the paid version for Win10 Pro support as the free one was forcefully dropped by M$.

For multiplatform development, I was recommended .net, which means VisualStudio.
If you can get MINGW C++ to compile .net and C# apps, then I would stick with my current Win7 systems, but something tells me there will be hundreds of brick walls sticking with my old PCs.  I'll kust keep them as my media players and servers.

[abeyer]

For multiplatform development, I was recommended .net, which means VisualStudio.

I'm not sure I'd necessarily agree on the first part of that, but don't have all the context, and there's a lot of nuance and opinion there.

The second part used to be functionally true, but isn't anymore. None of them are perfectly "equivalent", but donet is absolutely doable and even pleasant with the CLI tools, VSCode, Rider, MonoDevelop, etc... today.

[brucehoult]

For multiplatform development, I was recommended .net, which means VisualStudio.

Well, that's not true!

Here's me just now using .net on my Linux machine. (my version is a couple of years out of date, admittedly ... I haven't used it for a while)

Code: [Select]

bruce@i9:~$ mkdir hello
bruce@i9:~$ cd hello
bruce@i9:~/hello$ dotnet new console
The template "Console App" was created successfully.

Processing post-creation actions...
Restoring /home/bruce/hello/hello.csproj:
  Determining projects to restore...
  Restored /home/bruce/hello/hello.csproj (in 40 ms).
Restore succeeded.


bruce@i9:~/hello$ cat Program.cs
// See https://aka.ms/new-console-template for more information
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
bruce@i9:~/hello$ dotnet build -c Release
MSBuild version 17.7.3+4fca21998 for .NET
  Determining projects to restore...
  All projects are up-to-date for restore.
  hello -> /home/bruce/hello/bin/Release/net7.0/hello.dll

Build succeeded.
    0 Warning(s)
    0 Error(s)

Time Elapsed 00:00:01.41
bruce@i9:~/hello$ ./bin/Release/net7.0/hello
Hello, World!
bruce@i9:~/hello$


[Jeroen3]

.NET development can be multiplatform, but you'll be flooded with warnings like "Call site reachable by all platforms" but "only supported on: 'windows'". 

Did you consider a Framework laptop?

[Kalvin]

You seem to have a good amount of RAM, so mount a RAM-disk as your build directory.

[brucehoult]

.NET development can be multiplatform, but you'll be flooded with warnings like "Call site reachable by all platforms" but "only supported on: 'windows'". 

Certainly there are some libraries that will only run on Windows. But if you have the CIL then you can compile things using them on any platform. From the command line if you want — as demoed above. Nothing at all forces you to use an IDE, let alone Visual Studio.

[Zucca]

I would prefer Win10 Pro, but the current free VisualStudio will only install on Win11 Pro.  You need the paid version for Win10 Pro support as the free one was forcefully dropped by M$.

For multiplatform development, I was recommended .net, which means VisualStudio.
If you can get MINGW C++ to compile .net and C# apps, then I would stick with my current Win7 systems, but something tells me there will be hundreds of brick walls sticking with my old PCs.  I'll kust keep them as my media players and servers.

If you have time and patience try to ditch VS and jump in neovim with TMUX(or similar) in a Linux OS.
I am doing this transition right now, expect a long and painful "journey and not a miracle" (quote from my favorite priest Don Giussani).

You will be rewarded by immense boost in productivity in code writing... AFAIK pro SW developers who never take showers and touch grass are addicted to VIM/EMACS and you will get whatever you need....
Of course, you are required to type by touch and know all the VIM/EMACS movements... which alone is not an easy step.

 

[David Hess]

You seem to have a good amount of RAM, so mount a RAM-disk as your build directory.

I did that during the XP era when I had 8GB of RAM.  This was before Flash SSDs were available.

Flash SSDs, especially nVME ones, can be almost as good if not better now.

[BrianHG]

For multiplatform development, I was recommended .net, which means VisualStudio.

Well, that's not true!

Here's me just now using .net on my Linux machine. (my version is a couple of years out of date, admittedly ... I haven't used it for a while)

Now, just to be sure, I just need to get my current .exe demos working on an Android, as a Web service and as a Win64 .exe without learning anything new.  I need my dev environment to work with ChatGPT's Codex.  And whatever I come up with, it will need to be in an environment where whoever I hire as my app developer team in a few months will be able to work with the code I have, no searching for a specific software engineers who will operate with my linux engineered code.

If this all checks out, and I can get everything converted in a month while learning about linux in the same time, without hiccups, then I can say Linux is worth a look.

Note that I do not want to learn multi-platform development, I am retiring from any form of engineering/coding in before November 1.

[BrianHG]

I got the PC.  Its speed is speed and capabilities are very adequate as my full build compile times went from ~5min down to 45sec, and partial re-builds down to a few seconds.

I solved the low quality headphone output with a high quality external USB DAC.

However, even after stripping down Win11 pro to its essentials, it still manages to send me the occasional desktop add! 

For now, I need to find a temporary fix to stop this, however, the moment I'm passed my MVP product demo, f--k microshit and I's going straight to Linux.  I'm sorry, but doing a boardroom presentation on what supposed to be a professional commercial OS should not pop-up adds mid demo.

[nctnico]

I got the PC.  Its speed is speed and capabilities are very adequate as my full build compile times went from ~5min down to 45sec, and partial re-builds down to a few seconds.

I solved the low quality headphone output with a high quality external USB DAC.

However, even after stripping down Win11 pro to its essentials, it still manages to send me the occasional desktop add! 

Why does it do that? I mean  In what world is that considered a good thing to do?

[SteveThackery]

I'm sorry, but doing a boardroom presentation on what supposed to be a professional commercial OS should not pop-up adds mid demo.

It doesn't do that!! What program are you using?

Besides which, if you put just a little effort in you can dump all the ads permanently. Mine doesn't ever show ads. Never.

[BrianHG]

I'm sorry, but doing a boardroom presentation on what supposed to be a professional commercial OS should not pop-up adds mid demo.

It doesn't do that!! What program are you using?

Besides which, if you put just a little effort in you can dump all the ads permanently. Mine doesn't ever show ads. Never.

No program.  A few minutes after logging on, an add popped up for (if I remember) Microsoft Gamepass, or Microsoft Games.

I remember specifically uninstalling all games, ads, and related features.
Note the laptop came with Win11 and I upgraded to Win11pro.
And I did clean everything out.

It has happened twice.  Once right after a Windows Update.
The second time was a few days later later.  I think right after I linked my 365 business account to my laptop OS so I could run the local version of Office.  The second add was half-screen and I did not get time to read it, but it was probably business related.

[JPortici]

This never happened on any windows 11 pc i've seen or used. I recently configured one for my sister so i would know.
But: searching for "windows 11 desktop ads" pointed at this article from last week: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3230487/windows-11s-desktop-is-now-a-full-screen-ad-for-harry-potter-movies.html
Windows 11's Bing Wallpaper is testing the waters with full-screen ads. A Harry Potter promotion is the first to spark backlash.

so something something wallpaper related? You know, if you have a certain kind of system wallpapers, the one that changes dynamically, that comes with an icon about asking about the current image?
And one thing i had to disable on my win 10 machine was also bing on search through the registry, or bing anything for that matter

[nctnico]

My experience is not valid on linux, this has a much better filesystem and I expect better caching.
Maybe it also triggers less anti-malware hooks than on windows.

The problem with Windows is slow task switching. Compilations which take seconds on Linux can take minutes on Windows. Same hardware, same project, same compiler. Compiling consists of running a whole bunch of tasks in sequence and parallel. Even on Linux you can get a further measureable improvement by tweaking task switching efficiency through kernel parameters.