The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linux Workstations
Added 2023-12-15 13:49:43 +0000 UTCHi folks, a video I hinted at in my Plain Text video after saying, "But even if you're storing large files, storage is cheap if you're smart."
And here that video is, the problem is laptops, and the biggest culprit is Apple.
I'd love to know what you think, and thank you so much for your support :-)
Tris <3
Comments
extremely valid! I have LITERALLY begun doing this separation this week - I have a low-powered machine for writing, and a high powered machine for editing (and gaming, now that I'm trying to reclaim my evenings) You're not the only one to say good things about the Framework - I'll be very interested to try one out when my thinkpad needs replacing in a few years.
No Boilerplate
2024-01-19 19:29:56 +0000 UTCI really appreciate this video; I’ve watched it 5 times now and I think I’ve finally distilled down for myself the parts that are truth for me. I completely agree that Linux on any machine vs MacOS or Windows will always be the correct call for me, however; I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why watching this filled with anxiety just thinking about using a desktop for work. It finally hit me today; as someone who is Autistic and Severely ADHD I currently use the form factor of my computers as a little hack for my brain. The Desktop is for “Fun” (gaming, movies, shows, my children finding/making pictures to print and colour, etc. etc. etc.), where as the laptop is for “Work” - this physical difference between the two allowed me to create within my brain this separation that I accept and it keeps my intention in line with my actions when using each computer. This isn’t a “correct” approach by any means but it works really well me. Like literally better than a lot of other things I’ve done to increase my focus. So for me the laptop will probably stay - also the convenience for me of being able to move around as much as I like to without needing to maintain network connectivity will always feel good. I also feel like switching from my M2 MacBook Air to the AMD FrameWork 13 is the best thing to happen for me personally and it also feels like a “good-enough” solution for me that fits close enough to argument made here that I can live with being a little more on the fence at this time. With the FrameWork I got to bring my own RAM and Harddrive allowing me to kit it out with 64gb RAM and a 4tb m.2 drive for ~$500 less than my MacBook cost not to mention the ‘peace of mind’ that I can easily replace any part of this laptop as it needs repair/updated parts.
Miah Beach
2024-01-19 18:42:19 +0000 UTCSadly, as I joked about in the video, there's only so many kilos of copper the average consumer is prepared to lug around! :-D I think a thin light laptop coupled with an eGPU could be a great compromise for many people, as the gpu heat is external to the laptop, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP_8TzDGGVU
No Boilerplate
2024-01-11 12:00:32 +0000 UTCTodays laptop designs are really annoying also for me. I got a fancy "Engineering Laptop" which is really thin from the company I am working for. I am not even doing anything "heavy" on it. Just using Miro Board and MS Teams and it heats up soooo much that it lags extremely. What do I have to do? -> lift the laptop by laying something under it so the heat is not trapped directly under the laptop. I think the direction of design "futuristic thin laptops" is definetly the wrong way to go. I would rather have it a little bit heavier and bigger than struggeling with a piece of HW which slows down when I open MS teams....just sad.
Iton
2024-01-06 11:30:42 +0000 UTCThank you so much for you kind words, and support! I'm glad you're getting into rust because of my videos, it's a fantastic language right!? I swear I tried to write a more even-handed video! XD But when I started to get the real numbers I could not in good conscience recommend such poor options to my viewers. (all my references are in my source code, and for prices, I checked myself in the week before I published) 10x more expensive for ram than desktop is horrifying, no matter how you cut it! My audience are developers and power users. They should all be running 128GB of ram, and they're not because of the issues in the video. It's holding us back, and I'm kinda mad about that.
No Boilerplate
2023-12-27 20:03:22 +0000 UTCLoving your videos so far - I'm four chapters into TheBook, inspired by your enthusiasm, with no real reason to learn Rust other than that you made it sound interesting - but I didn't enjoy this one. Happy you have you extoll the virtues of Linux but not by bashing the competition. Any IT pro with plenty of experience will tell you there's only one answer to the question "Which is the best OS?" and it's always "It depends on the context".
Simon
2023-12-27 19:52:23 +0000 UTCSome hones feedback, hope it's well taken :) Slightly disappointed about this one. I expected it to be more about OS's and less about form factor. I suspect your points about laptops are simply irrelevant for most people. I can't imagine not being able to bring my PC into a meeting room, or a "focus room", or the cafeteria at my workplace. Or to bring my PC home when I'll be working from home. Or to work while commuting. I could have several different devices with different form factors, but then I'd have to switch when I'm back at my desk after that workshop. Laptops are usually docked at the work station, so you get big screens, a proper keyboard and a proper mouse, so the same ergonomics as a desktop would give. Waiting a couple of seconds extra when compiling is a small cost to pay for portability.
Daniel Hjertholm
2023-12-17 20:33:21 +0000 UTCInteresting datapoint I just remembered: when I joined my last company, instead of corporate laptop I was given $5000 (or 4000?). For business people it was 1K less, for ML people it was 1K more. And I could've bought any computer I wanted, along with displays, keyboards, etc. I bought an Intel MBPro, one of the worst ones (it was early 2018, so MBPro was MY 2017). The majority of other devs did the same, just a few went with System76 or desktop PCs. There was absolutely no pressure.
Kirill pertsev
2023-12-15 23:40:12 +0000 UTCCrucial will sell you 64GB of RAM for $100, and 4TB of m.2 SSD for $200 - ASK ME WHY I WON'T BUY APPLE PRODUCTS EVER AGAIN XD
No Boilerplate
2023-12-15 17:57:57 +0000 UTCShots fired! Single test run benchmarks of our dev env on Docker+Mac vs Linux has me agitating for developing on vms. Personally I need to get my PC dusted off and install a few more sticks of RAM just because I can!
Tim Urian
2023-12-15 17:36:55 +0000 UTCKirill, very interesting point! You're right that the video focusses on cpu/ram performance, and not so much on GPU (apart from the gaming performance) While your point makes sense, suddenly $1899 seems cheap for a GPU with 32GB of ram! (mac mini 32GB price), I don't get the impression ML performance is particularly good on Apple Silicon, in fact, the $200 GTX 1080 seems to crush the M1 ultra in community PyTorch ML benchmarks: https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2022/pytorch-m1-gpu.html I admit, I am not an ML/AI engineer, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting something here?
No Boilerplate
2023-12-15 16:52:31 +0000 UTCGood topic. I suggest another avenue. Corporations also have a high security and compliance overhead for corporate issued endpoint devices. Thus, even if you have the best machine, it will need to be secured to just before the point of unsuitability. The answer is employees should be given virtual desktops (VDIs) appropriate to their role. For corporate power users, they are given different permissions as needed, as well as access to labs and cloud resources. Thus, the corporation gives out laptops as a perk. They give employees a choice and basic licensing for the OS and common applications. However, all work is done in the walled garden of the VDI and all data is retained. Easy audits, higher security, lower costs. In practice, employees do all their personal messaging and browsing on the laptop, and on a separate monitor or virtual desktop, is work. I found it a beautiful work/life balance. The exception I've seen is graphic design or video editing. For the exceptions, there needs to be a secure file transfer mechanism in place where anything that goes in and out is logged, scanned and audited. The exception I expected to find was a need for corporate apps being needed offline. In that case, there will need to be a secured endpoint device. But now instead of all employees needing this infrastructure overhead, it's only a few. All in all, it doesn't end up being a cost savings for the company. It is an upgrade for security and compliance and audits. I found it to be a significant quality of life upgrade, and recommend it to anyone that will think different.
-g2
2023-12-15 16:37:52 +0000 UTCThe reason Apple Silicon doesn't have upgradable memory is that the memory sits on the CPU itself, which allows to drastically reduce latency and use the same RAM for GPU. Ask any AI/ML engineer and they will praise the decision. Go get more than 24GB on GPU for your desktop, "I'll wait"™. Your alternative is A100 with 40 or 80GB, check the prices. M1 Max with 64GB (or M3 Max with 128GB) suddenly looks dirt cheap, right? "Your team mostly works from home, right?" vs. "You don't need portability". Well, well, so you mean that instead of being chained to the office someone has to be chained to their home? What about digital nomading, or just deciding that the landscape looks boring and why not work for a month from a small town in the south of Italy? Also, there's pizza as opposed to the US where you can't find one. I'm writing this comment on a M1 Max laptop with 64GB of RAM and 4TB of very fast storage. It sits to my left on a stand so I can use its small, but wonderful display (find a match for one in any other laptop) connected via a single cable to two 4K displays, 32" and 27", the latter being the only match to the 16" Macbook display on the PC market, worth $1K alone. To my right though, there's a gigantic PC tower case, made of pure aluminum, 15 years old, with two fanless power supplies, i9-12900K, 128GB of RAM and 4TB of storage. And, of course the 4090 beast. It runs Rocky linux (and sometimes Win, when I have time for games) and is absolutely indispensable when I need raw GPU power. It's almost absolutely quiet, but only when idle. If I compile on it, or, God forbid, run GPU workload, it makes a very significant noise. Much more than a fully loaded M1 Max. Rust compile times are a PITA, but not PITA enough to leave the MacOS comfort for Linux. Because I can switch to designing my house which is being built in Home Designer Pro, edit some graphics in Photoshop, finally start processing my photo collection from the recent trip in Lightroom and so on. Having both for the SAME work is a major PITA though. I have hundreds of gigs of model files in various ML formats. How I'm going to sync them over 5G/LTE from the train? Unix won the creative/engineering desktop. And I'm very glad it did. It's just not Linux. And don't feel sad because of course I'd love for this Unix to be free. GPL3 is not a free software license. MIT/BSD/Apache is.
Kirill pertsev
2023-12-15 16:37:31 +0000 UTCI thought it was a well curated sarcasm!
Kirill pertsev
2023-12-15 16:14:03 +0000 UTCI just shared yesterday link to "Unreasonable effectiveness of Plain Text Teams" (or whatever was a title) and now about Linux! So good!
Grzegorz Wierzowiecki
2023-12-15 15:29:22 +0000 UTCSorry folks, there's LOTS of spelling mistakes, I accidentally disabled my fantastic spellchecking plugin in obsidian (LanguageTool) while configuring it last week. WOOPS!
No Boilerplate
2023-12-15 14:47:07 +0000 UTCI'm glad! It's a pretty logical choice if you're not bought into Apple's incredible marketing :-D I'm never better thank you J, I really appreciate your support and nice comment :-)
No Boilerplate
2023-12-15 14:44:05 +0000 UTCYou just validated my hardware decisions. Thank you for always sharing your most effective workstation and software decisions. Hope you are well, Tris.
J
2023-12-15 14:25:02 +0000 UTC
