Personally I have a self-built AMD dual-core, 4gb ram, archlinux & gnome/openbox (looking into using awesome wm, any suggestions?), a 17" and a 19" monitor.
a 13.3" Aluminium MacBook with Snow Leopard, 4GB ram, 24" Philips TFT, Magic Mouse and a Logitech DiNovo keyboard in combination with a Webfaction account and a Linode VPS.
This is an interesting question after reading your box. I started off with my computer infatuation with a setup very much like yours. But lately, I am so much more interested in portability that I have gotten rid of everything except for a HP dv4 (ADM dual-core, 4GB RAM) that I run Ubuntu on th ssh into my webfaction hosting account and writing my thesis in latex.
The size can't be beat, and it does everything I need it to without being the size of a house (granted I don't game on it...) Maybe if I had more space than a 600sqft apt, I would still have a mini-supercomputer, but laptops are amazing lately.
My only machine is an 11.6" Acer Aspire AS1410. It's a great machine, especially for it's very low price. Plus an external 27" display and a few 2.5" hard disks that's all I need.
My DE is Gnome, at home and at work. I live mostly in Emacs & chromium anyway.
Another MS mouse mac user! I absolutely love MS mice and have two identical models at home and work. Their OS and office software may suck but the mice are awesome.
Since January I've been using an Apple iMac 27inch, 2.8GHz quad-core Intel core i7, 8GB ram, 1TB hard disk, Apple GB keyboard (not wireless) & Magic mouse running on Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6).
i7 920, Windows 7 64 bit
12G RAM
nVidia 275 (Almost 2G of RAM)
22" Monitor ATM, as the wife is using the other one)
320G primary Drive, 1TB slave, 1.5 TB backup
Plantronics Wireless Headphones
3 Printers. Yes, 3. 1 Canon Jet, 1 B/W laser w/fax/scanner, 1 laser color. Really, don't ask. Blame my wife for them.
The most difficult thing at the moment is the single monitor at only 22". Really looking to invest in a nice 27", but with so many other things needing doing, I really can't justify it at the moment.
It's a nice system. Before this, I was usually a generation behind. This was the "let's really splurge and go all out" system. =) Encouraged very much by the wife. And yes, I do end up using the system and it's resources quite heavily at times for video rendering while still using the computer.
It's a funny story how I got this system. See, my wife is a Mac Geek. And she's not some clueless Mac Geek. She was installing and running Debian back in the 90s. She knows her networking, hardware, and computers. Her Mac love came about when she went back to school for compute graphics. Anyways, she's a Mac Geek, so for several years now, our home has been a Mac v.s. PC environment. Good forbid something happens with my PC (or her Mac), as the other won't waste any time before coming up with some snarky comment. She's really good at this.
Anyways, when I saw the new iMacs, the 27" i7 version caught my eye. With the constant struggle of getting a Mac and PC to work together, I finally informed my wife that I would be getting a Mac, selling my PC, and moving to Apple.
She rejoiced.
We made plans, but with me starting a new job, and with wanting to wait until after the new year to give them time to fix any potential first-run defects, we planned to get one in January.
However, come December 25th,I learned she decided to buy me Windows 7 (which I had yet to pick up, mostly because I'd just been too lazy to do it). This resulted in me deciding that I should upgrade my computer, and that, as we say, is that. She had her chance.
Anyways, sorry for the long post, and the rambling. >_<
I've decided that the splurge method is the way to go. I spent almost $3000 on this machine 2 years ago, and it has yet to even flinch at any of the new games or software I throw at it. Much better than buying a new $1000 system every year that makes you want to buy something new only a few months in.
I use awesome wm on archliux, and I HIGHLY recommend it. Definitely go for it.
You can pretty much do everything very efficiently from the keyboard, which just "feels right" to me (not to mention being way more convenient). You can also manage way more windows in an efficient way. The previous two sentences could probably be said about a lot of "tiling" window managers, honestly, but I think awesome is a great choice.
The only important user-facing software on my machine: Emacs, Firefox, Pidgin, VLC. I installed Stumpwm (http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/), but went back to Gnome until I have the time to learn, and am less ego-depleted.
I basically buy everything Apple releases. So I've got an 8 core Mac Pro loaded to the hilt and.. it's sat in my shed unused for the past 9 months! Once the new 27" iMac came out, that was it. Perfect form factor, "fast enough", a far better screen than my 30" ACD.. so it turns out a machine half the price of my Mac Pro set up totally replaced it. And as there's no market for used Mac Pros, it seems, I now have a full Mac Pro + 30" setup sitting around entirely unused (and a 17" MBP - once I realized I don't really like or need a notebook).
I came to same conclusion because originally budgeted for a Mac Pro + 30inch screen but instead went for the iMac 27inch (and used money saved on extra external HD's, Drobo & software and still walked away with large pocketful of money!).
I like to find successful eBay auctions to gauge value but they're highly variable since it's not commonly sold kit and I've upgraded it to 8GB of memory, more hard drives, and what not.
For an 8 core 2.8GHz Mac Pro with 8GB memory, I've seen everything from £1500ish to £2200 (which is more than it cost new!! - I suspect it's because the older 8 core Xeons are faster than the current 4 core ones that replaced them). Given that, I'd take £1500 for it.
On the 30" ACD front, it's as-new, little used over the last year, no dead pixels, the same as the current £1199 one basically. I think I'd take £700 for it just because it's taking up a lot of space.
On the 17" MBP, I haven't done my research yet - it's a stock 17" 2.66GHz unibody MBP with 4GB RAM, no dead pixels, heathly battery. Cost £1799 new, I think. No good auctions to watch on eBay it seems, someone has the same machine for £1439 BIN. If I had to stab in the dark, though, it's probably worth £1300.
You're in England, yeah? Surely there's some music types around who would buy a used Mac Pro... here in Perth, Australia, I know a few Drum & Bass and Dubstep producers who are gagging for one, they're just more expensive here.
The problem, it seems, is that if you have the budget for a Mac Pro, you're the sort of person who'd just buy a new one.
The odd thing, though, is that the 8 core Mac Pro I have has held its value well in the sales I've seen because it's still faster than the current 4 core, yet was considered the entry level one at the time..
Asus Eee PC 1000HD
* 1.6Ghz Atom
* 1 GiB ram
* 10" 1024x600 display
* OpenBSD (recent snapshot)
* StumpWM is the window manager
* emacs is the editor
I use it as terminal to login to my ps3 running Debian sid for cell processor development. I use profont to let me fit a lot of code on the small screen.
I've heard some people say that only being able to see a small amount of code at a time forces good programming practices, compared to what you'd be able to do with a large monitor. Do you think that having such a small screen helps in this way?
Tried using a netbook to do some web development, and the small screen, keyboard and lethargic hardware made it very frustrating. Horrible compared to using a big monitor and powerful desktop.
I bought an Asus Eee several years ago for writing away from home, but discovered too late that the keyboard is much too small for me to type comfortably.
I got a Dell Mini 10v and turned it into a hackintosh for Rails development...unfortunately it's useless apart from browsing the web and reading PDFs. The small keyboard can be worked around by plugging in a proper Apple keyboard....but that's not very portable :-(
Well it certainly doesn't force anything. I could probably adopt some bad practices if I really tried.
The screen really isn't that small. I disable scroll-bars, tool bars and menu bars in emacs. Using 11pt profont I get two vertical buffers of 81 cols by 102 rows. That's quadruple the size of a vt100 terminal. How much more could you need? haha
If I had to use gnome this display size would be unusable but stumpwm makes it very usable.
I'm on an Asus EeePC 1000H and I adore it. I used to have another machine for gaming and other stuff but after I went about a year without turning it on I got rid of it. I like to plug mine into a larger external display and my wireless kb+mouse if I'm at my desk.
As far as my OS, yesterday it was a pretty heavily tweaked install of XP, today I'm trying out Ubuntu 10.04. Oh, and learning how to use Vim.
EDIT: I've also got a 1tb external drive for long term storage, and slightly smaller USB powered external for those other occasions.
Yeah, I've got a cheap-ass Compaq laptop, that cost like $400 a year ago with Ubuntu 10.04 on it. 2 GB ram and a dual-core 64 bit AMD processor is plenty to get work done efficiently, especially with Vim + Bash as my primary work environment. I can run Windows XP in a virtualbox instance without issue for IE testing.
Today; our biggest distributed cluster (several thousand machines, 4 heads). Which is very fun :)
Usually I hack on various computers; either a water cooled Amd Opteron [the older ones that overclocked like stink] or Intel Core 2 Duo based machines. OS is usually Feodra core 11/Ubuntu (at work) or Mint (at home).
Synced with Dropbox, shared KB/Mouse using Synergy.
27" i7 iMac with 8GB RAM, attached to a 30" Dell display (3007WFP). I switched about a month ago from a MacBook Pro (attached to the same Dell display), and it's phenomenal. It's the first setup I've ever had that actually feels fast enough to run everything I need (iTunes, Word, Excel, and Windows running in VirtualBox, along with a few instances each of iTerm, Chrome and Textmate) without skipping a beat.
At work, dual 27" iMacs (one with the Core i7 option + 16GB of RAM, and the other a base 27" model in Target Display Mode) as my workstation, and several XServes and custom Fedora boxes in 3 racks.
At home, a first-generation 15" unibody MacBook Pro (2.2ghz C2D, 4GB RAM) hooked to the 24" LED Cinema Display. I also use a last-generation Mac Mini (pre-unibody) as an HTPC.
179 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadThe size can't be beat, and it does everything I need it to without being the size of a house (granted I don't game on it...) Maybe if I had more space than a 600sqft apt, I would still have a mini-supercomputer, but laptops are amazing lately.
"Old" laptop: Macbook Pro, 4GB ram
"New" laptop: Asus EeePc 1201N running arch linux.
My DE is Gnome, at home and at work. I live mostly in Emacs & chromium anyway.
Plus a crappy old laptop I had to upgrade to 1.5GB RAM after it came with 512MB and Vista. Used only in cases of extreme laziness.
Used to be into self-built machines, but prefer stuff with a combined warranty that 'just works' nowadays.
Before January it was an original Intel iMac 24inch running Tiger (Mac OSX 10.4) which I'd been using for over 3 years: http://transfixedbutnotdead.com/2006/12/14/my-workspace-with...
Home:
* custom-built quad core AMD Phenom (Ubuntu Lucid), 8 GB ram, single 22" monitor
* Lenovo T400s (Ubuntu Lucid)
* Macbook Pro (rarely used, bought during period of irrational exuberance on potential app store sales)
The most difficult thing at the moment is the single monitor at only 22". Really looking to invest in a nice 27", but with so many other things needing doing, I really can't justify it at the moment.
It's a nice system. Before this, I was usually a generation behind. This was the "let's really splurge and go all out" system. =) Encouraged very much by the wife. And yes, I do end up using the system and it's resources quite heavily at times for video rendering while still using the computer.
It's a funny story how I got this system. See, my wife is a Mac Geek. And she's not some clueless Mac Geek. She was installing and running Debian back in the 90s. She knows her networking, hardware, and computers. Her Mac love came about when she went back to school for compute graphics. Anyways, she's a Mac Geek, so for several years now, our home has been a Mac v.s. PC environment. Good forbid something happens with my PC (or her Mac), as the other won't waste any time before coming up with some snarky comment. She's really good at this.
Anyways, when I saw the new iMacs, the 27" i7 version caught my eye. With the constant struggle of getting a Mac and PC to work together, I finally informed my wife that I would be getting a Mac, selling my PC, and moving to Apple.
She rejoiced.
We made plans, but with me starting a new job, and with wanting to wait until after the new year to give them time to fix any potential first-run defects, we planned to get one in January.
However, come December 25th,I learned she decided to buy me Windows 7 (which I had yet to pick up, mostly because I'd just been too lazy to do it). This resulted in me deciding that I should upgrade my computer, and that, as we say, is that. She had her chance.
Anyways, sorry for the long post, and the rambling. >_<
You can pretty much do everything very efficiently from the keyboard, which just "feels right" to me (not to mention being way more convenient). You can also manage way more windows in an efficient way. The previous two sentences could probably be said about a lot of "tiling" window managers, honestly, but I think awesome is a great choice.
Be sure to read man awesome.
You'll want to customize things a bit, most likely... rc.lua (the config file) is very hackable.
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/5986/imag0011w.jpg
Home: 13in Macbook Pro, 4GB RAM, Snow Leopard, 24" Dell Monitor.
Before I bought the Macbook it was a 15" Ubuntu/Win7 Gateway Laptop with 3GB RAM.
Keyboard: black Unicomp SpaceSaver (http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/en104bl.html).
Mouse: Microsoft SideWinder gaming mouse (http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-HKA-00001-SideWinder-Gaming-...). 2x 21.5" emachines 1920x1080 monitor (http://emachines.com/products/products.html?prod=E211H_bmd).
The only important user-facing software on my machine: Emacs, Firefox, Pidgin, VLC. I installed Stumpwm (http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/), but went back to Gnome until I have the time to learn, and am less ego-depleted.
Also, the 27" iMac works as an input diplay, and it will also take that second monitor nicely (if you can deal with tons of space)
For an 8 core 2.8GHz Mac Pro with 8GB memory, I've seen everything from £1500ish to £2200 (which is more than it cost new!! - I suspect it's because the older 8 core Xeons are faster than the current 4 core ones that replaced them). Given that, I'd take £1500 for it.
On the 30" ACD front, it's as-new, little used over the last year, no dead pixels, the same as the current £1199 one basically. I think I'd take £700 for it just because it's taking up a lot of space.
On the 17" MBP, I haven't done my research yet - it's a stock 17" 2.66GHz unibody MBP with 4GB RAM, no dead pixels, heathly battery. Cost £1799 new, I think. No good auctions to watch on eBay it seems, someone has the same machine for £1439 BIN. If I had to stab in the dark, though, it's probably worth £1300.
There's a few machines been bought/sold via the Edinburgh MUG.
(and in fact, it's only £3k if I pay it in a lump sum, it's nearer to £3.5k if I want to pay monthly!)
The odd thing, though, is that the 8 core Mac Pro I have has held its value well in the sales I've seen because it's still faster than the current 4 core, yet was considered the entry level one at the time..
You don't actually do development on 17" screen do you?
Tried using a netbook to do some web development, and the small screen, keyboard and lethargic hardware made it very frustrating. Horrible compared to using a big monitor and powerful desktop.
The screen really isn't that small. I disable scroll-bars, tool bars and menu bars in emacs. Using 11pt profont I get two vertical buffers of 81 cols by 102 rows. That's quadruple the size of a vt100 terminal. How much more could you need? haha
If I had to use gnome this display size would be unusable but stumpwm makes it very usable.
As far as my OS, yesterday it was a pretty heavily tweaked install of XP, today I'm trying out Ubuntu 10.04. Oh, and learning how to use Vim.
EDIT: I've also got a 1tb external drive for long term storage, and slightly smaller USB powered external for those other occasions.
Today; our biggest distributed cluster (several thousand machines, 4 heads). Which is very fun :)
Usually I hack on various computers; either a water cooled Amd Opteron [the older ones that overclocked like stink] or Intel Core 2 Duo based machines. OS is usually Feodra core 11/Ubuntu (at work) or Mint (at home).
Synced with Dropbox, shared KB/Mouse using Synergy.
Hackerspace Kit
Freelance / Personal Kit Gaming Kit Work KitAt home, a first-generation 15" unibody MacBook Pro (2.2ghz C2D, 4GB RAM) hooked to the 24" LED Cinema Display. I also use a last-generation Mac Mini (pre-unibody) as an HTPC.