Hello all,
Hope this doesn’t turn out like the last post i started ( emacs vs vim vs others)!
This is not a debate between Apple vs Windows. I was in general wondering what the community uses as their primary desktop. If you do use a desktop, did you build the PC (if so can you share your config? ) or did you buy an off the shelf computer ? (what brand & review) what are your thoughts on this in general ?
I just resigned on the laptops market. At first, people at coffee shops around the city looked surprised when I arrived carrying my desktop computer on my shoulders, but they got used to it. I would probably gave in and buy a laptop if I had to do it more often, but once or twice a week it’s fine.
I love this post because I’m honestly not sure whether or not you’re joking.
I get a real Atlas vibe from carrying a desktop on your shoulders.
Color me interested as well!
@Bherzet, can you show us your setup at a coffee shop? :)
How long do you spend in any given coffee shop?
also how far is the coffee shop from home ?
Pic or it didn’t happen.
Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu.
Same except with Manjaro. Bought the 9360 three years ago and it’s still running smoothly. My only concern is the hardware bugs in Intel chips so my next system will probably be Ryzen based.
They told me Thinkpads for Linux/BSD. Bought a used T420 w/ Core i7 off eBay. Been working great for how I use it.
My PC is named Phoenix because it has basically been upgraded in bits and pieces, Ship of Theseus style, continuously since I originally built it in 2006. It is currently incarnated as a Ryzen R7 1700 with an ASRock motherboard, 16 GB of RAM, an NVidia GTX 660 GPU, and a 500 GB SSD. (Most of my actual data lives on a NAS.)
Wish I could do that with a laptop. Building your own PC is cheaper and better than buying off the shelf IMO, but I also enjoy doing it even now.
how good is AMD compared to Intel processors ? and for gaming in general ?
AMD has really stepped up recently. They’ve been beating Intel on performance and cost across their most recent line of CPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stM2CPF9YAY https://www.pcmag.com/review/371925/amd-ryzen-9-3950x
It’s also quite nice that AMD isn’t constantly changing their CPU sockets; every Ryzen generation has kept the same socket so far, and so (assuming your motherboard manufacturer keeps its firmware up-to-date) you can theoretically just keep upgrading the CPU as better ones come out… Whereas Intel seems to change their sockets every 1-2 years, locking you into specific generations unless you’re willing to buy a new motherboard and basically reassemble the entire PC from scratch. With the Ryzen line so far a CPU upgrade has been about as easy as a GPU upgrade, whereas with Intel you’re often stuck with whatever processor generation you bought into.
That being said, apparently AMD’s going to do a socket change in 2020, so there’s not a lot of difference if you’re buying right now. If you’re willing to wait for the next socket to come out, they’ll probably support it for a lot longer than Intel, though.
Currently AMD has Intel pretty soundly beat on price for performance, and in some benchmarks (here’s the Anandtech benchmarking for the 3950x, similar to the PCMag one linked above, but I find Anandtech even more thorough, and they test specific games as well) they beat Intel even when ignoring price.
My current gaming PC is Intel; I built it a while ago though, before Ryzen came out. My Linux desktop is AMD, and I’d probably go with AMD if I were rebuilding the gaming PC today. (And at some point presumably I’ll do it, since I’ll have to replace the gaming PC’s motherboard anyway due to the socket changing.)
Every benchmark I’ve seen has them quite a long way ahead on price/performance.
My current PC build is running ubuntu on the cheapest available Threadripper (24 cores) and cheapest RTX-class GPU, and came in at about 2/3rds the price of my $WORK macbook pro.
It absolutely screams along (eg: $WORK test suite on my 15’ macbook pro took 48m, on desktop it takes 9m, and the desktop remains responsive while it’s running).
I’ve never been super interested in current-gen AAA titles, but the few I’ve tried have all worked on high settings, and it drives my VR setup very easily.
In my experience, AMD’s Ryzen line of processors is basically 95% of the performance for 75% of the price of their Intel equivalents. This applies to gaming too. Their basic mid-range desktop CPU, the X600 (where X = 1, 2 or 3 depending on generation), is also 6 cores instead of the more typical 4, so for multithreaded workloads, like compiling code, it’s more like 110% of the performance for 75% of the price. I am a thorough fan.
Because it’s a good story… In 2011 AMD released their then-next-gen CPU architecture, which turned out to be a giant architectural dead-end. AMD CPU’s were just tragically bad for a long long time after that, as they had to develop an entirely model of processor core without going broke in the process, and they’re a much smaller company than Intel that can’t afford to just eat development costs and get on with life. Intel naturally took the opportunity to become the de-facto standard in all but the lowest-performance markets, and made money hand over fist. In mid 2017 AMD finally managed to dig themselves out of their technological hole and released the Ryzen line of CPU’s which are once again competitive. And lo and behold, since they did that Intel CPU’s have quite suddenly gotten cheaper, more powerful and more flexible as well.
I built one last week (Ryzen 7 3600X/32GB RAM/1 TB M.2 SSD), it was an upgrade after 7.5 years (minus graphics card). I also built the one before that and the one before that. I think the last one I bought off the shelf was in 2005ish.
Overall I’m not really into hardware anymore, but I’ve been buying stuff recommended by a friend who’s really into it for years.
The last laptop I bought was in 2004, since then I’ve exclusively used hand-me-downs, usually from work. Nothing too shabby, I have an x230 (that was broken and I had to replace the screen) and a T460p, but laptops have never been my personal main machine, ever.
My NAS is an HP Microserver N54L where I added RAM and disks, so kinda half off-the-shelf :P
For work I’ve used ThinkPads since roughly early 2010, the last (and first?) work desktop machine I had was from ~2001 to 2005 and sometimes when working at customers’ offices.
I like your site. It’s clean.
it is! I love how simple it is!
System76 branded NUC named Yutang after Lin Yutang who maybe once said: “When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”
My main desktop is a Raptor Talos II running Fedora with dual 4-core POWER9 CPUs (32 threads), 32GB RAM, AMD WX7100 video and NVMe storage. I largely bought it preconfigured from Raptor.
I’ve read good and bad about Raptor. How has your experience been??
I’ve been quite happy with them, but I was a very early adopter (T2 serial #12), so I got pretty much instantaneous support, and I haven’t had any major problems with either my T2 or Blackbird. I think Raptor is a good company and I’m very pleased with the hardware, but I’ll just say for the record that my very positive experience should be considered in that context.
Why did you buy a non x86 platform?
I’m a Power ISA bigot of long standing, and part of my computing choice goals is to intentionally select non-x86 where possible. I think we should support more variety in computing architectures and I have more money than sense, so for me this is feasible. The POWER9 in particular is currently the only non-x86 architecture that is IMHO credibly in the same performance ballpark.
Always self-assembled desktop PC. Currently 2-years old AMD Ryzen 1600 / 16GB RAM/ 240GB SSD + 480GB M.2 SSD / AMD Radeon 550.
what mobo are you using?
That time I found one modest board that was missing all these ‘gaming’ blink blinks - MSI B350 PC Mate. After two years I’m quite satisfied - system is rock solid with bit of RAM/CPU overclocking.
I’ve built my computer literally yesterday, after ~10 years.
Specs: AMD Ryzen 3700x, 32 GB RAM, 500 GB NVMe SSD, AMD RX 590 GPU. I’m running Manjaro Linux with i3wm on it.
what mobo did you choose for ryzen 3700 ?
I went with Asus TUF X570-plus gaming, because I got a recommendation for it.
It might sound like a joke to some but my main machine is actually a Surface Go 128gb even though I own a couple macs. I love the form factor and how small it is. It makes it quite portable. It is quite underpowered but there is charm in using it, it feels like a little vw beetle going uphill, it gets there eventually.
This is my ideal form factor. It’s still a few years off IMO for what I want to do with it but I can see it happening.
yea I currently use my laptop as my primary machine but the post is more about desktops
oops, sorry, I didn’t read the post very carefully, I was quite tired when I replied. In my mind it was a “post about your main machine” kind of question. My mistake.
nothing to be sorry for!
I built this AMD Ryzen 7 2700X rig in March earlier this year: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/jjmalina/saved/#view=gFqCLk
Photo of the battlestation: https://twitter.com/jjmalina/status/1150199875088322560
It’s running Xubuntu and Windows 10. I use it for half gaming half coding. For work I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which has acceptable performance but nothing like the desktop. Now I want a desktop at the work office.
Looks really cool, thank you for sharing!
I’m currently on a system76 oryx pro 15”
I’m missing my custom built AMD Threadripper with a GTX 2070/2080 and 64GB of ram though!
Laptop user mostly.
Currently a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2nd Gen with 8GB of RAM of a 256GB SSD evenly split between OpenBSD and Void Linux. I only keep linux installed for the odd application/piece of hardware that needs it, such as steam or an android phone.
The function row touch bar is annoying, but I really like the home/end keys taking the place of caps lock. I’d prefer if the touchpad had separate buttons, as it currently makes the trackpoint awkward to use.
I’m looking forward to receiving my Pinebook Pro come December/January (as well as a pinephone), and I hope to get good use out of it for serious work, eventually.
I’ll probably build a desktop over the next year or so, because
Define “Desktop” :) My primary computer is a laptop but a fairly over-wrought one :) I bought an Alienware 17 R5 and love it.
The hardware quality is superb and generally reminds me of what I used to love about Macbook hardware before it went to the dogs. It has an exceptionally good scissor key keyboard for a laptop with great tactile feedback and a good amount of play.
I run a combo of Windows 10 and Kubuntu on it, but my Kubuntu install ate itself during an attempted upgrade and I may try mainstream Ubuntu next time because Gnome seems to be the way of the future for the LInux desktop.
I mostly use it as a desktop machine despite it being a laptop, though I do very much value being able to hole up in a corner of the house away from my usual work area when we have guests taking up our combined guest room/office.
I’ve been super surprised at how good a development environment for *NIX Windows 10 has become. WSL1 works great for my needs and WSL2 is shaping up to be superb.
I will always value LInux for its ultimate hackability and the software that runs there and nowhere else, but sometimes when I Just Need to Get Work Done Windows 10 has proved to be a surprisingly smooth ride.
One downside to the Alienware is that Linux is most definitely NOT a supported option. Getting Kubuntu running on it required a number of work-arounds.
Were I buying a new machine today I’d definitely investigate going with a Thinkpad workstation line model and using a dock with GPU. That way the laptop could be considerably lighter and easier to run Linux on.
I like building computers…about once every seven years. Then, when I’m 75% through it, I get sick of it, wonder why I like it, but push through to the end, and torture test it to ascertain stability.
Custom-built gaming PC:
IMO, the only interesting things about desktop builds are what form factor you go after, the case, and wire routing. Focus on this was good price/performance (in 2016) and quiet operation. It won’t be for awhile, but I’ll probably look to build a mITX box next once other people work out the kinks of SFF. Been watching the DAN A4-SFX with quite a bit of interest.
Work-sponsored laptop:
I don’t usually computer all day, but when I do, it is helpful to use mice that require different grip types.
Personal laptop:
Eying the 2020 MBPs to replace this. Been a great laptop, other than the GPU issues.
Last desktop I bought was an Alienware I found on sale. At the time, it was the height of Bitcoin/shitcoin mining and video cards cost crazy bucks. The Alienware had an Nvidia 1080Ti in it for a much cheaper price than I could get as a standalone part so I jumped on it.
It’s been a good machine. I updated the main drive to a much faster NVMe SSD and bumped the RAM from 16GB to 64GB. It runs Windows 10 Pro and then I run a bunch of Linux VM’s off of it to do things. Also gets used occasionally for gaming. Overall pretty happy with it. It’s been a reliable PC and I would probably do it again just because I’m tired of building my own PC at this point.
this is exactly why I’m confused, graphic cards costs almost as much as an off the shelf PC! or in some cases more expensive
I use an old Dell XPS 15 (circa 2010) at home and a Surface Book 2 at work. Both (obviously) off the shelf, though the dell was spec’d out with a better screen and RAM.
I built my own PCs for many years, but once laptops became “good enough” the smaller footprint, portability and frankly lack of effort made it an easy choice to switch.
I built my PC last winter: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/dwGPq4 My laptop is a thinkpad x1 carbon (gen 5).
Custom built desktop PC named Deus (like the Shadowrun AI), with an Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3, 16 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz, Zotac GTX 970, 500 GB Intel SSD and 1TB HDD.
Building your own PC isn’t necessarily cheaper than getting a pre-built one but it has the advantage of allowing you to pick the level of quality you want and/or can afford for each of your components.
Why did you pick an Xeon CPU? That’s an interesting choice for a personal desktop.
That particular Xeon is the poor man’s i7-4770. From what I read, it is actually the exact same chip without the embeddded GPU, thus 50$ cheaper at the time.
Also it has no easy overclocking facilities, but since I don’t overclock my hardware I didn’t care.
I’m in the market for a new PC, so I’m curious to read the responses to this…
Until about 2 months ago I was using a 2011 27” iMac running Debian. 2.5 Ghz Intel i5, 16 Gb RAM, 500 Gb HD and whatever old graphics card shipped in those iMacs.
The HD finally started dying, so I dug through my closet and grabbed the older desktop buried in there and upgraded its hard drive and installed two NVIDIA cards salvaged from the e-Recycling bin at my last job. I built it myself in 2009, and it’s a 3.2 Ghz 4 core AMD Phenom II, 8 Gb RAM, 1 Tb SSD, with a GeForce GTX 650 Ti and a GeForce GT 640, running Debian.
My plan is to upgrade to 16Gb and wait for ThreadRippers to drop in price a bit. I really wanted 16Gb in the first place, but when I built it the 4 Gb DIMMs were like $1000 each and even 8Gb already seemed excessive.
Last desktop I owned was an old Dell Optiplex running Ubuntu Linux. I bought that in … 2007, I think.
Since then I’ve worked almost exclusively on laptops, specifically, almost exclusively refurbished ex-corporate ThinkPads running either or both Ubuntu and FreeBSD.
I have a desktop I built about 8 years ago. i5-2500k @ 4GHz, 24 GB RAM, NVidia 770, and about 16 TB of storage. Just runs Ubuntu 16.04 now since I don’t play games anymore. I’d like to upgrade but I don’t really need it so it’s hard to justify it.
I prefer portability over specs, but thankfully, my current machine has both (enough for me anyway). My only computer is an HP Envy 13 – i5 8250u, 256 GB NVMe SSD, 8 gigs of RAM.
This is all that I’ll ever need in the forseeable future. It gets everything done – gaming too. Disk space was never an issue for me, since I hardly ever store media; I have 180 GB free.
ThinkPad x270. Portable, long battery life, works well with Linux.
I have two devices I mainly use; one being a Thinkpad T440, and the other being a desktop I built from parts I picked out.
My Thinkpad comes with an older-gen i7 and a 250GB SSD and runs NixOS with 8GB of RAM. Nothing super powerful there, but it feels fantastic to use (aside from a tacky touchpad and not-so-great screen I’d love to replace).
My desktop is an older-gen AMD processor since I built it about 2 years ago. Upon waiting for the Ryzens to come out, I just settled with an FX-8350 which I used to build a friend’s computer with (budget build). I ended up liking the 8350 a lot so I wanted it for myself as it was very cheap. Picked out a mobo, 16GB of ram, 2x240GB SSDs, a 1TB HDD, and my other accessories, and that’s my computer in a nutshell, also running NixOS.
A dumpsterdived Thinkpad E560.
okay, that’s cool.
I use a couple of PC’s. There are two desktops under my desk:
I actually use both.
Apart from that, I have also ThinkPad X200, but plan to switch to Pinebook Pro next year.
Is the POWER9 64 or 32 threads (SMT8 or SMT4)?
Both. There are SU (scale up, SMT8) and SO (scale out, SMT4) chips. Sforza (variant used in Raptor boards) uses SO. SU are mainly for IBM boards used in enterprise (think AIX or IBM i, which won’t run on Raptor boards).
I stopped having a desktop machine when I stopped gaming. My computing device of choice are small X series thinkpads. Mostly due to their size (imh high portability) and Linux support.
My personal machine is a Lenovo Y50-70 (upgraded RAM to 16GB and swapped the 5400 RPM HDD for an Evo 860 500GB) running Windows 10 and Ubuntu & connected to a 27-inch BenQ monitor. I’ll build a rig after this laptop breaks down. I am waiting for that day.
I use a MacBook Pro 15-inch 2015 for work.
As for laptops: Thinkpad T480, and X240 before that, crappier thinkpad E-series before.
As for desktops: Self-built from ordered parts always
Servers: Preferably Supermicro rackmountable stuff with IPMI interfaces, and I have a HP MIcroserver Gen8 as home-server
Just curious. Do you use NixOS because of strictly professional demands or is it more of a personal preference? FYI I don’t have a pressing need to use NixOS but I’m pretty sold on the concept.
Personal preference. I hate dealing with users and groups, and systemd units, and digging into /etc to edit config files and then forgetting which ones I’ve edited and what I’ve changed, and then moving to a new computer and having to learn to do it all over again. I like how in NixOS that’s all in a single documented config file.
Also nix-shell is really neat, I like keeping my environment clean so being able to open a shell with a program or library I need in a specific moment (or when I’m developing) and knowing it won’t be there anymore when I close it is great.
Only wart is that if you download a random binary and try to run it chances are it won’t work and you’ll have to mess with patchelf to make it run.
Okay I may just have to get started sooner than later. Thanks for the caveat about ‘patchelf’.
I have a top spec x230 ThinkPad which I got second hand and works perfectly for day to day development work.
Aside from that one time when I lost my way and dropped three grand on a mac pro in 2008 I have never bought a prebuilt workstation instead opting to build my own.
Home:
Work:
I agree. I’m coming around to the idea that Apple never ACTUALLY cared about the non Apple developer demographic, and we were just a kind of accidental “freebie”. Apparently the recent changes really appeal to creatives - e.g. folks doing video / sound editing or lots of writing. I dunno. For my person use I’ve given up and bought an Alienware laptop that I’m delighted iwth :)
Yah, $work requires I’m on a mac, but practically it sits on my desk and I do almost everything on a VM on the big machine. Doesn’t hurt I’ve got a 3-monitor battlestation vs the puny 15” screen. :D
I’m in the same boat but I have my 34” monitor and mechanical keyboard set up using a simple USB switch so that I can hook my work MBP up to it and just switch inputs on the monitor and flip the USB switch and I’m golden.
Much simpler, cheaper and less hassle than the traditional KVM route since the whole idea is falling by the wayside given the high bandwidth of most high powered video setups.
I have a desktop that I built, 8700k gtx 1070 with 32 gb of ram and tb ssd. I used pcpartpicker to check compatibility. I also have a surface pro x that I use to remote into it with.
My work provided a laptop, but I build my own desktops from last-gen used parts. Typing this from an X99-based system that was cutting-edge when it was released 3 years ago and can now be found on eBay, discarded by large corporations or crypto miners for a fraction of its release price. I did get a current-gen high-end GPU for gaming in a VM but still saved quite a bit on the overall cost of the system, even moreso compared to buying prebuilt. I’d highly recommend this to people who don’t need the absolute newest CPU; the actual process of putting together a computer might seem scary but it’s totally trivial. I run Arch on all this stuff just because it’s what I’m most used to. Full specs: ASUS X99 Deluxe mobo, overclocked i7 6850K, 32GB RAM, RTX 2070 Super for the gaming VM, RX 550 for the host OS, and a few NVMe SSDs.
Everyone’s going to tell you to build your computer. Don’t do it. It’s stressful and takes tons of time.
actually quite a number of posts are about Alienware desktops
Desktop is a built-to-order thing from Cyberpower that’s 7 years old and has had various pieces replaced as they fail and/or seem problematic. I’d recommend Cyberpower as a vendor if you’re looking for a customized PC - lots of options, sane pricing, and they do what they say they will do. Mine is currently an Ivy Bridge era i5, SSD boot drive with large hard drives for data, and a fanless GeForce GTX 750. Dual boot Slackware and Windows 2012 R2, with a fairly large VM library.
Laptop is an HP Stream with a dual core Atom, 64Gb eMMC storage, 4Gb RAM, laughable GPU but with awesome battery life. Command line development just doesn’t need a beefy PC anymore. The Stream is a cheap and nasty device, which isn’t right for everyone, but I bought a model that I could install Windows 8.1 on and have been fairly happy with the result.
I use an Apple laptop as my effective desktop and run Fedora on the one it replaced, but I’ve been contemplating getting a desktop PC for various purposes. I’ve built a few PCs in my time and I’m not really interested in doing it again: to me it’s straightforward enough to not be particularly interesting, and involved enough to be more tedious than I want. Origin looks really nice but is neither affordable nor, as far as I can tell, really worth the premium. I’m wondering whether people find iBuyPower to be reputable. They’ve been around for a while and seem to be a large player in the industry, but their marketing gives me a strong “sells counterfeits on Amazon” vibe. That may only be because disreputable third parties have copied their look.
I’ve read reviews about iBuyPower and they don’t look good so far. Most of them have issues with poor qc, doa..
I had a homebuilt Hackintosh based on an Intel i7-8700, and it was great, but when we moved to a smaller house, I parted it out and now live on a 2015 MacBook Pro. If there were space, I’d probably be using an iMac Pro or possibly another Hackintosh.
2015 MacBook Pro is my main comp although the Windows PC I built in December 2018 has been seeing more usage than just the video gaming I’d intended to use it for. It being three years newer and desktop technology makes the experience a bit more… fluid. I’ve got an older laptop running NixOS somewhere. I boot it up when I need desktop Linux for something and VMs on my Mac won’t cut it.
I recently built a small form factor Ryzen 9 (12 core/24 thread) system. It’s the first desktop PC I’ve built myself for over a decade. Specs are at https://bitcannon.net/page/ryzen9-pc/ I’ve become a bit of a desktop (over laptop) convert over the last few years. I think you get way more bang for buck. Plus you can upgrade more over time compared to a laptop.
how do you like the performance of AMD so far ?
It’s brilliant. It’s my work machine. Totally rips through Rust and Mercury compilation, which was the motivation for getting it. I have an i7-6700K system at home, which no longer feels as fast as it once did.
I currently use a four-year-old Lenovo laptop chassis, from which I removed the screen, so it looks something like an old microcomputer. Since buying it I’ve learnt a lot about what I need from a computer, and computers in general, and am probably going to replace it with an older Thinkpad or similar, when it breaks.
With regards to the internals, I couldn’t tell you much. I know that it’s an Intel i3 and has 8 Gigabytes of RAM, and I don’t think it has a dedicated graphics chip. Running the software that I run (Emacs and some QT apps) and doing the things that I do (writing, some programming, reading) I’ve never had any performance problems, so I guess I’d rate it 4/5 - docking a mark for the terrible laptop keyboard.
Work: MacBook Pro 2015 15”. Home: MacBook Pro 2015 15”. Plus an old PC desktop, hackintoshed, used for recording music.
Mac Pro toob. I need ram, need to run a lot of developer stuff that’s not-so-great on Windows, and frankly I have no interest in fighting Linux hardware compatibility issues or wrangling the variously janky GUI environments therein. I’ve got work and other actually enjoyable stuff to spend my time on.