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Microsoft announces Project Zenith, a clutter-free Windows experience meant to entice developers - Engadget (www.engadget.com)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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But you'll need a powerful system with 64GB of RAM to use it.

Microslop thinks that "Clutter free" means "bundled with an always on LLM" 😸

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[–] 19 points 23 hours ago* (9 children)

Why do developers need 64GB+ RAM on their computers? Maybe I’m biased as a Ruby on Rails web application developer but I’m happily squeaking by on just 8GB RAM. Maybe they’re developing with the memory-hungry VS Code?

I thought it was the gamers who needed tons of RAM.

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  • [–] 17 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

    Visual Studio, VS Code, WSL2, docker containers, SQL Server + SSMS, MS Teams, ...

    Usually all at the same time. Not everyone is doing just web dev.

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  • [–] 5 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

    Teams, Visual Studio, VS Code are trash, they leak memory like no other

    WSL2 is hilarious, just run Linux/UNIX?

    SQL Server and SSMS are trash

    I run Docker quite a bit but if you’re actually writing the containers efficiently it shouldn’t be sucking down ~64GB of RAM. But I’ve also seen how people shovel things like Java, log rotation, etc. into those containers because they act like it’s a 1994 VPS.

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  • [–] 8 points 19 hours ago*

    Not everyone does the same development process as you.

    And I’m sure we all work at places that allow us to change the entire tech stack and switch away from teams /s

    Be realistic, there are many reasons you need all of these things and more. Why are you trashing other people so much?

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  • [–] 12 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

    This is on my work PC, I can't just switch there (:

    For .NET development Visual Studio and Rider are the only decent options, everything else is "trash". Teams is the company communication tool (besides Outlook).

    And we run SQL Servers in Azure, PostgreSQL would cost the same (but I'd love to switch to it myself).

    You don't need 64 GB of RAM, I was happy with 48 GB too, but the headroom is nice. 32 GB would be borderline for my work though, especially as I often have two heavy backend services open (2x Visual Studio) plus a Python project for automated tests (VS Code).

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 18 hours ago

    run Docker quite a bit but if you’re actually writing the containers efficiently it shouldn’t be sucking down ~64GB of RAM

    In Windows when you run a docker container a full Linux VM is run, so it uses gigabytes of memory

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  • [–] 1 point 23 hours ago* (2 children)

    I got the same impression. That dev work isn’t power hungry, just the stack is. But if IT controls the stack, that explains some of the dilemma.

    Why an RDBMS on the local though? Testing shit doesn’t make sense to name it as a regular piece of software.

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  • [–] 8 points 22 hours ago

    When you work on backend services you have a local DB running 24/7. Changes don't go onto the actual dev environment until locally tested, or you might just break things for 50 other people.

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  • [–] 5 points 23 hours ago* (1 child)

    Why an RDBMS on the local though? Testing shit doesn’t make sense to name it as a regular piece of software.

    I always build against a local DB?

    For our desktop / LAN software the DB will always be local.

    For web, it's easier since I'm likely to burn the DB down over and over during early development / prototyping. But I'm not using cloud hosted DB even in production, and don't expose Postgres outside the DB server, so I find it easier to work on this way.

    EDIT: I also think that a default installation of VS includes SQL Server. I don't use it, so always have to adjust the installation and remove all of those bits, but I also have complete control of my environment. I could see an IT department just doing a stock VS installation with the required workloads.

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  • [–] 1 point 22 hours ago* (2 children)

    Yeah sorry, that’s what I meant by testing stuff. I suppose if you’re always testing things in the DB, it makes sense. Usually in my case, I would spin up a Postgres instance only for the week or so that I’m developing and testing with it. Eventually I push to cloud though. I don’t keep it running locally unless I’m testing a change. But I’m not testing changes often… I wouldn’t consider it part of my stack for that reason. I might run a local RDBMS a few times a year.

    On the other hand, I will use SQLite or DuckDB all the time for local work. Not sure if those count as RDBMS, they are serverless.

    I won’t never consider a local RDBMS as having stable data storage, so it falls into a strictly “testing” category for me, I guess “development and testing” is more accurate.

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  • [–] 4 points 22 hours ago

    I could totally see that for the web stuff where I only make changes a couple of times a year. Usually when working on those I just delete the local DB before I start to keep it clean, but spinning up a new copy would be more efficient.

    For our desktop apps / server Postgres is always installed locally on the machine, so keeping it there mirrors "production".

    I spent most of my time working on those apps and services, or working on the Android client (or both at the same time when a feature requires that both change), and often on a copy of actual customer data as we do a lot of custom work for clients.

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  • [–] 2 points 21 hours ago

    Yeah, that’s exactly the process- while you are building out a feature it hits a local DB and once it’s ready to integrate you push it to a shared environment.

    If you break dev, coworkers be mad

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  • [–] 4 points 18 hours ago

    I develop in containers, which means I don't have to install dependencies on my host.
    While it's overhead, it's never that massive.
    Sure things like Codium and all the tooling takes up a lot of memory... I don't think I've seen over 10gb of "dev related" memory.
    I feel like people are significantly desensitized about how much data 1GB actually is.

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  • [–] 3 points 17 hours ago

    Sometimes you use big datasets. I needed 64GB (well, I only needed more than 32 to be fair, but 5-6 years ago it wasn't that expensive) to figure out a bug in data going over 32bits number of indices on a gpu.

    But usually 32GB has been largely enough for most stuff, I even only have 16 on my laptop but I don't do large stuff any more.

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  • [–] 8 points 23 hours ago (1 child)

    I've worked on large C++ applications and it's worth having a beefy machine. Each source file can be compiled in parallel so you save time by having a ton of CPU cores and memory.

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  • [–] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 child)

    Yeah for most projects the only time you need a workstation-class machine is to cut down on compile times. Every time you make a change and run you have to compile; a process you do possibly hundreds of times per day benefits immensely from even being just 1-2 seconds faster

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  • [–] 5 points 22 hours ago

    I do use quite a bit, but I also do a lot of different things. Compiling code, running docker containers, local web servers, an android emulator, slack, browser tabs for Jira/confluence/figma/etc., all adds up pretty quick.

    8GB is definitely nowhere near enough, at least for what I need to do.

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  • [–] 3 points 20 hours ago

    Java dev in charge of a $100M product here. Can't actually compile it with less than 32 GB of RAM.

    My old job working with a hydraulic analysis firm, needed 256 GB to run the product it in local development mode; to run customer models in production was a mainframe job - typically multi-terabytes. Computational fluid dynamics eats all your memory and asks for more. My work computer would have been pretty shitty as a gaming desktop, but did have every memory slot maxed out.

    Yes, you might be working on something more lightweight, and that is fine. That doesn't mean that your requirements are the be all and end all.

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  • [–] 2 points 23 hours ago

    I build windows software, so need Windows and VS. I keep my entire development environment in a virtual machine. I also have a couple of other VMs for client isolation, clean installation testing, etc.

    So having that much memory allows me to run more than one virtual machine at a time, and keep enough reserve for my actual desktop.

    It was also my first rebuild in over 12 years, and RAM prices hadn't gone stupid yet, so I figured I'd drop a few more $ and build another decade+ future proof machine.

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