innocenat

There’s a phrase: We are now in an era of abundant of processing power. While I certainly agree about this phrase – I believe it myself too – for some field no processing power is enough; namely graphics and video field.

I also work in such field, and I have got quite a powerful main rig (that I can afford). My main rig is Intel Core i7 2630QM Sandy Bridge (2.0GHz, Quad-code, mobile) with 16GB RAM running Windows 7. While might not sound as powerful as you might think (it still struggles on large After Effect composition, for example), it’s certainly more powerful than many new computer today.

Another field that screams for processing power is programming. While text editing (and yes, programming is just text editing) is not a burden on computer itself, compiling and testing sure do. Some program takes long time to compile even on fast processors. When testing, it’s very common to lunch virtual machines, which consumes quite a bit of RAM. Also, some IDE also takes a lot of RAM and processing power to provide better insight of code to programmer.

My main works on computer is programming. But I seriously doubt I need Core i7 with 16GB of RAM to develop on. So I decided to dig out my old notebook (Dell Studio 1537: Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz Penryn with 4GB RAM) which was running Windows Vista (argh!). I format it completely and install Linux Mint (a distro that desktop environment that’s actually usable). (I originally planned to run Windows 8.1 along with Linux Mint, but due to lag of drivers that plan was abandoned)

Surprisingly, after trying to make myself comfortable, apart from some nitpick (Win+D doesn’t work, for example), to my surprise I find it perfectly usable. (In past I only run Linux as a testing/production server which is shell only)

I haven’t begin productive work on this machine yet, but I plan to use this as my main machine for development in future. I bring IntelliJ Idea and Sublime Text with me, but plan to migrate to Vim in near future.

Of course, some works aren’t meant to be done on Linux (for example, developing a Windows-only software :P). I still use my new i7 machine for that.

EDIT: No, I am not a freetards. I am using Linux. Not because it’s free (I can also get Windows for free from DreamSpark), but because it consumes significantly less resources than Windows. One of the problem I use, IntelliJ Idea, is paid software (I use ultimate version). You can ensure that I will try to find application for various things that’s actually usable on Linux (i.e. nothing like GIMP, which its quality of result image is far inferior to, says, Adobe Photoshop)