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Journal by takyon

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On A $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

This $210 AMD Ryzen laptop may well be the best-value business notebook ever

Motile 14" Laptop: Ryzen 3, 1080p, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD ($199)
Motile 14" Laptop: AMD Ryzen 5, 14" 1080p, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD ($299)

MOTILE 14 Review $299 RYZEN 5 3500U Performance Laptop Amazing Value! (10m40s video)
$299 MOTILE 14" Performance Laptop Emulation Test - RYZEN 5 3500U (11m50s video)
External GPU On A $300 Walmart Laptop! MOTILE 14 + Radeon RX590 (10m52s video) (lol)

These $200-$300 laptops have a stellar reputation compared to the $80 landfill-tier EVOO 10.1 tablet that Walmart is associated with.

The main problems are probably single-channel RAM (although at least it can be upgraded), apparently a crappy Wi-Fi card, no USB-C charging, and they are Zen+. It's possible that Zen 2 "Renoir" could allow 4 or 6 cores in place of what is currently 2 or 4 cores, although it would take a while for prices to drop down to these levels.

Personally, I might take a break from laptops and try building a small form factor PC using Zen 4 (AM5 socket), which may be released in 2021. AM5 should support "mainstream" CPUs with at least 24 cores, possibly 32 cores.

Also, @krishnoid, Lenovo 100e is at $99.

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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday February 05 2020, @05:58PM (7 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday February 05 2020, @05:58PM (#954323) Journal

    Get rid of the ads and then you can browse with 1GB easily.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:55PM (6 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:55PM (#954348) Journal

    Hardly. I am totally ad-less (adblock and privacy badger) and my Firefox is over the 12G just now. Almost 900M is just a Xorg. I would not call that can browse with 1G easily.

    --
    The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 06 2020, @04:22AM (5 children)

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 06 2020, @04:22AM (#954617) Journal
      Those addons take ram. TANSTAAFL. Use a phone or tablet for browsing and be done with it. Or use links. And be WAY more selective of the sites you use. Like, maybe cut it down to one or two?
      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 06 2020, @05:00AM (4 children)

        by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Thursday February 06 2020, @05:00AM (#954629) Journal

        I can do 60 tabs on a single 4 GB device.

        1 tab per 1 device? Well, it's a valid lifestyle choice.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday February 06 2020, @01:25PM

          by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Thursday February 06 2020, @01:25PM (#954729) Journal
          It's environmentally stupid to have 19 separate devices running.
          --
          SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
        • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 06 2020, @09:18PM (2 children)

          by pTamok (3042) on Thursday February 06 2020, @09:18PM (#954862)

          I can do 60 tabs on a single 4 GB device.

          1 tab per 1 device? Well, it's a valid lifestyle choice.

          Hmm. On my 8 Gigabyte RAM laptop, I find I need to save my tabs and restart Firefox after a while when I get to around 550 (yes, five hundred and fifty) tabs. Its an AMD A10 processor, so not exactly up to the minute. With that number of tabs open my cpu is bumping along between 1 and 5% and RAM usage about 30-40%.

          $ free -m
                        total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
          Mem:           6868        2501         387         254        3979        3817
          Swap:         12287           0       12287

          I use uMatrix and uBlock origin.

          It probably has to do with me tending not to stream videos or audio.

          It works for me. Obviously, other people have different use-cases and usage profiles. I remember Jerry Pournelle saying you should have one cpu per task, and if cpus are cheap and efficient enough, and similarly inter-system communication, I'd agree with him: but my real-life experience is that the Linux scheduler works well.

          Note, I just reset my phone's (Sailfish) browser having got to roughly 550 tabs on that too.

          This probably says more about my browsing habits than the hardware's capabilities.

          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday February 06 2020, @10:25PM (1 child)

            by takyon (881) <{takyon} {at} {soylentnews.org}> on Thursday February 06 2020, @10:25PM (#954884) Journal

            IMO, beyond the 60-100 tab range, you have a lot of tab clutter, and maybe multiple browser windows open. You might forget some news story that you have open that you wanted to submit, for example. Maybe it works for you but for me that is the danger zone. Currently I have 23 (on a 4 GB system) + 25 (8 GB) + 105 (4 GB) tabs open.

            Also, I would question whether these 550 tabs are really in memory. I think 20-25 MB per tab is a typical average, maybe less than 5 MB for static content but jumping to 100 MB or more if there is heavy multimedia content, scripts, or whatever. And then memory usage can slowly creep up if some scripts are left running (a default behavior of most script blockers is to allow scripts on the domain, only blocking third-party and blacklisted domains by default).

            So if you click on an old tab or use the keyboard command to cycle through them, do some of them reload? Less of it is stored in memory in that case (favicon, title, URL, and page offsets are probably the bare minimum, maybe a snapshot of the DOM?).

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            [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
            • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 06 2020, @11:15PM

              by pTamok (3042) on Thursday February 06 2020, @11:15PM (#954911)

              I have lots of tab cruft, but am strictly a two windows person: one general browsing, and one private browsing.
              As for the tabs, you are almost certainly correct about reloading (I just checked, and yes), but for me, that's no big deal. I can wait for a couple of beats if I switch to a really old tab.
              I am cruel to Firefox: I shut down the machine without shutting down Firefox, so on restart, FF offers to Reload/Restore/Resume, which is nice. It rarely fails these days. So, given the daily reboots, and FF resume behaviour, a lot of those tabs are probably just stubs waiting to be kicked into life and reloaded. The computer allows me to be disorganised, which is great.
              Every so often I save all the tabs into a new bookmarks folder, so my bookmarks storage is huge (more than a decade's worth*). It has been a useful resource on multiple occasions, as searching the bookmarks has recovered stuff I couldn't find by regular Internet Search engines.
              Anyway, letting the computer do what it is good at (keeping track of the detailed stuff) so I don't have to strikes me as a defensible approach. I do the same with email: keep everything, and use search to dig out things I need later. I have not yet found a workable approach for audio, picture, and video archives. I hope someone comes up with an AI cataloger that runs on my system that can attach accurate automatically generated metadata to such stuff, so I can search it easily using textual search tools. I have no doubt the TLAs have such things. Curating unstructured media is a hard problem.

              *In principle, I could just search through the History, but the Bookmarks are easily editable and exportable, and still allow me to index stuff in a way that works for me. It's also interesting looking at the old Bookmarks to see how many sites still work or not, and 'permanent' URLs that have turned out not to be...here's an example that still works: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/11/06/1549256/how-to-verify-cd-r-data-retention-over-time [slashdot.org] and another http://www.inference.org.uk/saw27/notes/backup-hard-disk-partitions.html [inference.org.uk]