TOOLS

Saying goodbye to my daily driver

The IT department is renovating developer machines and it is time to say goodbye to the machine that has been my daily driver for over 3 years (since March 2021). This is the machine I have customized the most since the 2000s, and by far the linux machine I customized the most.

Machine specs

The machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad model T15 gen 1.

  • CPU: Intel Core i7-10510U CPU @ 1.80GHz (specs)
  • Cache sizes: L1d 128 KiB, L1i 128 KiB, L2 1 MiB, L3 8 MiB
  • RAM: 16 GB, Type DRAM, Configured Memory Speed 2667 MT/s
  • Dedicated Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce MX330

Software

Theming

Things to improve

Many of the packages installed with snap (pycharm, vscode, slack, firefox) consumed a lot of resources. Not sure if this could be improved by using a different installation method.

Things to try

Starship. Synth shell is nice, but seems to take too much visual space. Also the report generated each time a terminal was spawn took to long and I disabled it. However the better ls script is nice and I will keep it.

New theming. I got bored of the dracula looks. Lately I feel it is too dark and I would like to try something lighter.

Window manager. For long I wanted to try Gnome material shell. This implies running Ubuntu and gnome. Not sure if this is something I want to do.

Changes to avoid

I will be keeping most of the local setup. The biggest changes I could think of doing are:

  • Replace Pycharm
  • Replace VSCode
  • Replace OS, currently running Ubuntu

I would love to replace pycharm and vscode with other lighter IDE. The main reason to replace PyCharm is the amount of time I spend waiting for the indexing to run and the amount of CPU it requires. VSCode I have noticed that it shuts down quite often, I will keep an eye on this. The main functionality from these which I could not easily replace are the PyCharm search, I grew use to the commands and the visuals of it, and the git integration of PyCharm. Also all the team uses PyCharm, which creates a good support group. I will still use VSCode a the ‘light’ IDE. I might install some version of neovim to test it out.

I have nothing against Ubuntu, but it has been my only linux distribution so far and I have been willing to test something else. But since all our servers are running Ubuntu 22, I will probably stick to this.

The OS decision has a big influence on the desktop environment. I am aware of the different ubuntu distributions running different desktop environment, one of my machines runs Lubuntu. But since the new daily driver should be more powerful I hope that it can deal with Gnome and material shell.