DEV Community

Discussion on: Tips for Programming with a low end PC.

Collapse
 
tominekan profile image
Tomi Adenekan

If you have a low end chromebook. (speaking to myself) with 4 gigs of ram, 16 gigs of storage and Intel Celeron. You need some help (speaking to myself again). Here are some tips:

  • Use galliumos. GalliumOS is a light Ubuntu based distro with XFCE4 (around 2 gigs burn to bootable USB)

  • Continually clear your cache. Storage caches cause a lot of pain and sorrow because they are usually hard to find and separate from the important stuff (I'm looking at you Google). Clearing the caches usually will save your dying storage.

  • Use the terminal. The terminal is the one app that can do it all. It has a web browser (lynx, I wouldn't use it though), a text editor, (vim, nano, emacs), a file manager (I don't need to explain this one). A system monitor (top, htop, dmesg). Multiple programming languages (python and Perl usually come default installed on the system).

  • One app at a time, the tiny RAM won't be able to multitask at all, especially when running electron apps like vscode.

  • Avoid Google chrome, it may be hard to do that on a chrome book 😂. Google chrome and RAM are like mouth and food. One eats the other. Try Microsoft Edge (dev for linux) or Firefox.

  • Get a new computer as soon as possible. As you get better at programming, there will be more advanced tooling that will take up more memory, space, and processing power. I am at that spot right now and things are getting tough. (I'm getting a new one this month though).

Sorry if this was kind of long. Happy coding 😀.