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== The article itself

I wish that it went into more detail on the hardware choices that he used. I'm constantly toying with the idea of building a Linux box for dev work, but then get lost in the morass of hardware options. The high level description of his system sounds perfect (tons of RAM, fast drives, and triple monitors), but I'm not sure how to get there.

== My own dilemma

Every line of production code that I write is done in Linux - in a VM running on OS X. The killer app that keeps me on OS X is 1Password. It's too useful, and I haven't found a suitable Linux replacement. Any suggestions?

The other "killer" is that it's extremely simple to get a great computer by pulling up the Apple Store site and clicking "buy this thing." Building my own is something I would have done a decade ago, but I've since lost track of what all of the hardware lingo means, or which companies are making decent components.




I use KeepassX on Linux. I'm not sure if it's missing features that 1Password has, but it works great for me.

For hardware, the Apple Store sells great laptops, but for desktops, it sucks. You can either get an underpowered mini for the price of a powerful Linux desktop or you can get an overpowered but out of date Mac Pro for the price of a small car. (OK, slight exaggeration).

I highly recommend the Anandtech buyer's guides for figuring out what you want in a desktop. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5184/holiday-midrange-system-b... seems like an excellent starting point.

Also, don't be afraid of overclocking. You can get a LOT of extra performance for little effort on an i5-2500k or i7-2600k. My box has been stable at 4.7GHz for months, and it's speeded up my compile times immensely. It'd probably also be stable at 4.8GHz, but I bumped it down one notch just to give myself some headroom.


I love my MBP, as it seems clearly designed to get some work done with minimal hassle.

Apple's desktop choices are very frustrating. I only buy Mini's as a computer to attach to the TV. It's great for a little, quiet computer that I don't have to pay any attention to. I couldn't do much work on it though. The Mac Pro's always seem way overpriced for what you get.

Thanks for the heads-up on the buyer's guide.


Apple's desktop choices are very frustrating. I only buy Mini's as a computer to attach to the TV. It's great for a little, quiet computer that I don't have to pay any attention to. I couldn't do much work on it though.

Really? Why? What'd you be missing exactly?


>You can either get an underpowered mini for the price of a powerful Linux desktop

Have you considered the cost of electricity? Power consumption at idle on the average desktop is like 4 or 5 times that of the mini. Also the mini sleeps and wakes quickly and reliably, and probably draws less power sleeping that a normal desktop draws when powered off. (You have to either unplug the normal desktop or flip the switch on the back of the power supply to get zero power consumption.)

There's also the noise issue: an idling 2011 mini can be heard in a quiet room if you are very close to it, but you would not notice unless you are listening for it.

P.S. I am curious whether Linux on modern hardware sleeps and wakes quickly and reliably. When I ran Linux (on hardware made in the 1990s) I kept it powered on and "awake" (not sleeping) continuously because that was the only way I could always sit down and start typing. In contrast, I usually sleep my 2011 mini when I walk away from it.


Have you considered the cost of my time? My 4.7 GHz i5 desktop with a good SSD is probably at least 3 times faster to compile my project than a Mac Mini would be (even with an SSD). It's now fast enough that I don't get the urge to switch to Hacker News while waiting. If I had to pay $100 per month for electricity for it, I wouldn't care.

And I doubt that the electricity difference is major. My i5 spends most of it's time at 1.2 GHz, and I'm using an efficient power supply. So when running at full-tilt it uses a lot more power, but when just running Emacs it's basically idle.

And yes, a modern Linux desktop does hibernate properly, although sleep is a little more problematic. It also boots in about 5 seconds (although most modern PCs have horrible BIOSes that add about 15 seconds).


Agree that a Mac mini is not a good choice for people who regularly compile large projects.

It's no big deal, but your second paragraph leads me to believe you did not fully digest my comment.


Okay, let's use evidence.

Anecdotal, but numerical.

The current Mac Mini is supposed to pull between 10W (at idle) and 85W (at load---this is the limit of what the PSU can take from the wall.[0]

Let's be generous and say that the Mac Mini, if left on continuously without sleeping, pulls on average 20W.

Let's be pessimistic and assume that power costs you $0.20 per kWh.

# The time in which the Mini will use 1 kWh

1000 Wh / 20 W = 50 hr

# The number of hours in one year

365 days * 24 hrs = 8760 hrs

# The number of kWh the Mini will use in one year

8760 hrs / 50 hrs = 175.2

# Cost of running the Mini continuously for one year

175.2 kWh * $0.20 per kWh = $35.04

That's amazing, no? Let's say, then, that you bought a mini for $599 dollars; your cost of ownership would be 599 + 35.04n, where n is the number of years you've owned it.

No doubt impressive.

A desktop I built relatively recently, which a Core i5 and an unnecessary graphics card, along with a few hard drives, pulls roughly 60W at idle and 150W at load (measured at the outlet by a Kill-a-Watt).

Let's be not-so-generous and say my machine pulls 100W on average, is left on continuously, and my electricity costs $0.20 / kWh.

My computer will use a kWh in 10 hours (1000 / 100); and will cost $175.20 per year to operate ((8760 / 10) * 0.2).

My initial cost for this machine (excluding monitor, keyboard, etc.) was $450. SO my cost of ownership is 450 + 175.2n.

The cost of ownership for east will equal in :

599 + 35.04n = 450 + 175.2n

149 = (175.2 - 35.04)n

149 / 140.16 = n

n = 1.06 years

So after a year of ownership the Mini becomes "worth it," if power consumption if your first requirement.

Note however, that I've given the Mini every benefit of the doubt possible, did not take significant steps to minimize the power consumption of my machine, am able to upgrade my machine piecemeal instead of discretely (and thus have significantly lowered future costs of ownership), and have assumed we've been leaving the machines on continuously.

The Mac Mini, let's say, pulls 0W when in S3 sleep.

My machine pulls 1W in S3 sleep, and about 0.2W when off (to answer your query, it wakes reliably and quickly).

If we assume my machine is asleep half of the time:

Half the time (8760 / 2 = 4380 hrs), my machine pulls 1W. While asleep, it will take 1000 hrs to use 1 kWh. Therefore, it uses 4.38 kWh in the time it is asleep.

Which means the new yearly cost is:

(175.2 / 2) + (4.38 * .2) = 87.6 + 8.76 = 96.36

The Mini ends up costing $17.50 yearly.

So:

599 + 17.5n = 450 + 96.36n

149 = 78.86n

n = 1.889 years

Once you factor in the cost of replacing the Mini versus upgrading a small bit of my machine, I think the answer is much less clear cut.

P.S. I don't mean to pick on you, but excitement about power consumption that doesn't factor in the numbers is a pet peeve. The Mac Mini is only "worth" it if having the computer you actually want is worth less that $80 or so per year to you.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT3468 Edit: formatting.


>I don't mean to pick on you

I don't feel picked-on :)

The mini can take 2 2.5-inch hard drives and (unofficially) 16 gigs of RAM. Like I said elsewhere, I do not consider the mini suitable for software development or other demanding tasks. The popularity of smartphones and tablets as ways to access the web will probably prevent web sites operators from increasing the computational demands of accessing the web so much that I will need to replace the mini in 4 years -- online selling and buying and iPhoto being the most demanding things I do with the mini.

The mini weighs 2.7 pounds. When I want to spend a couple of days at the girlfriend's place, I bring it along and plug it into her TV set. (Unlike laptops and netbooks, however, the manual instructs me to power the mini down before moving it, and I do worry a little that it is not designed to survive this weekly commute.)

The girlfriend would have aesthetic objections to my plopping most computers on her living-room floor, but the mini is stylish enough and small enough not to raise any objections.

I guess my overall point is that when you use mobile-class components, like the mini does, you can get away with having just one fan, like the mini does, which saves further electricity, since fans consume electricity, and makes it easy to avoid making noise, and make the whole device potentially very compact and light, which has its uses even in a desktop machine.


The mini can take 2 2.5-inch hard drives and (unofficially) 16 gigs of RAM. Like I said elsewhere, I do not consider the mini suitable for software development or other demanding tasks.

Software development is not a CPU demanding task by any stretch of the imagination.

Professional programmers get just fine on an Air, much more so for a Mini --not to mention with 5 times slower machines just 3-4 years ago.


>Software development is not a CPU demanding task

OK. Change my "software development" to "compiling very large codebases".


Thanks for the informative reply. (I had done the math, but my notes were not at hand.)

>My machine pulls 1W in S3 sleep . . . it wakes reliably and quickly

On Windows or Linux? (My interest is mainly what it is like on Linux.)


Linux. S3 sleep doesn't work in Windows, for reasons I haven't bothered to figure out. I only use Windows to play games, so I never had reason to care that it didn't go to sleep.


S3 is a firmware-managed power state. The OS (modulo bugs: for example not being able to reliably enter a sleep state) doesn't have anything to do with its power consumption.


You get to choose, and can go for something between. Eg when I built my Linux box a year ago I used the lowest power Core i5, SSD, 8GB ram which is nearly silent, and uses 50W from memory at peak. Linux sleeps fine now.


Did you manage to get KeepassX to integrate with your browser to auto-fill forms?

I've switched to LasPass recently, but I'm still getting used to its browser-based management of passwords.


I've got it configured so that when I press meta-alt-x it sends the username, a tab, the password and enter to the keyboard. This is functionally equivalent in the vast majority of cases.


I use lastpass and 1password, with Chrome in OS X as an intermediary. I definitely prefer the 1password mobile apps, even on an Android tablet. But LastPass is a big win at work where I can't run 1password (looking at you, NMCI).


Re: building your own:

I'm sure you know that building your own desktop would let you get a vastly superior machine (in terms of raw performance) than buying an Apple. What you may not know, being out of the game for so long, is how much EASIER it is now. I don't build machines that often (maybe 4 in the last 5 years?), but when I do, I do some research, buy the parts, and then put them together. Then it works! In the 90's and early 2000 years, this process was a real hassle.

Sometimes you run into weird issues (especially with weird on-board video configurations), but I've never had them bad enough to make the process longer than a weekend day. (In the 90's it could take a week or more).

Is it easier than buying a Mac off the internet? No. You may easily make up your cost in time with your newfound productivity, though.

(Or you can just install Linux on your Mac directly, instead of a VM).


This guide has saved me countless hours (people are always asking me which parts to buy). Price ranges/etc included, and it's updated fairly often...

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/af150/The_FalconO6/Curre...


It's mainly the inertia of not knowing where to begin. It's good to know that the process is easier now though.

At the risk of descending into total newbie-land, when you say "do some research" where do you start with that? Has the state of things really moved to the point where I can find a highly rated ATX motherboard, a power supply that won't catch fire, and start plugging in components? My general approach would be to read reviews to find potential compatibility issues, stick with good performance but not bleeding edge, and to stay away from anything in the bargain basement.

(To everyone else who is replying about the 1Password replacement, +1 to all. Thanks. I'll check out those suggestions.)


Ars Technica runs a guide every few months with their recommended components to build a desktop PC at a few different price/power levels. Here's their most recent one, from last December:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/12/ars-technica-s...

Their advice is generally really good, so even if you don't end up buying the exact components they recommend, it's useful for establishing a baseline of what a good custom PC at a given point in time for a given amount of money looks like.

As to compatibility issues, if you mean "compatibility with Linux," those sorts of problems are much less common today than they used to be, at least for desktop PCs. Laptops still require some picky shopping if you're planning to run Linux on them (thanks to things like proprietary drivers for wireless radios, grumble grumble), but compatibility with desktop parts is pretty robust.


"Laptops still require some picky shopping if you're planning to run Linux on them"

This is the show stopper for me. I hope it improves since I'm uncomfortable with the direction apple is going.


Tom's Hardware does regular roundup articles for building gaming PCs in a certain price bracket. I use those as a starting point. I've always built my own systems and in the past couple of years it really has become just plug and play. If you are looking to build a linux box the only caveat is that nvidia and intel video cards are generally better supported.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-overclock-perfor...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-overclock-crossfire-s...


Personally, I have my list of trusted brands for each component (which are likely out of date, but whatever). I also poke around Newegg's reviews.

As a general rule, I tend to prefer older high-end components over newer mid-range components. That usually gives you better bang for your buck (since "older" in computer hardware is often a single year).

I never skimp on my power supply. A bad power supply can ruin your whole computer, and a flaky power supply can make it LOOK like another component is bad. Also, I buy the CPU/fan retail box combos, since custom fans invalidate your CPU warranty, and the boxed version has the thermal grease already done for you. This means you throw out overclocking, but you probably didn't want that anyway.

I think the other guides angrycoder and kylek are likely to be more help than I am, though.


"This means you throw out overclocking"

Not necessarily. You can get surprisingly good overclocking results on most Intel chips even using the stock heat-sink/fan these days (and it has been this way for a while, at least since the Core 2 Duo days and even the generation prior to those).

But yeah, for someone who isn't even sure he wants to build his own rig and who won't be using the machine primarily for gaming the overclocking can be skipped without much real world loss.


http://reddit.com/r/buildapc <- everything you need.

Easiest way is just search a price point and steal a parts list. Then follow the youtube guides.


I'd like to second this. I just built a PC through this subreddit and they were very helpful and the resources of past threads are incredibly useful.


In addition to the [buildapc subreddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc) you should also check out PC Part picker which will let you choose parts for your system, automatically choosing the lowest price and checking compatability.

http://pcpartpicker.com/


I highly, highly recommend http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40 for build your own pc advice. There are some very knowledgeable and helpful people that frequent that forum (in my experience, more technical than tomshardware and reddit).

If by chance you don't find a thread by someone with similar needs and budget(seriously, thousands of these threads), then just start your own and it will be answered promptly.


I have a ridiculous system at home, and after years of building everything myself I now opt for base boxes that give me 90% of what I want.

What I'm using is a HP Z800.

It can take 192GB RAM in 12 slots (and mine does, I started on 24GB made up of very cheap 2GB sticks and upgraded later), and I also put in 2 Intel X5560 Xeon CPUs (they were new at the time and 4-core, if I did it again I'd be tempted by the X7550 which are 8-core).

The Z800 chassis is one of those zero tools systems, and best of all it is virtually silent (quiet enough that you don't hear it even when the work environment is silent).

Note: This stuff costs a bomb.

Topping out the RAM is expensive, but if you go for the smaller sticks in many slots you really get a lot of value for money.

The CPUs can cost a bomb too. But... if you're running many virtual machines (VirtualBox and Vagrant) then you shouldn't max out RAM and neglect CPU.

On motherboards, unless you're going for a server or workstation motherboard you won't get the best out of the rest of the components. You want tons of bandwidth to and from the RAM and CPU.

What else? Just use it. This type of hardware is incredible, but if it's just running Facebook then buy an iPad instead. I have nothing against people spending lots and not using it, but there's something really nice about great hardware being pushed at times.

It sounds like I've a very similar setup to the one in the article, the only differences would be that I haven't yet put an SSD in (though I do have a 3 HDD RAID for data), and I prefer 1 very high quality large monitor over several large monitors (I like a desk that isn't dominated by the computer).


For Linux buying options, I would recommend System76: a variety of systems (desktops, laptops, servers) with Ubuntu preloaded. They are a Linux-only vendor and so are serious about making sure their hardware choices are Linux compatible. Thus, you don't have to worry about compatibility issues or driver hunting etc. https://www.system76.com/


Building my own is something I would have done a decade ago, but I've since lost track of what all of the hardware lingo means, or which companies are making decent components.

Desktop hardware hasn't changed much, so if you built a system ten years ago, you'll come up to speed pretty quickly. The main pieces are the same; they just have different features, performance characteristics, and different rules for figuring out which components interoperate. If you want a complete list of parts that will work together, Ars Technica still publishes their system guides regularly.

Compatibility between different parts can seem complicated, but it's simple once you figure out the rules. To be extra safe and avoid accidental incompatibilities between components that should, by spec, be compatible, I always pick components that are popular with builders (measured by the number of reviews on NewEgg) and search the web for mentions of incompatibility between them.


Honest question regarding the password managers: what would you do if you had to log into one of your accounts from a machine not owned by you?

Say, you are traveling. You know there's a map, or something like that in your secondary email box. Only internet connection - the hotel PC. Would you risk accessing the master keychain from there just to look up that password?

I simply can not phantom not keeping all my passwords in the only 24/7 available storage - my brain. Also, don't I find myself logging into that many services on daily basis, as I often use Google/Facebook/LDAP as the access manager.


The KyPass iOS app (over Dropbox) works nicely.


You're the ideal candidate for http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc which will typically recommend something like this:

* Intel i5-2500k * Crucial M4 SSD etc

It is getting easier and easier to build a desktop. If you want to, it is certainly within reach.


I'm a LastPass fan myself. https://lastpass.com/

Works on every platform imaginable. And it does so flawlessly.


Yeah, you could buy a Mac and be happy. I just bought a System76, and while the jury is still out they came highly reviewed and first impressions with the machine are positive. You do have options other than "build" and "buy a Mac."


Re: dilemma

Have you tried keepass (http://keepass.info/)? Certainly not as pretty as 1Password, but seems to be just as usable.


Another vote for KeepassX. Use it on both Mac and Linux (and the Windows version when I need to at work.) It's a great program.


On hardware:

The segmentation of platforms makes the search space a bit complicated, but you can start from a list of prebuilt configurations (anandtech was mentioned), pick the one closest to your requirements, and swap/add/remove/adjust components a bit according to current functionality and price.


Keepass could be a decent replacement for 1Password, though I've never used the latter.


I use KeePass (keepass 2 which runs under mono).

I use a key file and a long passphrase to encrypt the database and store the encrypted password db on dropbox which handles the syncing across all my machines and phone.


Sorry for the OT - why not use something like Lastpass ? They have been honest and pre-emptive about data security in general.


LastPass, works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.


As an alternative to 1Password you can try Keeper (https://keepersecurity.com/). It has Linux, Windows, OSX, iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry clients. With sync between all of them.

(I work for Keeper Security)


you just can use Vim with blowfish encryption [1]. that's easy, secure and portable.

[1] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Encryption


My killer app is Time Machine. There's still nothing as simple anywhere else. It's a great shame.


Time Machine is very poorly implemented, and is quite fragile as a result. Keep rsync backups in parallel (not of your time machine volume, those actually depend on inode numbers(!)).




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