sam henri gold
sometimes its interesting to go into best buy to see what computers “normal” people are buying. making a slick Svelte app is fun and all on my M1 Pro but how much do i need to optimize my stuff for the majority of people using whatever $500 gets you from HP. we, as product makers, get swept up in the latest, shiniest thing & set our assumptions accordingly. “Well everyone’s at least on an M1 right” my brother in christ my mom just bought a Lenovo yesterday and it has a Celeron + 4GB memory 19 comments
Evan Boehs
@samhenrigold if I ever become the CEO (goals) of a large company, I will go onto eBay with a budget of $40 per device and buy a computer for every developer. Biweekly, I will force them to use it for the work day.
sam henri gold
@eb Fully support this. I think the classic example is Figma: it’s traditionally a developer tool and gets used on absurdly powerful machines but it’s also used by high schoolers on school-issued Chromebooks. And it has to be optimized heavily for both use cases without being (too) opinionated or throwing a “your hardware can’t handle this” message
Evan Boehs
@samhenrigold yeah it’s shocking how awful it is to use cheap Chromebooks. Ironically, google’s own text editing suite is insufferable  
Григорий Клюшников
Evan, at one point, when I worked at VK, we had an XP desktop set up in the corner of the office so web developers could test things on old IE. That was in the early 2010's.
Evan Boehs
@grishka @samhenrigold man, I kinda want to support IE today just for fun, but I cannot live without flexbox
Григорий Клюшников
Evan, so out of curiosity, I just opened Smithereen in IE 11, probably for the first time ever. To my surprise, it's looking much better than I expected. There is definitely some flexbox support (I just changed the posts themselves from tables to flex a few days ago), but no support for CSS variables (comment indents rely on them but there aren't any). 
Evan Boehs
@grishka @samhenrigold Oh dang thats sick. I completely forgot about CSS variables, thats another thing I couldn't live without. Overall, not a bad look! 
dontony
@samhenrigold and an eMMC drive. so all that swapping that needs to be done is glacially slow. RAM usage still matters.
Григорий Клюшников
I have a weak-ass Samsung laptop from around 2011 with Windows 7. I test Smithereen on it sometimes. Another thing to look out for is that scroll bars take up space on all OSes but Mac. This leads to interesting layout problems sometimes. 
Queer Like The Slur
@samhenrigold I honestly don't think I know anyone outside the fedi who has purchased their own computer in the last decade. They're a thing your employer chooses and insists you have against your will.
Григорий Клюшников
Queer Like The Slur, what do these people use for internet at home then? Do they really not consider touchscreen text input a form of torture? That is to say, 95% of people I know own some kind of computer, use it on most days, and have bought it themselves in the last decade.
Queer Like The Slur
@grishka @samhenrigold I don't really see them at home so I don't know what they do there, but I suspect they don't have to spend a huge amount of time doing touch screen input activities. Bills only need to be paid once a month. Folks who do their own rosters and accounting are a different story (although not all, I know a lady who runs her business with a non-smart-phone only). But that once again comes around to the hardware being being necessitated by the business.
Queer Like The Slur
@grishka @samhenrigold in my community text based messaging is not huge. Email is primarily for invoices and rosters. Re watching videos, I think most people here have some kind of smart TV and only watch what comes with subscriptions. Just goes to show how different subcultures can be I guess. The last place I lived was nothing like this, most people had fairly new computers for themselves. 
Proxfox Virtual Environment 🦊
@grishka @coolandnormal @samhenrigold a lot of people just use their phone, maybe an ipad 
Lewis Cowles
@samhenrigold 
VisualPlugin
@samhenrigold: the best place to visit would be Starbucks, a university campus (especially the study halls), or a co-working space. My family typically get laptops from Costco. And people also like buying stuff from Amazon. To be fair, I've been seeing a lot of desktop computers with at least 32 GiB of RAM. It doesn't help that I just graduated from uni. |
Gregory's Server
run a giant React app like facebook dot com on the HP 14-dq0052dx. I fucking dare you. that thing begs for mercy if you so much as think about opening the start menu.