Planning to upgrade my aging 5-years old laptop on Windows 7 and know how to repair and DIY on my own except I can’t make up my mind to make a switch over to Mac or stay on Windows that can still be productivity and less impact on user experience e.g. lagness on IDE or slow database performance.
Prefer to know your OS, hardware spec and why as well.
Here is mine, OSX, Macbook Pro, 8Gig of RAM, SSD, during development. Deploys webapps on Ubuntu Linux. Will probably try out meteor on Windows 8.1 at some point just for comparison
For home, I have a relatively cheap setup - OS X on 2012 Mac Mini w/8GB+SSD. My lappy is a 15" MBP. For everyday non-development use I actually use Win7 but OS X plays so much nicer with Meteor and anything Node-related.
Windows 10, dual screen, ssd, sublime text
Deploying on scalingo for now
Ubuntu 14.10 with Webstorm
SSD & 16 GB of RAM are needed for Webstorm. Could probably get away with 8 GB of RAM but I always have a couple webstorm instances running.
I do fine on an ubuntu 14.10 64-bit 4GB ram and three sometimes four projects open in webstorm all the while lots of tabs open in chrome and several other apps running.
I sometimes use it on an old core 2 duo laptop with 2gb ram and that, too works just fine.
You should check your computer or webstorm memory settings.
I have the same experience than workman. I was running Webstorm 8 on Ubuntu with a three years old laptop with 4 GB Ram and this was swaping too much. I upgraded it to 6GB (the max this laptop supported) and this was ok.
Now i run Webstorm 10 on Ubuntu 14.10 on a new laptop with 16 GB ram and a ssd, this is night and day.
When i have two Webstorm projects opened at once (and a few other programs) the 16 GB are used.
that’s very odd!! running webstorm (and no other app) with a single meteor project (a big one with a huge source tree) keeps my laptop at around 750-800mb
what are your vmoptions? which jre are you using?
JVM Oracle 1.8
vmoptions ? I don’t know.
I use openjdk7’s jre (not jdk) that may be causing the performance difference and vmoptions is a file in the bin directory of webstorm. it has memory options that make huge impact on java performance.
I found Macbook Pro 2015 256GB SSD achieve 1200+MB Read and Write rates. Any advice if 16GB memory is plenty for VM and Bootcamp for Meteor projects?
I do all my development on a Digital Ocean VPS with one core and 512 MB of memory, running a headless version of Ubuntu. It works great.
13’’ Macbook Pro (+ external monitor) with Sublime Text 3.
Run development locally and deploy to smallest Digital Ocean droplet, I have three apps hosted there.
Reason for this setup is I used to run a linux desktop, and about 8 years ago I wanted a laptop I could develop on and at the time the macbooks were the best option. There are lots of contenders now, but I am hooked on the build and quality.
Only just upgraded to the 2015 model, the one I replaced is from 2008 and was still working fine as long as I had it hooked to an external keyboard and mouse (battery expanded and broke the trackpad about a year ago).
I use Xubunutu 14.10 with 8gb ram on a Thinkpad x220.
Thinkpad x230, Ubuntu 14.04, 2 external monitors, Webstorm, and a 32 gb docker cloud for deploying multiple instances of my app at once.
I think this is the best way to develop. It is very very cheap, and pays you back in increased productivity, decreased loss of sight and hair 
Used Ubuntu 14.05 and Webstorm 10.0.1
ArchLinux 8Gb 8core laptop with vertical and horizontal 24" displays. Why? Because that’s the only laptop that had the features I wanted (new intel graphics, IPS matt display, VGA+DP+HDMI, long battery life…)
why not choose an external monitor?
Sometimes I need to work on the go. Like when remote hardware fails, or in a meeting, and having a portable working station is a great plus.
Sometimes I need desktop space, and an external monitor will always be better and cheaper than a notebook monitor.
To me it seems like a win win situation, what are your use cases?
OSX. I have a WIndows machine on my desk, but I use MacBookPro for web development. It’s connected to dual monitors for development. I got the best monitor for dev anyone has ever made: 27" square EIZO EV2730Q
OSX is unix so it’s a much more similar environment to your web server than Windows. It’s possible to get a lot of the tools running, but there is much more support for web dev on UNIX. Also the things you learn on a daily basis about your local OS will transfer better to the server/hosting world.
you can do a lot more with OSX than some minor flavor of UNIX
Also the things you learn on a daily basis about your local OS will transfer better to the server/hosting world.
Right on!