Some things do not fit together here. The egg-laying, milk-bearing woolly sow has not found its way into the shop shelfs until today. So, we need plan B.
I’m just out loud
Keep this thiny laptop and/or get a used one for your parents to carry around.
Get a desktop computer which fits your budget. The recently launched Ryzen CPUs seem to be interesting from budget/performance point of view. Linux support must be checked for the motherboards as they are quite new. Getting a desktop would also offer the possibility to add a GPU later. GPU wise I would not start below a GTX 1660 or the older GTX 1060. Especially, profiled denoise NLM tears down slower cards while editing.
btw. I would freak out on an Acer V3-372. 13" with darktable and RAW editing.
Please keep in mind that a better GPU is not all that is needed to make darktable work faster. The CPU is also important. See these clockings (where lower numbers = faster execution). The same benchmark has been used on all combinations:
With the caveat that I don’t use noise reduction often, I edit on a four year old i5 desktop and raw files from the d850 don’t seem that slow to edit to me. Sure, CPU only isn’t blazing fast, but it is way more than acceptable.
Well I am a patient person. I think speed is not that bad if I have less than 10 instances. Also darktable 2.7/3 seems to be slower than darktable 2.6.
So if the Geforce MX 250 isonly 2-3 times faster than my current computer it’s ok for me, I’d count that as an improvement.
I bought it. Performance seems to be much better but it is loud - fan is almost always on, and I feel on my legs that it is always warm. The old one’s fan was almost always off. And it is uglier.
Apparently I will need to install Debian testing, Buster does not boot.
But it is really slim and light.
@betazoid Probably, your laptop has dual graphic cards. If so, you should configure some of the alternatives to turn off the second card while not using it, so you can save energy and have a cooler and quieter system when not doing stuff that requires it.
Apparently the Nvidia card really needs a lot of battery power. When on, my battery is empty after a little more than one hour. When off, it lasts for at least 5 hours.
No, I have no experience in that particular GPU – but I have installed Nvidia drivers for other GFXs (and sometimes that is a tricky business, especially if the distro believes that nouveau is sufficient…)
out loud
