two computers

Linux for blind general discussion blinux-list at redhat.com
Tue May 17 15:49:08 UTC 2022


Tim here.  I'll provide a few aspects you might want to compare:

- Disk space:  to ignore the sizes of individual partitions and check
  the total disk-space of each of your drives, you should be able to
  use

  $ sudo fdisk -l | grep 'Disk /'

- Disk type:  it might be a slower rotating drive or a faster
  SSD/NVMe drive, so to check that:

  $ lsblk -io name,rota | grep '^\<'

  If the 2nd "ROTA" value is a "1", it's a slower spinning disk,
  while if it's a "0", the drive is a faster SSD/NVMe drive.

- RAM: use

  $ free -h

  or for just the numeric value without swap and usage information

  $ free -h | awk 'NR==2{print $2}'

- CPU: this one is trickier to compare because one might have more
  cores that are slower while the other one has fewer cores running
  at a higher clock-speed.  For just the CPU count, you can use

  $ fgrep -c "model name" /proc/cpuinfo

  whereas if you want the details on processor-speed (which can
  differ by CPU) in addition to the processor count, you can use

  $ awk 'END{print c, "total"}/model name/ && ++c' /proc/cpuinfo

That still doesn't take into consideration things like

- system weight (I remember the old days of 10-pound laptops and even
  45-pound luggables)

- the keyboard feel/layout (some are spongy-feeling with short
  travel, some laptops have atrocious layouts for things like
  arrow-keys, function keys, etc)

- battery life

but hopefully it provides enough numbers to let you compare them
and determine which will better meet your needs.

Hopefully this helps,

-Tim



On May 17, 2022, Linux for blind general discussion wrote:
> I have an old laptop running Fedora.
> My sister is giving me an old laptop she no longer needs.
> It has windows on it now.
> I will put linux on to it.
> How may I find which machine has better memory, disk space, and all
> that?
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Blinux-list mailing list
> Blinux-list at redhat.com
> https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list
> 



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