Ask HN: Do you maintain two laptops for work and life?

If your work laptop is issued by your company and you work on side projects whose IP you want to continue to fully own, you need a separate home device. Surely you don’t want your employer to have ownership over your personal emails? Your contract may even have policies that when read closely or interpreted conservatively prohibit doing things like social media browsing, gaming, or online shopping on your work computer.

Even if you’re founding your own startup, keeping IP separate can be worthwhile from a legal and governance perspective.

I find it can also help with getting into work vs relaxation mindsets to configure the UIs a little differently to create a sense of boundaries between the two.

if you are an employee, then for love of god, dont cheap out and buy another laptop for your personal work / side project. My roommate who used to use company laptop as a personal one, had to go through a lot of legal hurdles when he moved to a different company.

if you're working as an employee then i'd recommend isolating as many devices and accounts as feasible. share nothing between work and non-work.

if you're working for your own business and there's any chance you might like to sell the business to someone else in future, it might also be a good idea to think about how to decouple the business from the rest of your life. (perhaps less value in isolating laptops than isolating bank accounts, credit cards, email addresses, *aas accounts, etc)

Its better to have separate laptop for your day job and your business. You can use a virtual machine on your day job laptop and back up your VM on your hard drive.