Ask HN: What's your computer setup?

I recommend finding your local Mac USer Group and see if anyone there's looking for one.

There's a few machines been bought/sold via the Edinburgh MUG.

I used Gentoo four/five years ago, and the draw was the amount of optimisation available. Everything's compiled from source with optimisation flags for your specific hardware rather than the generic 'works pretty much everywhere' options that are used for pre-built binaries with most distros.

The down-side is that it was - at that time, at least - a huge nightmare to maintain and do major upgrades. Almost as bad as CentOS. Waiting for things to compile every time you install something also got boring pretty quickly. I moved to Ubuntu, and I'm now considering moving to just Debian for future VMs I build.

"What's with all the laptops?"

I've gone all laptop for a few reasons.

Ergonomics: For 6'4" me, quite a ways off most ergonomics charts (in theory not, in practice yes), the best position I've found at home is in a reclining chair with the computer on my lap. It isn't recommended anywhere that I can see, but with the position I hold my computer in, all the actual ergonomic factors that you are supposed to seek out are in play: I'm usually partially reclined so it's more like I'm in a chaise longue, which I've seen mentioned as one ergonomic optimum in a few places (and I agree). My wrists are very straight and unpressured. I don't use the trackpad a lot anyhow and it's in easy reach. I can go all day like this no problem. (Yes, I am aware that I shouldn't even so and in practice don't. My point is that I can.) Very few desktop setups have been able to match this.

Also, Dvorak on my laptop keyboards has proved sufficient for me. YMMV.

Display Space: My laptop is at 1600x900 (yes, exactly). I'm in Linux running compviz, and with a single keystroke I can switch virtual desktops arbitrarily quickly. (With compviz now it can be literally a single frame on the display if you like; I find I prefer a bit more animation so my poor primitive lizard brain, already struggling with this whole "computer screen" thing, doesn't get completely disoriented.) I still like my dual-monitor display at work but I can't say it's critical.

In Windows, I would scream. Even Windows 7 is still too multi-desktop hostile for this to work.

Computational power: Usually my compilation is actually offloaded to fast VMs anyhow, so that's less of a problem. You shouldn't buy the cheapest laptop you can get, but anything above about $600 should scream for most dev tasks, even modestly-disk-intensive loads, because everything comes with such obscene amounts of RAM nowadays that a lot of stuff is hitting cache anyhow. With a full desktop Linux and two VMs generously allocated with RAM, I'm just barely using all 4GBs, including disk cache. (Without it, I'm at 1.8GB free RAM. Obscene, I tell you.) Anything else and laptops are fine. Admittedly, you may have to run Linux.

And this laptop is now coming up on a year old now, and there's been advancements even then. Just about the only thing I do now that shows any sort of delay is starting up Firefox, and, well, I'm still waiting to see the system that doesn't take visible time to do that :)

The last desktop advantage for dev is IO and I expect SSDs to end that disparity. (Leaving behind only 3D graphics, but unless you're developing a 3D game that shouldn't matter for dev.)

I don't hack nearly as much as I would like to so that wasn't the deciding factor in choosing a box to work on, this machine is as big as it is mostly because of my browsing habits.

Hundreds of tabs open is not rare at all when I dig in to a subject and I've seen the browser top 10G resident. Amazing how much memory it will eat up.

And when I do program (especially if it is in java) the IDE will use what the browser doesn't.

Yes, it works exactly as advertised, and my humble little macbook doesn't seem to have any problems processing with it.

The text is a little fuzzy, though, because the UV16 only goes up to 1680x1050 in widescreen format, while my monitor is 1080p. But apparently EVGA recently came out with the UV19 which says it supports 1920x1200, and Buy.com has it cheaper than I paid for the UV16, so I'm strongly considering upgrading.