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Can I ask why developers would prefer a laptop over a desktop? I know it's off topic, but I see this question on HN an awful lot and I scratch my head each time. Desktop PCs are: - Cheaper - More repairable and upgradable - More options for hardware - Better thermals - A full monitor(s), keyboard, and mouse, instead of a rinky-dink keyboard and trackpad
What desktop make and model do you use?
I'd personally go for a framework Ryzen, but also heard good things about LG gram. The framework has a few disadvantages one of which is the bad speakers. My personal wishlist for framework: Coreboot support Better speakers ECC RAM support LPCAMM2 support (modern RAM to save power and space)
The framework speakers are comically bad. Everything about their design is compromise (size and modularity over function), to the point where you should just use headphones. They sound awful and they're too quiet, because they're badly designed and firing into your lap or table instead of your ears.
It's a shame they're an afterthought on the new Framework 16, too. If they had added front firing speakers I would have bought one.
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Even if a laptop is wanted for portability, a good desktop + a cheap laptop as a portable terminal still comes out cheaper than most mid- or high-end laptops. The laptop also gets better battery life from not having tons of ram or power-sucking processors and GPUs.
Can you guys work through RDP all day? Latency kills me on any type of connection.
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Can you guys work through RDP all day? Latency kills me on any type of connection.
Most remote dev machine setups I've seen involve some combination of SSH, port forwarding, mounting remote drives, etc., not actually running remote desktop. So you don't RDP and open your IDE on the remote machine, you open the IDE on your cheapo laptop and use whatever SSH or remote filesystem mechanism it provides to connect it to your dev machine. Services like Tailscale make it easy to establish the connectivity…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most remote dev machine setups I've seen involve some combination of SSH, port forwarding, mounting remote drives, etc., not actually running remote desktop. So you don't RDP and open your IDE on the remote machine, you open the IDE on your cheapo laptop and use whatever SSH or remote filesystem mechanism it provides to connect it to your dev machine. Services like Tailscale make it easy to establish the connectivity…
Thanks for the explanation, but then an IDE just runs on a cheapo laptop with a mount even slower than hdd. I don’t get the idea of the advice then. It stops being a cheap terminal and becomes a cheap laptop?
Actually mounting a remote disk solves a different set of problems, such as if you need to edit something that doesn't support doing the work on the remote machine or if you want to explore the remote disk in Finder or some other GUI.
Can I ask why developers would prefer a laptop over a desktop? I know it's off topic, but I see this question on HN an awful lot and I scratch my head each time. Desktop PCs are: - Cheaper - More repairable and upgradable - More options for hardware - Better thermals - A full monitor(s), keyboard, and mouse, instead of a rinky-dink keyboard and trackpad
I see devs talking about syncing their work between multiple computers and it just sounds like a huge pain. Having a single laptop that you use everywhere is so much easier.
Unless you need a really beefy machine for something niche, a nice laptop handles development just fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the explanation, but then an IDE just runs on a cheapo laptop with a mount even slower than hdd. I don’t get the idea of the advice then. It stops being a cheap terminal and becomes a cheap laptop?
Well, most of the IDEs still perform all of the work on the remote machine and just stream IO to the laptop, so you're not actually editing files on the laptop, you're sending file editing commands to the remote machine, all the compilation and execution stuff happens on the remote machine, etc. For example, VS Code has client/server components which make the experience feel seamless and handle network disruptions to…