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Ask HN: What's your current “daily driver” computer?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your current “daily driver” computer?

#3

Post by andykx »

slater wrote: post #2

2017 MBP

Ah, I had one of those! i7, 16gb RAM. I loved that computer, but I've spent the majority of the past year and a half at home and I found myself reaching for it less and less. A desktop just makes more sense for a home office (IMO). I did get an M1 MBA for the rare situations that I actually need to travel with a computer.

I handed it down to my fiancée who uses it to edit photos.

Re: Ask HN: What's your current “daily driver” computer?

#4

Post by themodelplumber »

I made the mistake of buying a used Thinkpad T420 and setting it up w/ Xubuntu as a fun fixer-upper side project. Now I'm way too used to it. It's my 1/2 daily driver (the other half a boring dell XPS desktop; Xubuntu) and I gave my much more capable MB Pro to my son, who uses it to watch YT videos and play games.

So far I keep finding workarounds for things that require too many system resources. It's been kind of a funny experience in that way. I really, really like that it's forced me to slow down and think.

It's a similar situation with my 2012 MSI Wind netbook, which runs Puppy Linux and is surprisingly capable with Falkon, Geany, Puppy utils, nim, Object Pascal, etc. I feel like I should be getting rid of this machine but it can really do a lot.

T420 Dislikes: It's heavy. The screen is terrible in terms of viewing angles. It doesn't show the color orange properly, so when I use it for graphics or illustrations, I have to check my work on other devices. The speaker volume isn't loud enough. The DVD drive randomly springs open every so often. I can't stand the way the trackpoint gets in my way when I go to type the B key. The literal LED lamp that shines onto the keyboard is annoying but at least it's there. There are 3 dead pixels.

This computer also dual-boots Windows 10 so I can run the sketchy software that has come with about 20 different Chinese ham radios. Thanks to the Chirp team for making this easier.

Re: Ask HN: What's your current “daily driver” computer?

#5

Post by version_five »

slater wrote: post #2

2017 MBP

+1 same here. I only really use a computer for work, and these days the three things I use are web browser, office suite, and ssh into a linux server. The 2017 still holds it's own, and suits my work very well - basically by having a browser without any memory / cpu issues, supporting MS office, and not annoying me every 10s with some kind or advertising or survey or notification as a windows machine does.

Re: Ask HN: What's your current “daily driver” computer?

#8

Post by dekhn »

my work computer is a macbook pro I didn't want.

my home desktop is a windows 10 machine with 64GB of RAM, 32 cores and a GPU. It's nice to be able to run servers and Cyberpunk at the same time- they don't bother each other, even though I've got a few renders going on in another window.

my server is a linux box that is 10 years old and still runs great.

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