This is going to sound dumb or elitist but I am so much happier working since I ditched portable computing.
I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place.
Nice keyboard. Nice mouse. And a nice OS that, yes, took a whole day to configure but over which I have total control. (Full-screen focus-mode no-ornaments note taking, web browsing, and hacking.)
I think desk setups are underrated. I got (a relatively cheap) one this March and the difference is touchable. I went the gamers way: Gamer keyboard, Gamer Mouse + pad, 3 screens, AMD for processor, nvme and also ArchLinux.
Needless to say, I can no longer work on macOS or an Apple device. The speeds you get with a bare-bone install and a window manager are unparalleled.
I went down the same route and wouldn’t change a thing. The difference really is striking.
Just curious, as I’m looking to upgrade the processor that I bought - are AMD processors widely known as being better than Intel?
Not trying to start an argument about which is better, I’m just genuinely curious as I have no idea as I’m not a gamer and have always gone for Intel processors.
>>Just curious, as I’m looking to upgrade the processor that I bought - are AMD processors widely known as being better than Intel?
Basically AMD did a full redesign of their processors when they introduced their Ryzen CPU line. That and Intel's problems in manufacturing has resulted in AMD chips beating Intel on price, performance, and temperature.
AMD's high end desktop chips literally perform better than Intel's top commercial Xenon.
AMD also uses less socket types than Intel and it will be possible to upgrade CPUs easily in the future. This upgradability is also something what laptops don't offer nowadays, requiring users to buy a whole new laptop every time.
The latest top of the line AMD gaming CPUs seem to beat out the last top of the line Intel gaming CPUs on almost all games. You can also get more cores for the same price on AMD, and they bench much higher on e.g. 3D rendering, so AMD should be faster for dev work, too.
Gamers Nexus is a pretty good YouTube channel with detailed benchmarks, but there are others, too.
The benefit of laptop is that it's ... everything. It's a replacement for desktop, for TV in living room, for TV in bedroom, for something to look up stuff in kitchen or workshop, and you can take it when you travel, use it in a hotel room or in a train or plane ...
It's not perfect and perhaps not good replacement for many of those things, but it is so practical. Especially if you live in a small apartment where desktop and TVs would take a lot of space.
I've been rockng a Macbook Air since 2013. I love the thing and it works fine, but I can't do video editing, which I need to do. The new Macbooks were on the horizon, but I figured I'd wait for v2 of whatever came out.
So I bought a Dell gaming machine, for the GPU.
First impressions from the week:
* Windows is still pretty kludgy.
* There are no good Gmail cients for Windows (settled on eM, but it crashes a lot, on macOS I used Mailplane, Mimestream and Outlook; Outlook on windows doesn't automatically connect to Google Calendars, even though the macOS and iOS versions do).
* The Dell came with a terrible keyboard, I'll have to buy a better one. It didn't come with speakers, so I bought some (I was planning to get reference monitors anyway, but having NO sound for a few days was interesting). It doesn't have a webcam, which is fine, but I'd have to buy one if that becomes important.
* The cables, cables, cables.
* I can use the Phone app to connect to my iPhone, and iCloud on Windows works well enough (for Drive and Photos).
* Windows apps don't adhere to the design guidelines nearly as consistently as macOS apps do. Fonts and usability is far more varied.
I will see about dual-booting Linux, and I'll see about getting Davinci Resolve working.
Try Kiwi for Gmail. I liked it enough that I paid for it. It uses a browser, so it has the standard Gmail tricks, but it has its own UI so you don't have a million browser tabs open.
That's easy to say in 2020 when mobility in general is non-existent. But if you travel even somewhat often, it's nice to have the ability to carry the environment with you. I used to take the train to work every day. I was never more productive then I was in that time on the train.
Why either/or.. with laptops you can have both the desktop experience and the portable experience. I have a laptop that I primarily use as a desktop. I like it that way best, but I like the option to take it with me. For when I travel or just times I want to sit out in the family room.
If your work is CPU or memory-hungry, I don't think there's a single laptop out there than can touch the performance of a Zen 3 desktop with 64 GB+ of memory.
I spend 99% of my working hours at my desk so it's a no-brainer for me to use a desktop. For the rare times I need to work somewhere else I just git push on the desktop, git pull on the laptop, and keep working.
Having your battery charged near 100% all days long with charger plugged in will soon degrade the battery and you may be surprised by your battery time.
Also some people prefer buying gaming laptops for better performance. The problem often is insufficient cooling, fans too noisy and ridiculously low battery time (obviously) from already-big and heavy battery pack.
No I'm more or less with you. My laptop went out early this year and I just haven't felt the need to replace it. I might get a Chromebook or something cheap but I don't really feel the need to have an entire dev environment with me.
I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place.
This is exactly what I've returned to as well, and I'd forgotten for a while (or maybe didn't understand) what was so good about this setup. Working only in my own "do work stuff" office at my own desk means when I'm not working, I'm free to enjoy things without technology getting in the way, and I find that when I do get to my desk I'm a lot more focused, energized, and ready to go. Best of all, I don't have to deal with obscure laptop config issues.
I have a Linux box: it's an ATX tower, a 40" monitor, an Apple Magic Trackpad 2, and most significantly a mechanical keyboard. The importance of the latter can't be overstated: having good key travel, Cherry MX switches, and tactile feedback makes development a vastly better experience.
I got a refurbished HP desktop i7 that I bought two years ago for $300 on Amazon and upgraded the SSD and 32gb RAM for another $250 or so. I can run numerous instances of VS Code, Chrome, Slack, Postman, etc all day without even a hint of a slowdown. I also never hear my fans go on, not ever. I'm running Manjaro/XFCE... I think it does a minimal Windows style UI better than Windows.
My work is done in a nice quiet room and I don’t have to or want to travel. I never understood why people want to optimize for working on trains, planes and in meetings. Even when I was going into the office, I didn’t need to bring my computer home because I had the exact same machine at home since it was so cheap.
I do have a 2015 Macbook Pro and an Acer E5-575g laptop as well. If I feel like working on the couch or in bed, I can absolutely do that, but I never do. Mostly the Mac is just there to test Mac things or compile iOS things. The Acer was just so cheap and it also runs Manjaro perfectly.
Who doesn't like having nice peripherals? :) I'm the same between a work and home desktop. It's great to not have to carry anything to or from the office. Maintaining several computers also helps avoid the "single point of failure laptop problem". Between two desktops and a laptop, if any one of the three explodes (or are stolen) it's easy to work from the remaining two until replacement. Or in a more mundane case, fearless upgrades.
People may be most familiar with WireGuard as a light-weight proxy, but as a true virtual private network, it's also been great for making my home desktop accessible to my laptop on the go (desktop <-> digital ocean droplet <-> laptop).
I rent a virtual server with IPv6 connectivity. Like you, I use WireGuard to uplift[1] any machine I use into the same data center as the virtual server.
All my machines now have static public addresses. All my containers too. The firewalls are simple. It’s refreshing doing this in 2020. It also brings a sense of freedom (but not mobility) that might explain why I’m happy without a laptop.
What’s old is new. I must have had an unrequited nostalgia for 1990s Novell Windows NT Workstations, but with Linux. (Come to think of it, when I was using WinNT at University we had so much IPv4 space that they too all had routable IP addresses. When I were a lad...)
That's why laptop docks are great! You get the portability benefits of a laptop while being able to use it as if it was a regular desktop with nice computer monitors and peripherals.
Couple it with a USB switch and you won't have to bother with unplugging cables when switching between your work laptop and your personal desktop. (The only thing I have to unplug and move between my laptop and desktop is my microphone cable).
I’m tempted by a desktop but I worry about noise. Typically power components == big cooling reqs == big fans == big noise. There are specialized vendors who guarantee quiet but obviously they cost more.
Big fans are a good thing because they move much more air with much less RPM. If you care about noise, buy components with low power requirements and low heat output and slam a ridiculously overpowered cooling solution on it. I recently tried a workstation radeon GPU with one very small fan that would be essentially silent if it were in a case. Something like a recent i3 or i5 would mean so low heat output that high end coolers from Noctua would probably work somewhere around the lowest RPM with correctly configured fan curves. That, combined with the possibility of putting the case below the desk instead of right next to yourself like a laptop sounds much more silent as my macbook pro. An efficiently cooled i5 should be much more powerful than the frequently thermally throttled ultrabook/mobile CPUs. Those components are usually the cheaper ones too.
Granted, my high end gaming machine can get a bit noisier compared to my macbook, but even then the kind of noise is more pleasant than the relatively high pitched wind coming out of the MBP. The 3900X and the GPU do generate a ton of great though, so the focus is not on noise and heat output like in your case.
I have a desk at home in an office. I have the same setup at work. I don’t carry my dev environment with me. When I need to work I go to the ’do work stuff’ place.
Nice keyboard. Nice mouse. And a nice OS that, yes, took a whole day to configure but over which I have total control. (Full-screen focus-mode no-ornaments note taking, web browsing, and hacking.)