Ask HN: What is your personal computing device setup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your personal computing device setup?

2 pointssylens5 comments

Given that a majority of people are working from home right now, I'm curious to hear what everybody uses at home - either for their own personal computing activities or to support whatever work computer and equipment their employer may provide.

Do you still own personal laptops/computers even when their employer provides them a specced out model (such as Macbook Pro/Surface Book/ThinkPad X1 Carbon/etc)? Do you prefer building your own desktop for the value per dollar or buying a laptop for the flexibility?

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For $DAYJOB work, I have a Dell Latitude 7490. It's nothing fancy, but it does the job. The only real downside is that we're a Windows or Mac only shop from a desktop standpoint. No Linux.

For my own stuff, I use a Dell $SOMETHING_OR_OTHER that I bought used a couple of years ago. It's a beefier machine with 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, yadda yadda. On that (and all my personal devices) I run Linux. Usually Fedora or CentOS.

I don't really run servers at home much anymore, but there are a couple of older laptops that are still up and running that serve a few miscellaneous purposes. One sits at my electronics bench, and is mainly for quickly looking up data-sheets, or circuit diagrams, etc. The other is in my bedroom, connected to a 32" display and powered external speakers, and is basically where I watch movies and stuff. And then I do have one little Lenovo tower PC that hosts one specific application that I'm experimenting with and wanted to keep local.

All of my other computing resources are cloud based, using a combination of Linode, Hetzner and AWS.

Do you prefer building your own desktop for the value per dollar or buying a laptop for the flexibility?

I used to, but these days I mostly value my time more. The one thing I may do at some point, is build a dedicated machine learning box with one or more beefy GPU's and what-not.

> Do you still own personal laptops/computers even when their employer provides them a specced out model

Yes.

Reasons:

I control the personal ones (yes, plural), so they run what I want (Linux) and do not spy upon me.

Work machine is a w10 laptop, with all the usual corporate "spy on you" stuff, and the long policy document of "don't use work equipment for ...".

So work machine is used only for work purposes. No personal usage of the work laptop occurs, ever. Then, there is nothing on the work machine that "work" might get all upset about. In fact, the work laptop and VPN hardware box have their own, isolated, ethernet card just for them in my firewall, with strict firewall rules such that the subnet run over that ethernet card has no visibility of anything going on on the rest of my home network.

> Do you prefer building your own desktop for the value per dollar

Yes. In fact, all but one computer is a desktop model. The last one is a laptop, it also runs Linux, just like the rest. The firewall I mentioned above is another desktop model running Linux, which is how I could simply add another ethernet card and configure the firewall rules to make a hardware and software isolated subnet for the work laptop.

macOS: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os

iOS/watch/iPadOS: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-ios

really awesome documentation of your setup

Recently, I switched from iOS to Android. And I was missing Apple's Continuity feature. Where I could easily make or receive phone calls on Mac, get access OTPs, messages quickly on my Mac. I noticed I was ending up landing social media or hacker-news :D spending hours every-time I picked up my phone for a call(there're a lot in this work from home situation).

And then after spending a day, going through a lot of spam! I noticed this app on App Store called "Connecton"(I'm surprised why was it hard to find it).

Putting out loud my personal wfh setup, so that I can save someone's time who needs this.

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