Hacker News Reader

Comment by sairamkunala | Hacker News Reader

if you are looking at Macs, mac book air.

Chromebook is a fantastic option in terms of price, though everything may have to stay in the cloud.

I've not tried it, but I think you can install Ubuntu within a container on a Chromebook[1] without jailbreaking or removing ChromeOS.

[1] https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-on-chromebook

No it’s even easier and better than that. There is a built in Linux container internally called crostini, you just turn it on and it’s a fully featured Linux install with admin privileges and a terminal.

You can repave a lot of Chromebooks with Linux, and should, if you're using one as a dev machine.

The lack of one modifier key left of the keyboard is an issue to me. Equivalent Windows laptops cost about the same and have an extra key.

And can run Linux just fine.

Caps Lock is useless. Map it to Control and the search key to Super, and you have all the modifiers you need, and in a more comfortable configuration besides.

That's still one key short.

What do you use hyper for? It's cool that DEs support binding it, but I've never found a use.

I use Emacs. I have use for as many keys as I can add to a keyboard (on my desk I have a PC 122 model M by Unicomp)

I mean, I do too, have for over a decade now. I'm still much more likely to bind under a prefix than directly to a meta chord.

macbook air, is no good for programming. sketching and frontend things yes, but when you start running environments within it like docker for example. it will crash.

If you spec it out to about 2000$, with the i7 upgrade, 16 GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, I'm pretty sure it will be plenty powerful for the majority of developers. Probably as good as the 5 year old MacBook Pro everyone still uses.

Bonus: you get a function key row

You don't need to run docker for every single thing

Yes, you don't need Docker for the development environment. I do that sometimes though for convenience and for projects that I develop on only now and then.

The use-case is “quickly write tiny JS/PHP/Html programs”. I do that on my Air. I have never used docker and don’t really know what docker is besides a tech-de-jour.

JS means using npm and node, ive heard my laptop fans go crazy at times. I'm MBP 13 inch, i7, SSD, 16GB Ram

That's not really true though, and I know this from personal experience in the company that I work for.

We have a fairly large development team all using MacBook Air, the previous version. It's a little workhorse, but you gotta know its limitations.

It struggles a little with Java development (i.e. running NetBeans or IntelliJ), but the new version (i.e. 2019 model) will do that just fine.

Depends on the environment. You can easily run Docker containers on the new Air.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com