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Comment by varispeed | Hacker News Reader

I am looking for a quiet and fast machine for development. I've been trying to find a reasonable AMD laptop but all are out of stock and I think these will still have fans buzzing under heavier load. I personally hate Apple practices and I never clicked with macOS (was forced to work with it for many years), but if I could install Linux on M1 it would be hard to swallow, but I may consider using it. My Intel laptop has fans buzzing now even when it is idle. It drives me crazy.

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Do you absolutely have to have a laptop? I realized years ago that I spend 99% of my time in a single place and have since built custom desktop systems for my primary development machine. They are faster than any laptop I ever owned, quieter and much easier to live with. And because I can put together a system to my own specifications I can end up with something that works perfectly with Linux. I haven't bought a Mac in years and even with their new ARM hardware I don't see enough of a benefit to go back.

You may already know this, but there is active work happening now to port Linux to the M1: https://asahilinux.org/

Initial support was also just merged a couple? days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26746983

I'm in a similar situation. I want a new x86 laptop for development, but it's not super urgent.

Some laptop built around the new Ryzen 9 5900HS cpu [0] seemed like an obvious choice. But although it seems like AMD has released it, I'm having trouble finding any actual laptops that have it as an option. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough?

[0] https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-9-5900hs

UPDATE: Maybe I just needed to wait a little longer: [1]

[1] https://www.ultrabookreview.com/35985-amd-ryzen-9-laptops/

I got an HP OMEN 15 for $1200 and added some memory - 32gb with 8 cores, 16 threads and a nice IPS 144hz screen. I run VirtualBox Ubuntu 20.04 VMs with docker inside them and connect with VS Code SSH - and I have no performance complaints.

Unless you are doing Linux GUI development, you have several options.

1. Low-end Chromebook (good battery life), remote server, VPN.

2. High-end Chromebook (there are a few i3 and i5 models with 8GB RAM), Linux environment.

Are you often in locations where you don't have Internet access?

High end Chromebooks have i7 and 16 gb RAM fwiw, and run Linux VMs just fine.

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