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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

This is probably an unpopular view, but I kind of use laptops as if they were terminals. If you want to spend $2k, I'd invest $1600 of that in a great desktop machine, and spend the other $400 on a cheap chromebook and tablets / keyboards / gizmos to log into it remotely.

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I agree, except I haven’t found a ChromeBook I’ve liked.

For $900, you can buy an M1 MacBook Air. It is the sexiest dumb terminal I’ve ever used.

I had used Linux on a laptop for about 15 years prior. It is a fine 90% solution.

The Air is barely the same class of device: no noise, almost instant-on, battery lasts forever.

Modern Macs are fine as terminals I suppose, unless you travel a lot or are on metered Internet. If so, then you have a lot of stuff to turn off. See:

https://gist.github.com/mmillar-bolis/dcfb3d1814fb0532eb3c71...

https://github.com/keithbarrett/Mac/blob/master/DisableMacSe...

https://gist.github.com/b0gdanw/40d000342dd1ba4d892ad0bdf03a...

I haven't used a Mac full-time for years, but the straw that broke the camels back for me was when I was traveling through multiple countries (including in New Zealand and on flights) and I could not get my damn Mac to stop sucking down, well, whatever it was doing. The number of default services running seems to have gotten even worse since then by the looks of these scripts...

>For $900, you can buy an M1 MacBook Air. It is the sexiest dumb terminal I’ve ever used.

There's something ironic and wonderful about a laptop with more processing power than an i7 desktop being called a dumb terminal.

I was indifferent to chromebooks, until the Lenovo Ideapad Duet 5 (13.3"). Very cool machine.

Agreed with M1 MacBook Air.

I went to BestBuy last month with this same idea in mind. I've got 4 desktop PCs under my desk I use for game dev but I'm curious to travel and remote desktop into them. I was on the fence about maybe just getting a small laptop and large portable monitor but eventually landed on a $329 "HP - 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i3 - 8GB Memory - 256GB SSD - Natural Silver" that seemed to check my two boxes cheap & large screen.

I haven't made the purchase yet because I'm concerned if I should reach for a more expensive laptop that I can do work on in case I'm ever unable to connect over RDP.

Curious to hear if anyone else has had any success with this kind of setup?

The weakest link in this setup is your current internet. I've found while traveling, internet is generally pretty bad under, 10Mbs. Making this a rather difficult task. American view.

At home, my "laptop" is a dumb terminal that docks to my desk monitors. But computes to servers in the closet.

At my families who have (150:down/10:up)Mbs it was no different from being at home. I connected over wire guard. I even took my zoom/client calls in vms over rdp. Passing my webcam from my local laptop -> wire guard -> server. I also used parsed to stream gaming from home.

Conversely, I was at an Airbnb recently with (5/0.512)Mbs DSL. It was a real chore. For the internet black hole, I've opted to go for a SFFpc instead. That can fit into checked baggage or carry on. Even if I can't setup a monitor and keyboard at the airbnb hotel. Having both off in lodging wifi is suitable enough.

This only works if both the desktop and the notebook are always online and on a good connection. For the desktop, this is doable (although not everywhere, first world is pretty good connected but besides that it can be really hard). For the notebook, it all depends.

Fair. I locked in an good price for fiber at my house. I only have to worry about the quality of my connection away from home. That's just cost of doing business though.

I'm a lot on boats and before covid also in planes. I would not be able to do my coding on my desktop at home (which, like yours, has a good fiber connection)

Even if I wanted to, I cannot get a stable and fast enough connection there to work on a dump remote terminal.

Why does the notebook need to be in good connection? Use mosh.

if all you need is shell/tui, sure. what about app development, web development etc?

Does anyone have a recommendation for a remote desktop software for Linux? Specifically one that also supports using a browser, video, etc. RDP (server) with proper GPU acceleration works great for this, but unfortunately is Windows only.

I agree with this. I bought a Dell XPS 15 a few years ago with discrete GPU with the hope of using it for dev/mild gaming. Its now just used for remote desktop.

Horses for courses though. If I didn't have space for a desktop I'd be happy to have the XPS 15.

Multi-monitor is my big requirement when it comes to development. The 15" screen is good, but it doesn't beat a proper side by side setup.

I went this route albeit differently. I purchased an older model Thinkpad T440 for about $300 off eBay a few years ago, and it's one of my favorite laptops to have still. 8GB of RAM, 4th gen mobile Intel i7, 240GB SSD. I've been using it for probably about 3 years now as my travel laptop.

The keyboard on it is really fantastic, but the touchpad is not something I'm proud of.

Can get a much better desktop machine at the same price, and upgrade/repair easier.

Then a ex-corporate laptop from eBay that I'm not too worried about breaking/losing. Dell laptops tend to have the best support of Linux.

I spend >80% of my time in the same place, so it makes sense for me. If I'm out and about, I won't be doing "full" work anyway.

Hi. OP here. I had also considered this but I don't have much space where I live (family etc etc). Maybe one day :)

A "beefy" workstation these days doesn't need to take a lot of space. For example the Intel NUC machines are pretty powerful and can fit in the palm of your hand.

I'm considering something like this for personal compute-intensive projects, or things that I want to continue running while my laptop is closed.

If your workload is really greater than a machine like that can handle, you should probably be considering some kind of cloud based compute option.

The only case I can think of where a really powerful local computer is required is the link stage of a huge monolithic binary, which by it's very nature is not parallelizable, but you'd never do that on the laptop anyways.

I also do this. I recently picked up an Acer Spin 713, which I'm very happy with. On the one hand it can be a terminal to a honking desktop machine, or something beefy in the cloud, but it also runs Linux just fine, so I can do a fair amount of local development if network access is limited or non-existent.

I carry a Dell XPS1500(64GB, 2TB, 4K) that is probably 3 pounds to use at work and at home with external monitors, it's better comparing two one desktop + one low-end laptop for me.

I totally agree with this too. Additionally, MrChromebox is doing some great work in terms of fully liberating some of these older machines!

i'd second this. i set up a Tailscale vpn account and now just RDP into my dev machine at home to do any coding on my spare time.

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