Hacker News Reader

Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

> I do all my work on an under $200 Chromebook. I have a VPS where I do all the actual work.

Arguably you do all your work through (not on) a $200 Chromebook then ;)

Somehow the Chromebook acts as a glorified keyboard+display tied via a very long cable to a several thousands dollar machine that you rent!

(I get that you can run Linux, and that this machine handles browsing as well, and I'm not judging the setup, it just feels like the "$200 worth of hardware is all it takes to do work on" subtext feels cognitively dissonant to me)

View on HN

Just to clarify, I use a $5/mo DigitalOcean droplet plus an extra dollar or two for backup and then a rsync.net account (that I use for other backup purposes too). Off the top of my head, that is the extent of my expenses for this set up (it's possible I might be forgetting/missing something).

And you are correct, that I work through the Chromebook but when the other monthly expenses don't exceed the cost of lunch, I don't think there is too much missing subtext.

So you're spending ~$80 per year for DO plus $180 for the hardware. Over 5 years that's $580 (if that Chromebook really makes it to 5 years and DO's prices remain unchanged). This is about half of what you'd have to spend on a local dev setup with similar capabilities.

Not bad, but I think whether or not it makes sense depends entirely on the productivity difference between the two setups.

I started working like this in the summer of 2017 so I'm right at the 5 year mark with this setup (I actually need to get a new device and DO's prices have remained the same - I think they've actually gotten cheaper and I'm on a more expensive plan - $5 vs now they have a $4 option).

Due to my client work, I need an online test server so I'd be paying for a test VPS either way.

Being able to open my Chromebook and tmux into any project in about ~15 seconds provides enormous productivity gains for me. Not sure if I mentioned this previously, but I'm a freelance developer and sometimes juggling 6-8 clients at a time so being able to pull up any project at any time from any device with SSH access is very powerful for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com