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Comment by deliriumchn | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article but it looks a bit too focused on ecological impact of manufacturing one laptop (its pointless if one person will skip buying it, they make them in hundreds of thousands of exemplars) and the use case of "only using webrowser as light as possible and notepad for text, thats it"

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By your argument, it does not make sense not to eat meat, because they will kill the cow anyway.

I don't think cow anology is very appropriate. Technology is moving fast (well not as fast nowadays but still pretty fast) and if you don't update your tools your work will be as obsolte as your hardware. If any of your hardware is touching the internet running obsolete stuff is a big security risk. Vivaldi browser ? Notepad? seriously...

The "one person" argument doesn't hold up, since the article has an audience of thousands.

well said! I read it but the "only using webrowser as light as possible and notepad for text, thats it" gives it away. I am just surprised how many experienced coders don't realise that technology is moving fast and, if you use obsolte hardware, your work and code will be as obsolete.

Imagine having to do any testing for a mobile app or a new website and you go like "oh sorry I only use a light web browser" or having to code anything more complex than 90s cgi scripts "oh no I use only notepad" .

Or receiving an excel or word document to edit, notepad is not going to cut it.

Most people have faster machines that they could RDP into when needing to test with a fully-featured browser. The key however is that this is a pretty rare need; you can do plenty of useful things without opening up a web browser at all. Even editing Office documents is a comparatively light workload these days.

You can do plenty of useful things without a computer too :-) but that is beside the point.

For business use you do need a browser. Fast, with security updates etc. For some people doing web development having access to professional products e.g. Adobe suite is a must too. And no, you can't do that on linux.

> I am just surprised how many experienced coders don't realise that technology is moving fast and, if you use obsolte hardware, your work and code will be as obsolete.

I think the reverse: Silly to build software on a bleeding-edge machine then act surprised when it runs like trash on customers' hardware. Instead build it on a trash machine and it will fly on better hardware.

I expect it is not such a good strategy for those whose code can't stand on its own legs outside of a Chrome distribution or VM, though.

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