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Comment by talkingtab | Hacker News Reader

I use a Raspberry Pi 4/8G as my maine (ha ha) development machine. I have a special case, which is that I mostly ssh into my websites hosted by digital ocean. I usually have several terminal sessions (+3), some local terminal sessions and firefox. I use the pi mainly because I can have two monitors at once.

I just installed ubuntu 22.10 desktop and it appears to work well. I use ubuntu mainely because it is what I run on my remote systems and as long as "it just works" locally then I don't have to deal with many differences between the systems.

The best thing I did was to have it boot from a cheap kingston 120GB ssd ($18 now). Makes a world of difference in speed.

My biggest complaint is that firefox is a little slow on the uptake, I am usually debugging some web interaction with developer tools and once the page is up it is as fast as I need.

I don't play games, I don't edit videos (haven't tried) or other things.

Key take-away: for development

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>I have a special case, which is that I mostly ssh into my websites hosted by digital ocean.

This sounds like what I do, except I mosh from a MacBook into a VM on my own server, which in turn runs tmux with mosh sessions to other machines, physical (including the same MacBook) and virtual. They are all local, but there is nothing preventing the sessions from being hosted somewhere else.

>I usually have several terminal sessions (+3), some local terminal sessions and firefox

Do you run Firefox remotely? I run Chrome and Firefox on the MacBook I use to mosh into the first aforementioned machine above. I read mail on one of the terminal sessions with VM on emacs; it passes via SSH URLs from messages to the local browser. Overall, I am very, very satisfied with my setup.

Yeah, SSD is a must for any serious work on a Pi, although I still can’t imagine running something like IntelliJ IDEA directly on it.

With the recent release of browser-access VS Code, I feel like we’re only a few years away from cloud development as dominant paradigm. We’ll grouse about it here (“what happens when my network connection fails?”) but I suspect using a “terminal” to develop on a remote machine is likely to be the only option for future generations of developers.

Coding in an ephemeral development environment is actually kinda nice. Whether that is a fully remote system or inside a Docker container. It’s nice to have a fully specified development environment that can be recreated at any time. I’ve started doing this for some newer projects and it’s refreshing. You don’t need to install compilers or libraries on your live system — it’s all stored in the container.

This is what I see as the winning paradigm. Whether that environment is remote or local is almost an implementation detail, and should be unimportant to the developer at the keyboard.

But the remote development aspect is even more important if you do notebook-style data analysis (which is increasingly more like traditional programming). In this case, browser/HTML based notebooks have been a game changer in that you can have long running sessions on heavy duty servers, controlled from smaller local machines. And the local machine only has to have a web browser.

Incidentally, my first foray into this development model was when I was trying to use my iPad as a dev machine. I hooked up an RPi to the iPad over USB-C and connected to the RPi running code-server (before vscode had their own remote server option). It worked surprisingly well, but the biggest hinderance was storage. And if you’re already connecting over a web browser, no need to limit yourself to a locally attached RPi…

> The best thing I did was to have it boot from a cheap kingston 120GB ssd ($18 now). Makes a world of difference in speed.

Nice. I also want to try this, just to get the most speed and performance out of it, without giving in reliability or durability. I should also check out Jeff Geerling's comparison of different MicroSD cards for the RPi.

I started out using a cheap MicroSD and it only lasted a week or two before failing; I've since replaced it with a 128 GB SATA SSD with a USB3-SATA dongle I bought off Amazon. No SD card needed and it's served me incredibly well. I figured that even the best MicroSD card isn't going to be designed to run as a computer's boot drive, and SATA SSDs are cheap and plentiful.

I should definitely look into this, thanks!

If you want to avoid sacrificing reliability, get a Samsung portable SSD. SSD-SATA dongles and SD cards will all represent a step down in reliability.

Thanks for the tip!

This is interesting. I wonder if one could use PINN or NOOBS on a portable USB SSD drive as well in order to multiboot the needful on one bigly ssd..(?)

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