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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

I think there's on assumption being made here which ought to be challenged. Laptops are widely used, but they are not great coding environments. They were created to enable portability, but the way it mostly gets used promotes terrible habits, posture, handpositions, viewing angles, all of the above. If given a choice I would opt for a desktop and live with the portability restrictions it comes with. Of course it is an increasingly uncommon choice. The next best thing is to use the laptop docked but closed, and have separate peripherals: monitors, keyboard, mouse.

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> The next best thing is to use the laptop docked but closed

That's what I do, combined with a 64-thread/128GB build machine.

In fact, I'm so happy with my discontinued HP UltraSlim docks mounted vertically on the side of my desk/divider that I went to IT and special-ordered the last model that fit those docks. My new laptop is five years old. Worth it! :)

As someone whose desktop is showing its age and no longer games much, I'm curious about your build machine.

Do you have a physical build machine? Or in the cloud? And did you build it or order it from somewhere?

i have a similar setup with an amd threadripper thinkstation.

It's just a guess but this sounds like a physical machine with threadripper 3970x (128gb memory is the max it can handle without memory bandwidth contention) though I'm also curious about the details.

Physical machine, in a server room at Sony's Lund office. Custom order of several machines from Compliq, a small local shop.

It's a Threadripper-something, 128GB RAM, and nvme disks totaling 9-10 TB (plus a sata SSD for the OS, and maybe a big HDD for the mirror). I use btrfs' raid to join the repo disks, while others use other solutions (e.g. ext4 on top of mdraid). I also run btrfs compression, which saves a lot of space for very little cost (iirc, something like 1% extra time for a full Android build, but ymmv).

Most of us share the build machine with 1-3 other engineers, which is fine because we rarely need to make (big) builds at the same time. Android is not small, and having multiple copies of the complete history for multiple people would be impractical, so we have a custom git/repo mirroring solution that keeps our various checkouts from growing out of hand.

People use whatever tool they like to connect to the machine. I've seen remote desktop of some sort, xpra, mosh... Personally, I'm using ssh and screen, with some ssh_config aliases for quick access to specific product branches.

When it's time to flash a build to a device, rsync is great. I believe AOSP aims for hermetic/reproducible builds, which enables big speedups from rsync.

These port replicators are easily replaced by a monitor with a high-speed usb c hub now a days.

I have not needed one in years, power, peripherals, and networking all go through the single usb-c connection.

But I can't hang my laptop from a USB cable. :)

FWIW, I'm happy with IKEA Skådis pegboard (vertical, clamped to the desk surface) + magazine rack, holding laptop & thunderbolt dock. The dock means it's a single cable to unplug to take the laptop out. It's probably cheaper to get something off AliExpress, but being able to see the products in store to have a better idea if it would work was worth it for me.

Laptops are actually kind of ok just not how people use them. ;)

Elevate & decoupled! Raise the screen. Use a Bluetooth keyboard. Stop staring down!

Ideally one can rig up a way to get the keyboard under the laptop. That's rough though, not always easy (some soda cans & cardboard... Where there's a will!). Often I end up with my laptop on my adventure pack and the keyboard in front (or on my lap). I used to just use tablet style 2-in-1's, which rock: the Tryone gooseneck arm (or many others) let's you hover the screen in really nice position, wherever you want.

I was pretty fine having a decently hidpi 11-12 inch screen positioned close in, but I have really wanted a bigger 2-in-1 I could work with. I miss 2013 when there was the bigger bigger bigger push for tablets: we are creeping back up, but the bold 18.4 beasts of that age were I hope only a bit too soon.

It all comea down to!:

> Improve your coding environment

There are many great options for a stand if you want to use the screen. My current setup: standing desk, external keyboard and trackpad, 2 monitors raised to comfortable viewing height, and laptop on stand where the screen is aligned with the larger monitors.

I don't understand why people insist on using more than one monitor.

Downsides: - Looking sideways is bad for your neck. - Looking from the one to the other and refocusing probably takes more time than using a shortcut key to switch between virtual desktops or something similar. - Consumes additional space, energy and money.

Upsides: - Looks cool and professional, I guess. - ??

I'm not expecting you to understand but I find it less disruptive to look to the side than switch windows or desktops.

The advantage of having two monitors is that I can look at two things at the same time.

I have my main monitor centered and my second off to the side. My browser mostly lives on my second monitor while my IDE lives on my main. I spend a large majority of my time looking at my center monitor, as I put my IDE there and also move my browser there when I need to look at it for any extended period of time.

In this case, I concur with the parent post. I probably have a browser window on every virtual desktop, but I also have a browser window that exists on all virtual desktops. In this case I could just access this browser window from the virtual desktop that contains my IDE.

I either want to look at 2 things at once, or I'm often only looking at one monitor at a time. Besides, my chair swivels lol. I'm certain the common posture of how many look at their phones (neck down, for many hours over the course of a day) is far more damaging to the neck than a 30 degree side turn.

Yeah, I agee with the problems laptop use can create. I do use a decent laptop but use it as a desktop with eye level monitor and external keyboard attached. I found that positioning the keybord close to my body with a table height slightly above my sitting thighs such that the elbows are close to the body is the best ergonomics I could find and any back/neck/shoulder aches I used to get in my 20s and 30s have nearly vanished completely. My only problem is my butt getting tired of sitting on a chair and use it as an excuse to take breaks. Not sure if this position is universal, I did find it through experimentstion and I encourage evryone to test out various positions and to avoid using laptops for extended periods of time, it is really bad and could also create poor sitting habits that extend beyond the computer.

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