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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Many people at Google still use desktop Linux workstations. Those would be airgapped too under this plan and force these people to change to another workflow. There are at least hundreds of people who have been there 10+ years still using desktops for all development. For example on the team I was previously on, 4/8 people used a desktop workstation as their main device.

I used a cloud VM as my main machine, and still used internet all the time. I used github to sync my configuration (using a proxy would be out of date and no way to push), amongst other things.

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~5 years ago I had desktop Linux and a chrome book. All compilation happened via cloud build and the preferred IDE was the cloud-based web app. I didn't really use my desktop for anything, not even ssh.

I switched to a Chromebook in the pandemic and honestly it was fine. My workflow barely changed. I wasn't a vim fanatic at the time so I didn't really care.

Many people don't do that. They sit in front of a desktop with a monitor plugged into it and use the desktop for everything, including stack overflow etc

They don't need the desktop for stack overflow. They're launching a browser. They can launch the browser in any computer without breaking their workflow.

That doesn't make sense to me. You can't copy-paste into and out of your editor across machines.

You see an error message on your desktop, you want to search for it. What do you do?

You can in most modern IDEs/editors (e.g., editing over SSH or clipboard support over remote X/terminal)

The editor for people I'm talking about is running locally on the desktop. The user is viewing a window on a monitor attached to the desktop. How does this work without changing that workflow?

> the preferred IDE was the cloud-based web app

possibly, not everybody is ok with using a not so good editor, no debugger integration and keeping their ssh and pgp keys somewhere else than a local machine.

The in-browser editor at Google is actually very good and has built in debugging support. Some people still don't use it though, and this change seems to ignore that.

>keeping their ssh and pgp keys somewhere else than a local machine

This is Google. Who is using ssh keys for anything?

new gpg supports them for signing… do you not sign commits?

As I said, many people are still not on this workflow, but it’s clearly the workflow everything is moving towards. I don’t believe anyone wants to take the internet away from people not on this workflow, but I’d give it up and be essentially unaffected, and I think there’s a growing minority in that position. Therefore, it seems like a reasonable experiment to pursue to inform future development.

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