Ask HN: Does anyone use a laptop as a thin client for programming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does anyone use a laptop as a thin client for programming?

3 pointstripdout10 comments

I have a powerful laptop, but I find that I don't really need portability and high performance at the same time. As a result, I've been thinking of building a much more powerful desktop computer, and using a cheap, thin, laptop (maybe a Chromebook) to develop on the go.

That way, I can have even higher performance as well as better battery life.

However, the one limitation is needing to run heavy IDEs like Android Studio. Does remote desktop software have low enough latency to make this practical? Are there any unique solutions to this problem? I know Jetbrains has Jetbrains Gateway - does anyone have experience using this? It doesn't support Android Studio yet, and isn't free, but at least the technology looks possible.

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The latest Macbook Pro has 24 hours of battery life and is a powerful laptop. It's not the thinnest laptop, but it's not bad, how thin do you really need it to be? To me the overhead of replacing one machine with two wouldn't be worth it for development on the go, but if you enjoy building desktops that's different and may be worth it to you.

There are a bunch of people using Chromebooks for dev, apparently. Some info on Reddit, and there was a thread on here where this came up a little while ago.

Nobody mentioned doing anything like Android development though; it was more "you can install VSCode and basic tooling natively on the Chromebook via its shell" or something

Thanks, I'll see if I can find that thead. Yeah, that's the main roadblock. Lightweight IDEs like VSCode can easily run on cheaper laptops, and as long as the compilation is done remotely, you're good to go.

But the Android Studio IDE itself is fairly heavy, and the compilation process is "ongoing" as you're writing code, with UI previews and things like that. It's not clear if there's an easy, free way to offload all of this processing from your local machine.

Yes, it works. Look into wireguard to access your workstation remotely.

I wouldn’t trust Google to run my hardware however.

Wireguard is just for a peer-to-peer VPN connection between the two machines, right? You'd still need a remote desktop client that has low enough latency to feel "local", and I'm not sure if that's at that stage yet?

With the apparent popularity of game streaming, it feels like it should be doable, but I'm not sure if WiFi is recommended for that.

Yes, I meant when you are away from your home office.

I do use a similar setup and Kasm to spawn required containers. Everything is backed behind a WireGuard running on rasberrypi. Something like sgwork.ddns.net For remote development VS Code is the best option. (should work for android remote development as well)

From what I can tell, Kasm seems to be an application-streaming solution through a web browser?

If the latency is low and the quality is good enough to comfortably run an IDE like Android Studio (which is heavier than VSCode, but if the whole things being streamed it shouldn't matter), this looks like it could be a good solution, thanks.

Latency has been minimized using wireguard since everything is 2 hops away using public IP

client => pi [wireguard] => home [containers, wsl, kasm, vscode etc]

Definitely depends on the client bandwidth and the home/ server network bandwidth.

Visual Studio Code is split into two parts. The remote part handles file sync and terminal management. The frontend lets you edit files in a local buffer. When you save, the file contents are sent to the backend. This has been working pretty well for me.

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