The Case Against the Desktop | Hacker News Reader

The Case Against the Desktop

amadeuspagel.com

2 pointsamadeuspagel5 comments

I always forget that desktop computers actually exist and always slightly surprised when I see or hear about one(Almost always in the context of really hardcore enthusiast gaming).

I've never actually owned one myself, the family had a shared one when I was a kid, but I never had any real reason to mess with them.

In theory, a super high performance machine seems really great, but my i5 Asus from 2018 is still fast enough for everything I do.

Sometimes a CAD operation takes a few seconds, or some tests will take longer than I want them to, but a desktop at home still seems like too much trouble for the small time saving.

I feel that way about laptops and tablets. Like, I can't understand why anyone would pay much more money for much less performance, and either chose between bad ergonomy or flimsy docking setups.

My desktop allows me to have a base in life, where my stuff is, and I get to have hundreds of gigabytes of memory and many terabytes of storage for relatively cheap. It's where I can drive my high resolution monitors at high refresh rates.

The desktop computer is where I build my little sanctuary in this world, where everything is just so, and set up just as I want, a place I never really want to leave. It's my comfort zone, and I don't know, the image of a little laptop on that desk, seems sad and empty to me.

Sure, I own a laptop, it's perpetually not charged, and I need to remind myself to plug it in before I have to go somewhere and use it, but that's only once or twice per year.

There's not a lot of text in that article, and yet I found no case being made against the desktop, even if the title claimed so.

There seems to be two pretty consistent personality profiles in tech.

If you got your start in a way that that leads to internalizing a love of highly customized tech you probably like desktops.

Especially if you already gravitate towards spatial/tactile thinking and do well with multiple monitors and mechanical keyboards and things like that, you tend to be aware of your body while using computers, you naturally process multiple things at once, Seeing things and thinking of their inner workings, coding while also noticing your hands physically on the keyboard, etc, being bothered by unnecessary complexity even if well hidden, having lots of ideas at once, etc,

And then doubly so if you're passionate about highly abstract things like algorithms and math just for their own sake, rather than getting into this stuff via some other field that happens to use coding.

If you have a very active mind you probably also have lots of ideas for things that could actually use more performance, plus you probably have more tolerance for having lots of stuff going on at once, so having lots of different personal projects you split your time between is a natural fit, even if some need bug fixes and maintenance occasionally.

In that case you probably have a lot of really great memories centered around your computer more than the office or field work, even more motivate to customize.

I think the psychology is really interesting, especially because so many articles don't seem to notice the very obvious different personalities and kind of act like all developers are exactly the same.

For people with the opposite profile.... our (possibly unhealthy escapist) comfort zone is more or less in the cloud and in mega sized software that Just Works and syncs everywhere, and part of what makes it a (most likely unhealthy) comfort zone is the lack of embodied experience, and the predictability of off the shelf, unmodified tech.

That's an interesting observation!

The case against the desktop, by analogy with the TV, is the way that it takes over a room, that it makes it hard to focus on anything else — unlike the laptop, which is easy to fold and put away.

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