You can own more than one type of computer | Hacker News Reader

You can own more than one type of computer

world.hey.com

14 pointsTomte9 comments

I work in mobile gaming. A lot of used macs because you need to for iPhone development. During covid a lot of us started using our beefy windows gaming computers for development because Unity ran faster. A lot of us have stayed on those beefy boxes.

Personally I use Linux 90% of the time but for a long time I would regularly develop on 3 different machines: windows desktop, Linux laptop, MacBook. VSCode running on all three is a big improvement to this style of development. The windows terminal, annoying symlinks, line endings, PATH annoyances, were all perpetually annoying, but once you were set up, windows machines honestly feel pretty snappy.

One reason I don't use Linux as much as I'd like is custom keyboard layouts (in addition to Mac/Windows only software). I have to make two for terminal and X11 apps. And another for Wayland. I haven't found an inline USB mapper though that shouldn't be so hard.

What hardware you using? I have my keyboard remapped a bit on Linux and it was a pain to figure out the first time. I'm sure it can be done for you tho.

I remapped alt to control and made alt tab still work. So my Linux laptop has the keyboard feel of a mac. For some reason I didn't do this on my desktop and I mindlessly swap between the two.

I'm using a typical ten-keyless keyboard that otherwise has a standard US 103 ANSI layout. My need for remapping keys is for the letters as I accidentally developed[0] my own custom non-Qwerty layout[1] that turned out to be very similar to NIRO.

[0] https://github.com/qwickly-org/Qwickly

[1] https://github.com/qwickly-org/QwickSteps

OT: I'd already wised up to computer hardware and software, depending on a minimum of platform-dependent services. What I realized recently is that I'm not as aware in other areas. I'd been using Pioneer DDJ players/controllers and Rekordbox since ages. Version 6+ of the software requires subscription or a top-end/recent model of controller hardware to unlock. There were good reasons I picked Rekordbox when I did, but that was a long time ago and others have likely caught up and surpassed it in many areas, e.g parametric EQ. There is some vendor lock-in with tagging that I'd done on my library which would somehow need to be migrated.

The ability to freely import/export data is sorely missing in all software. For example, exporting albums in iPhoto or albums between Spotify-Apple Music is not great. Migrating out of Google Docs also an issue.

> I love computers! So having Android in my pocket, Windows on my desk, and Apple in my backpack?

That's me...

I have noticed in recent days, with younger engineers coming on board, this is typically viewed as "a bad thing" and you're either Apple or not. It's almost as if anyone is not fully apple, it's simply because they can't afford it, there's no other explanation.

Android in my pocket. Windows (and Linux) on the desk. Apple in the backpack. Yep. Pretty much. And the Apple Macbook Pro, apart from macOS, is also the best Windows laptop I've ever owned too. We have several Surface Book laptops of various versions scattered around the home, but our small collection Macbook Pro's are "old reliable."

I mean yeah. Surprising that it took some sort of a catalyst event for someone to realize this fact but...

I have a laptop that runs haiku. My desktop runs Windows 11 and I use WSL2 on it. My other laptop is running kubuntu. I have an M1 Mac mini that runs the latest beta of macOS. I have a pixel fold that runs the latest beta of Android. I have a Pixel 5 as a backup phone that runs graphene OS...

If you're going to be serious about computers you're not going to draw a line in the sand and stick with one thing. Branch out and be efficient with switching between all of these operating systems that you can.

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