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Comment by neilsimp1 | Hacker News Reader

Can I ask why developers would prefer a laptop over a desktop? I know it's off topic, but I see this question on HN an awful lot and I scratch my head each time.

Desktop PCs are:

- Cheaper

- More repairable and upgradable

- More options for hardware

- Better thermals

- A full monitor(s), keyboard, and mouse, instead of a rinky-dink keyboard and trackpad

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Even if a laptop is wanted for portability, a good desktop + a cheap laptop as a portable terminal still comes out cheaper than most mid- or high-end laptops. The laptop also gets better battery life from not having tons of ram or power-sucking processors and GPUs.

Can you guys work through RDP all day? Latency kills me on any type of connection.

Most remote dev machine setups I've seen involve some combination of SSH, port forwarding, mounting remote drives, etc., not actually running remote desktop. So you don't RDP and open your IDE on the remote machine, you open the IDE on your cheapo laptop and use whatever SSH or remote filesystem mechanism it provides to connect it to your dev machine. Services like Tailscale make it easy to establish the connectivity between devices. Doesn't work for all dev workflows though, sometimes you're forced to use the GUI on the remote host.

Thanks for the explanation, but then an IDE just runs on a cheapo laptop with a mount even slower than hdd. I don’t get the idea of the advice then. It stops being a cheap terminal and becomes a cheap laptop?

Well, most of the IDEs still perform all of the work on the remote machine and just stream IO to the laptop, so you're not actually editing files on the laptop, you're sending file editing commands to the remote machine, all the compilation and execution stuff happens on the remote machine, etc. For example, VS Code has client/server components which make the experience feel seamless and handle network disruptions to hide latency and make it feel like it's all happening locally. This setup works pretty great if you're mostly editing text files, i.e. source code.

Actually mounting a remote disk solves a different set of problems, such as if you need to edit something that doesn't support doing the work on the remote machine or if you want to explore the remote disk in Finder or some other GUI.

Oh, didn’t know that, thanks!

Portability. The ability to take your laptop and work somewhere else. Take it to a meeting. Etc.

I see devs talking about syncing their work between multiple computers and it just sounds like a huge pain. Having a single laptop that you use everywhere is so much easier.

Unless you need a really beefy machine for something niche, a nice laptop handles development just fine.

I'm a mobile app developer. Mobility is preferrable. And I don't need the most powerful dev machine.

I agree.

What desktop make and model do you use?

travel with bad network.

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