Hacker News Reader

Comment by RadiozRadioz | Hacker News Reader

I'm always curious about developers who are able to use such (no offense) limited devices. Not limited in the performance sense, but limited in the capability sense.

Does it not bother you that there are things you cannot do, and workarounds you need to have (e.g. running your text editor in a web browser)? What is the advantage to you over a normal laptop?

View on HN

What do you mean? I use DEX on S20 with Termux which is basically Linux with all the normal package manager stuff. Can run PostgreSQL, alpine docker files, PocketBase, Portainer, whatever.

There are nice editos too as well if you look around.

With 6GB of RAM it can't run LLMs beyond Tiny Llama, but it's def usable.

I am writing this from a Chromebook with an 8th gen Core i3 CPU. I bought it used for around $50. It has a rather good Linux container which can run even graphical applications. This is not really that limited anymore other than using Chrome instead of a proper browser (Firefox :P). I previously used a quite slow Chromebook which I bought new for around $100. It also had a Linux container, but it was more of a beta feeling and it hardly could run graphical applications.

What is great about those devices is that they are almost perfect thin clients. I also have a big desktop machine running Linux. I remote a lot to it, but with this newer Chromebook it is often enough to do things on itself alone. The biggest perks for me is that they are cheap (easily replaceable), lightweight and have a very long battery life, the keyboard quality and other things are also good. On this newer Chromebook I even wrote most of my thesis for a geographical faculty and even did maps with QGIS.

I am living mostly in a Linux terminal, so with the mentioned old Chromebook I sshed a lot more. I use Zerotier and at times I leave my desktop on and remote to it even on the run with phone tethering.

I have full Node.js, Python, Golang and VS Code with 50 extensions on my phone - and a lot of other stuff from Nixpkgs (using Nix on Droid). Yeah it's in a browser using openvscode-server, but I added it as a PWA app and on DeX that looks just like a normal desktop app.

The phone has 8 cores, 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB disk, it's better than what I had few years ago as a desktop computer.

The advantage is that I don't need a personal laptop - I have only the one from work, and that's the 16" Macbook Pro - I don't travel with that; it's easier to pack my USB-C to HDMI cable and the BT keyboard and mouse, also I don't really care if that is stolen or broken. At the destination I simply abuse any random TV as needed. All my important data is on pCloud plus some physical backups on my home NAS.

Now I really wonder if I could run Kubernetes on the phone...

>What is the advantage to you over a normal laptop?

Lighter weight, cheaper, smaller form factor, not having to worry about syncing storage or things like messages across apps. Also basically a spare power bank for the phone.

>Does it not bother you that there are things you cannot do,

Not really, because I can always SSH to my home computer if I need to have a full linux environment. The case for this is very rare though, and half the time its because I don't want to spend the time compiling stuff from scratch on the phone.

You don't need to run your text editor in a web browser, and you can do a lot of stuff, just not, like, run ML models.

People use RasPis as servers and PCs all the time, and a top-end android phone can often do more.

(neo)vim and emacs both work in termux!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com