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Comment by locusofself | Hacker News Reader

I realize this does nothing to solve your problem, but for the sake of discusion, internally at Microsoft, pretty much all the developers I know have switched to using "Devbox", which means we use a remote desktop client to access our dev machine.

A lot of us resisted this at first, but then just kindof came to accept it, and it made it so we have a lot more capable machines to do development on than the laptops that we would have to recycle every couple years.

I know there have probably been a lot of "thin client" products/services in the education space in the past, but I think it might be time to try again.

Like another poster here, I think it's "sad" that kids are using laptops. Laptops have small screens and poor ergonomics.

A thin client setup with a good keyboard, mouse and monitor could be better and more affordable / future proof.

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Chromebooks are thin clients of sorts, its a web browser rendering google docs locally.

If anything is making them slow its the javascript bloat of modern webapps that could be doing more serverside.

>Laptops have small screens and poor ergonomics.

This is a huge gripe of me and my wife. Growing up we all had desktops in the computer lab at school (elementary+) and you had decent size screens. Now kids pull up their little 12" chromebook in their classroom. Kids have eye strains, myopia etc...

We used G3 iMacs with the puck mouse until high school. You can't convince me it was the epitome of ergonomics.

They were an upgrade from the Mac LC II. I don't recall those having very big screens either.

15" and 4:3 was about as big as it got in high school. A computer on a table and we sat on a normal plastic school chair.

And the flicker. It was pretty bad on most screens.

Of course they switched to devbox which is nothing more than azure virtual desktop with some added bells and whistles... also has the nice side effect that it's a subscription. Nice for microsoft at least, less for the consumer.

You don’t have to recycle laptops every few years. That’s a sandy foundation to build the rest of that “came to accept it” on. You weren’t just made to do it and retconned justification for compliance?

> internally at Microsoft, pretty much all the developers I know have switched to using "Devbox", which means we use a remote desktop client to access our dev machine.

Everything old is new again, back to the days of using a single shared server for software development in timesharing setup.

Instead of Novell Netware, UNIX, VMS, AS/400,..., it is the cloud.

The "cloud" is most likely running Linux so it's UNIX-like. Everything old is new again!!

Devbox seems to be semi-public, and/or offered to customers: https://devbox.microsoft.com/

Curious if there's a way random people can test it.

This is basically the same as having an automated way to provision Azure VM instances that you would access via RDP, already quite common in many IT organisations, especially for temporary team members as contractors.

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