Hacker News Reader

So this is somewhat OT, but: how much compiling do you actually _do_ in-situ on your laptop?

I mostly look, these days, for the best possible portable pane-of-glass I can get that allows me to do all my work on "real" computers -- in the cloud and in our office lab. I'd much rather have epic battery life for my web browser and terminals than have more cores in the thing I carry around.

View on HN

It's a taste thing. My day job is working on a big android distro, and it's too hard to manage dealing with multiple build boxes with remote work. So I bought a quad-core laptop (Vaio Z, sadly just recently discontinued) and love it. The box itself is ultrabook-sized, but Sony makes an extra batter that clips right on the bottom, adding some weight but getting back the battery life you lose with the bigger CPU. I find I actually prefer the laptop with the extra battery attached.

If you're running a linux distro that requires compiling packages from source (Gentoo comes to mind), then you could conceivably be compiling a lot of things often.

Eh, that sort of thing was already reasonable a few years ago and open source software hasn't really gotten much bigger since then. Some projects have actually gotten smaller. (Browsers are the glaring exception. I don't envy anyone building their own firefox or chromium these days..)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com