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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

> But, then why not just VNC into a beastmode machine on a netbook and compile remotely? After all, that’s what CI/CD pipeline is for.

Is this how you work?

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> Is this how you work?

This is exactly how I've worked for a number of years now, for my home/personal/freelance work. Usually using a Chromebook netbook ssh'ing into my high spec home server. I'd do the same for work, but work usually requires using a work laptop (MacBook).

I've worked that way for 10 years. My current desktop is a 5 year old Intel i3 NUC with a paltry 8G of memory. Granted, it uses all that memory (and a bit more) for a browser and slack, and the fan spins up any time a video plays. But usually it's silent, can drive a 4k monitor, and most of the time I'm just using mosh and a terminal, which require nearly nothing.

OTOH, the machine that I'm connecting to has 32c/64t, half a terabyte of RAM and dozens of TB of storage.

> the machine that I'm connecting to has 32c/64t, half a terabyte of RAM

Ok I'll bite, what do you do? Do you think halving the number of cores / RAM would impact your productivity?

A lot of what I do is compiling, so for that I'd still be fine with fewer cores and a lot less RAM. But I also do backtesting of trading strategies, and for that I can use all the cores I can get. The memory is needed to cache the massive amount of data that is being read from a pair of 2T NVME SSDs. Without adequate caching, I/O can easily become the bottleneck, even though the SSDs are pretty fast.

My work takes place at a beefy desktop machine. I wouldn't want it any other way... I get to plug in as many displays as I need, I get all the memory I need, I can add internal drives, there's no shortage of USB ports or expansion - and I get them cheap. For meetings or any kind of work away from my desk I'll remote in from one of my laptops.

All that and my preferred OS (Manjaro/XFCE), which runs on anything, has been more stable than any Mac I've ever owned. Every update to macOS has broken something or changed the UI drastically and in a way I have no control over...

If I ever switch away from desktops, it will be for a Framework laptop or something similar.

This is interesting - in the sense that you are someone who doesn’t want the UI to change, but it’s really not clear what this has to do with the question or the article.

I'm not the guy above, but I concur with the sentiments. After a while, adjusting to trivial UI changes becomes a huge chore and unnecessary cognitive overhead. It's relevant, because in order to use the M1, you have to buy into Apple's caprice.

Caprice seems like a weird way to characterize an aspect of the Mac a lot of people like.

I think it’s valid to want not to have to deal with the cognitive overhead of UI evolution.

It’s equally valid not to want to deal with the cognitive overhead of various attributes of Linux.

What’s not obvious is why people sneer about it.

Well, actually I have a beastmode mobile workstation that gets maybe 3 hours of battery life on high intensity. And when the battery is depleted I find a table with an outlet and I plug it in.

Everything in the machine can be upgraded/fixed so it should be good for a while.

I’m not saying this to be snarky. I just want to emphasize that while M1 is great innovation, I put repairability/maintainability and longevity on a higher pedestal than other things. I also highly value many things a computer has to offer: disk, memory, CPU, GPU, etc. I want to be able to interchange those pieces; and I want to have a lot of each category at my disposal. Given this, battery life is not as important as the potential functionality a given machine can provide.

Which 2021 laptop has replaceable CPU?

That's 90% how I've worked in ~15 years as an SWE.

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