Hacker News Reader

Comment by daibo | Hacker News Reader

Nothing wrong with that though

Mind you in that case a cheap Chromebook with a decent screen would fit the bill

In my mind, "decent screen" is retina-quality display, which limits things. I doubt a cheap Chromebook will have one. The Chromebook Pixel has a 13" retina display option, but why not get an M1 Air and get all the functionality of a real, mainstream OS. (Unless Chromebooks have expanded from minimal Linux using a browser?)

Personally, 15" is about the minimum screen I'll accept if I'm going to do actual work on it, and at that size I expect the choices to be sparse to none. Certainly not cheap.

Yea, I personally think local development is fraught with problems that remote resources solve quite well.

I personally think remote development is fraught with problems that don't exist on local.

Both can be true at the same time…

Worse case scenario too.

Yea it can be picking your own poison in some respects. My preferred workflow is something like spinning up a dedicated dev VM within your provider, install a standard image, then use a local text editor that's saving files over ssh or sftp.

I have found virtually no one has problems with "well I can't get this to run on my machine and here are the n undocumented quirks". Everyone is using a homogeneous environment with local IDE help.

This is in many respects similar to the idea of GitHub codespaces and other remote dev environment tooling that has started to pop up.

While I haven't used any of them, I think the general principle makes a lot of sense. You can also develop on very light local hardware, while taking advantage of an elastic resource depending on what you're doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com