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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

Silly question ; am I the only person who still uses a desktop / tower machine? Feels like I'm a huge minority these days, but when it comes to needing processing power and juice it still feels it provides budget and upgrade flexibility no laptop can match.

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I use a desktop that I can remotely access. So I can do development on my fast computer from anywhere. It’s always on so it’s easy to run long jobs.

Since my laptop is basically just a thin client used for ssh, vnc, and a web browser, it’s super easily replaced.

I've yet to find an offline desktop which can be secured, let alone work on it from a remote location.

Cant people detect when their offline machines are being/have been hacked?

If the desktop is insecure, it is always possible to put it behind a secure firewall implemented with a small computer, e.g. a NUC-like computer or one of the many cheap, small and fanless computers with multiple Ethernet ports that are available now exactly for implementing firewalls, routers or other similar network appliances.

Of course, configuring correctly a secure firewall requires some expertise, but it should not be too difficult to find online resources or someone willing to help.

I have done exactly like this for accessing remotely my desktop during the last two decades, without any problems whatsoever.

It's much like anything else... I run my desktop under Linux, keep it upodated, have SSH on a non-standard port with only public/private key access enabled for my account. I access it over wireguard running on my home server. Wireguard is the only port available through my firewall.

So I can connect to my home network over wireguard, and SSH to my desktop. VS Code + Remoting extensions work great for this... almost like editing locally, but running remotely. The integrated terminal in VS Code is invaluable when doing this.

I do the same, for the same reasons.

You are definitely not. Writing this from my work machine, passively cooled Ryzen desktop, which has been serving me well for the past 5 years. And I don't miss much having a laptop. I work from home anyways.

I think the demographics depends heavily on industry. I know many people doing 3D work and they all use desktops these days.

I actually built a desktop tower, and then built a laptop to use it from bed! Because I found that regular laptops were totally unacceptable. I tried to cope with a gaming laptop but could not. It built up so many issues over less than 2 years that it became worthless.

Anyway, I get all the "portability" of a laptop (with my display, keyboard, and trackpad(!) in bed), but all the performance of an honest-to-Arceus desktop, with a full desktop 12400F (boosting up to 5.2GHz on all 6 cores at a cool 130W) and a full desktop RTX 3060 12GB (I regret not getting the Ti for performance reasons, but for VRAM reasons this is acceptable since I do ML work).

My personal machine is a desktop, and I have a laptop that I use for light portable web browsing occasionally. But for work I've come to expect to be given a laptop. It means you can easily WFH, take it to a meeting, or hot desk, without needing to RDP/VNC. And neither I nor my company would want me doing work stuff on my personal desktop. I do know some developers who work by remoting to a VM instead (often as part of a compromise to let developers have admin/root access for development tooling)

I have a nice big workstation with heck load of cores, memory and a 4090. It's the only way to fly. Laptops are great for emails but toys when it comes to dev machines.

Jealous. I'm still trying to save up for a slightly bigger cooler to handle the 130W of my 12400F under load. It hits 5.2Ghz.

I noticed a lot of people switching to desktop during work from home. They have this gaming PC just sitting there, and it turns out to be way faster than there stationary MacBook.

Personally I use a desktop at a standing desk from 9-5 and a 13" laptop around the house/on the deck.

I'm likely going to upgrade from the Dell XPS 13 to a MacBook Air, but the desktop is a higher priority. She could use some upgrades.

I notice a lot of people using desktop in the office an having a personal laptop.

But also there has been a shift to cloud instances that provide the flexibility you say at the price of renouncing ownership of the machine. Especially for GPU-based computations.

I’d love the power of a desktop but I can’t leave my house with it

Wireguard+SSH+VNC works wonders for me.

Does VNC get laggy once you’re in more restricted bandwidth ie hotel/cell/etc?

Yes. I typically only need SSH so that isn’t a huge concern for me. I only rarely need a GUI.

Yeah, it's not great remotely... If you are mostly in an editor, VS Code's remoting extensions over ssh are pretty great as an experience.

How's the performance with 4K?

I use an massively overbuilt i9-13900K tower everyday and a laptop on the go. I remote into the pc when I need major grunt.

I do know a ton of people who live out of a laptop tho. I can sorta see the appeal depending but the lack of display real estate and how low the screen is and all is just a nonstarter for me for any long duration work.

And plugging up to a dock or what passes for a dock these days and external monitors and keyboards etc is a flaky annoying PITA.

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