Frustrations with my MacBook Pro are leading me to re-evaluate my machine strategy. I've been hung up on this since before I bought this computer, but my experiences have sealed the deal. What are those frustrating experiences you might ask? Basically everything. And I just don't see any laptop computers on the market that make me want to stick with this form-factor even if I simply ditched the Apple ecosystem. Mobile computing has progressed to the point where I feel adequately plugged in on the go. But ideally, I'm unplugged when I'm not at my workstation anyway.
My current workflow is that I carry my MacBook around and then plug in when I need it. The process of plugging in is itself chaotic and annoying with my various cords (and dongles!!).
I've enjoyed the convenience of one machine so everything is configured and installed as I need it, but a more cloud-centric workflow is perfectly reasonable. I look forward to finding ways to keep things in sync.
I'm no longer a fan of "working from coffee shops". It was fun for a while, but I now find it frustrating. This is likely because I lead a team and workflow disruptions just make the whole process worse.
I work both from the office and at home, which is why I have gone with the laptop, but I look forward to having two distinct physical machines and not having to carry the laptop around!
I am excited about the change. I'll keep a lower-powered laptop around here and there, and maybe see where the tablet computing scene is going in terms of secondary machines. I'm rarely all that productive with my coding work when I'm away at conferences or something, so I don't really need the primary laptop for anything. I am still not sure whether I want to go MacOS, Linux or Windows.
Top comments (101)
I have completely opposite view on this - when working from home office I prefer the desk and big monitors, but I also need option to "bugger off downstairs" if little one can't stop coming up with crazy very important reason to come see daddy.
Not having to set up two machines the same way, and keep them synced up sounded like hassle, so in the end when desktop got too ancient, I just opted with laptop.
Also, working in busy coffee shop sounds like hell to me :D
Why would you want to limit yourself to these three?
I'm happy to hear other suggestions 😄
For any secondary laptop-type machine I'd expand to Google's offerings etc. but I'm not even aware of anything outside Mac/Linux/Windows ecosystems in terms of something I'd reasonably work with. I've heard of things like Redox, but hadn't considered alternatives. Now that you mention it, I kind of want to.
Secretly I would love to build a DEV-OS, which would basically be a developer-centric OS that natively hooks into your DEV profile for interacting more richly with this community. But that's another discussion altogether.
Do you have any OS suggestions I might want to check out?
While I'm happy to try various systems whenever I can, I agree with you that Redox is not complete enough just yet.
Being a developer, I can recommend Solaris (OpenIndiana or Tribblix) and BSD (FreeBSD or OpenBSD) though. Especially OpenBSD is a very fine desktop OS in my experience.
try HaikuOS (slightly Joking) it's ancestor BeOS was hands-down the best OS of it's time. I was gutted when Be Inc failed. It was clean, fast, had lots of software and a really healthy community. I'm gutted my C++ is not good enough to have written anything amazing for it.
Downsides are FF and Chrome support, virtualisation, probably a heap of non-core development environments and tools.
Haiku is nice, actually. :)
I started to use fedora this week, and i`m enjoying it so far! I was using Debian based (ubuntu), but i felt that fedora is better to install new programs and the user interface is better than ubuntu
Are you aware that the user interface is independent of your distribution?
I mean default user interface. My mistake!
Edited: in this case just about information Gnome 3
You can set the default user interface during the installation process. :)
I didn't know about that! Thanks about information!
The default for my was gnome 3!
Great observation man. Thanks!
I would actually disagree with the 'default interface' statement, at least in the case of both Fedora AND Ubuntu. With Fedora, you can get into depth and customize it, but if you wanted, say KDE, you would normally use the KDE dedicated spin. Same for Ubuntu, which also defaults to non KDE. For that, you would use Kubuntu. It's not always as 'simple' as 'just choose the ui you want' because many different changes have been made that you wind up with packages you dont need, may have conflicts, etc.
I would love this, mannn.. let's get started! DEV os!
Because they are the only mature and widely supported options that won't get your ass busted every time you try something and find out it's not supported. I've had my share of exotic OSes and frankly nothing beats Linux in terms of comfort... (And I've got other battles to fight that are far more interesting)
Wow! I started thinking that I'm the only developer without a laptop :)
I can only think of a small handful of situations where not having a laptop proved to be an inconvenience, but it was never more than an inconvenience.
Everything has a price and a value, and most Apple products have higher price than its value... meaning, it's not worth that cost.
I used couple of other brands before (DELL, Sony, Apple, Samsung... and many more) and I landed with with ASUS, and I can't be happier.
Random simple search in Amazon:
amazon.com/FX503VD-Powerful-i7-770...
Rational price with super high tech from ASUS comparing to this super expensive one from Apple:
amazon.com/Apple-MacBook-Laptop-St...
Maybe you could've got a much better laptop for the same amount of money, I use this little beast and it never fails me (even in RAR brute forcing or rendering videos), about $1000 in 2015:
amazon.com/GL551JW-DS71-15-6-Inch-...
You still can install any OS you want, or even better, with such a powerful laptop you can install the three OS(s) in VMware.
TD;LR
Maybe your problem isn't in choosing a laptop or desktop, the problem is with the money you spent comparing to the tech you've got.
Even if I’m pretty comfortable with any *NIX and I hate to waste money for this stuff, on a daily basis I still prefer to pay more for the Apple products.
Yes, they cost a bit more their real value, but they also offer more support and integration (in a walled garden way, I know). My last Dell laptop was productive for barely 2-3 years, my mac book air is still rocking since 2012. Not only that: I was able to repair the touchpad in 1h by going to an Apple Store, during a Sunday.
I still don’t like Apple, but its products let me save time, money and frustrations/distractions on the long run.
You can't legally virtualize macOS on non-Apple hardware though.
Would you legalize the macOS you use once a month to try an app or even test how safari opens your website :D
tbh, yes. My experience is that it's also instable and "vulnerable" to future OS updates if you run a hackintosh. I'd rather pay to avoid headaches.
I have to say I really like my Lenovo Yoga X1. I dont need adapters or dongles as I have plenty of plugs. I also have a touch screen and a pen which is amazing for scribbling/reading. I dont have to use any syncing software (had really bad experiences with that). I have a Thunderbolt docking station at home, so I just plug in one cable and have 2 monitors, audio, usb hub and more to work productively.
In my opinion most of the gripes are just caused by Macbooks being shitty laptops. I also wouldnt want from Coffee Shops, but having only one development machine is so much easier. I do have a desktop, but I only use that one for gaming.
For OS I would go with Arch Linux. I had a lot of issues with Ubuntu because of outdated software in the official repos. I had less issues with packages on Arch.
Considering that Arch in itself might require a lot of manual installations (of course, depending on what you're working with) I'd suggest Fedora instead. I've never ran into any sort of outdated software and the OS itself has never stopped me from doing any sort of work (something that happened with Ubuntu and also the Arch-based distro Manjaro).
This is why I love and use Antergos. It's basically an installer for Arch. I have a Dell 2in1 and it worked perfectly out of the box after installing antergos. Even the touchscreen and pen.
*Antergos I think
Whoops. Typo corrected. Thanks.
I made this move a couple of months ago.
I bought a NUC8i7HVK and haven't looked back!
Have a fantastic dual monitor setup as main workspace and now my laptop is relegated to being an exceptionally good movie watching device, and very intermittent working while traveling.
With a NUC + dual monitors + stand fits inside carry on luggage as well. So works great as long as you are staying somewhere at least 3 weeks.
I have a similar setup, but what OS are you running? I can't use dual monitors with Ubuntu yet because there isn't kernel support for the Vega M yet(well it's in 4.18, but that's not LTS yet).
Yeah it was a great few days realising I'd bought a PC that Linux didn't support yet. I got a pre release NUC through a friend who won at tournament.
I moved from Linux Mint to kubuntu with 4.18 kernel, and updated Mesa drivers. I update the kernel as needed, I haven't had any issues at all using latest kernel, even when I was using the nightly builds pre release it was working fine but now I just stay on the point releases and will go to 4.19 when it's out of RC. I was manually updating but then installed ukuu to save some time.
The message drivers are: launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubun...
Here's my thread from askubuntu if you want more information, little bit dated now but useful background: askubuntu.com/questions/1040440/gr...
Depending what kind of desktop environment you like (I really dislike unity and prefer the more "standard" customizable task bar at bottom) KDE Plasma is great and quite customizable :)
I tried upgrading my kernel to 4.18 once it went mainline on my 18.04 install....that didn't go well. And I have Gnome dialed in just right, so I doubt I'd move to Plasma
But thanks for the links! Things will be great when 18.10 is out(hopefully it lands with 4.18 at least out of the box)
Did you try using the updated drivers alongside the kernel update? I think that's still necessary alongside updating the kernel.
I aways worked in desktop, this year is the first year i'm using a macbook in my job, it's good because I have 3 monitors, but all the cables and plugs around my desk annoying me too, and some times I have to walk in streets with the laptop in my bag, in a dangerous city (y)
In my house i have a desktop, it's better because all the cables are hidden behind the table, its more easy to keep the table organized, the worst part is turn on all that and wait the windows.
The best part is the work still in that table, if I need to stop working I just turn off the pc and leave the table, laptops are aways still rounding me and poke my brain to talk to me at 2am "hey, i think how to resolve that bug, check that line of code, it's 5 minutes, the laptop is next to you brow".
Ubuntu has a number of problems, one of which being systemd which is a giant mess, others involving repeating issues where one could just skip a lockscreen by pressing Enter. What do you need from a desktop OS that Ubuntu gives you and other systems don't?
"Better" is not defined that well.
I have a VPS that I
sshinto to do 99% of my work - that includes coding, note-taking, running development sites, timecard-keeping, personal wiki, you name it - through the magical trinity ofssh+tmux+vim. Since I can access this machine from literally any device that can run chrome (via an ssh extension), my whole mindset around physical hardware has changed considerably.In its most extreme and reductionist form, my concerns can be boiled down to:
This 100% cloud-based setup allows me to start work from my macbook pro, throw it in a bathtub mid-unit test, pick up exactly where I left off (thanks, tmux) in the car on a $99 linux netbook, run that over on the highway and finish the workday on a windows desktop gaming PC. It's incredibly liberating.
Bonus points: your dev environment is identical to your production environment.
Reading your heading, makes me think of dismissing a laptop as a form factor. Reading the article, makes me think you want to dismiss the one machine for everything. As I can understand the latter, I can not understand the former.
I have a laptop at work and two laptops 13" at home (a linux box and a MBP2015)
I am so happy with the form factor: having a desktop was always a pain. I do not use external devices like mouse and monitors at home. My desk is zenlike clean.
I thought about moving to a Chromebook but hesitated so far.
If I am on the road, I use my mobile. I don't develop then, so that's okay.
I've been thinking about this too, but haven't got the chance to test it. I think the best option could be to have a bare metal system in a colocation data center like hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/e... and just ssh into it to make work, your client can be anything from a tablet or a really small computer like a raspberry pi.
The only downside is that you need to be online all the time. No way to work offline.
I only use my desktop which is a 27"i-Mac but was a custom built PC with Linux Ubuntu before that. I hate developing on laptops. They don't provide enough real estate for me. I also have dual monitors. The second one has a 24" screen. These two monitors combined seem to be able to handle everything that I need.
This past January I went out and bought the Precision 5520, thinking of all the work on my laptop I am going to do. Well when I was at home I did work on it, in my office desk. When I went out it sat in my bag like a brick. I never took it out. I used my phone. I find I never really do work while I am on the road. The only time I do is for conferences. So I decided to buy a desktop for home and an android tablet, just in case I need a bigger screen on the road. Lot lighter to carry. I really think laptop are just not needed anymore
Isn't it interesting how we move away from desktops because "the office should travel with you" towards laptops and now we're getting back into static environments?
I always find it fascinating when we go back to classic working themes as the technology ebbs and flows. Personally, I have a work laptop (which I take home out of habit), which I leave in a bag and never touch.
For my personal projects like Jelly Fin, I primarily used my iMac, but later wanted the freedom of working from my bed while watching a show, so I started using my old MacBook again. I was reminded of the pains of setting up a developer environment from scratch.
I know there are cloud IDE solutions out there, but none have really caught my eye. I like my setup the way I like it. I don't want someone else's interpretation of it.
As far as OS goes, Windows (if I'm desperate or if that's the only option given my employment), MacOS preferred (because it's a beautiful Linux), and definitely Linux. Linux Mint is my favorite distro. I learned on Debian and Ubuntu, so I really like those based systems. Linux Mint is just clean and easy to use. Highly enjoyable.
This would be a great separate #devdiscuss topic. What is your developer setup? What do you use? Hardware setups mostly, then branching to IDEs and whether you're cloud-based or not.
Didn't we have a survey about that?
So, I have a Samsung Galaxy S9+ and apparently, there's a device called a DeX where you can use your phone and hook up a monitor to it and use it as a computer. Can you imagine using your phone as a Linux development environment?
apparently it is not possible to use a phone as a dev-pc in any productive way, except u are using some sort of webIDE stuff that u can use with ur normal webbrowser. I tried so many possible solutions an it ended up buying me a s120 lenovo supercheap laptop. I know that it is possible to deploy linux on android. But what youre actually doing is, u run it in a container and then connect through VNC to your own device. and in the background is android still running. That is much to slow for a real workflow.
This is only useful for portable penetration testing.
greetings.
I'm not sure why you would use your phone to develop on it... Just to make the battery last 20 minutes :D ?
For me as a Student it was quiete a good idea to keep always a capable device around you. I got a great Android tablet and I wanted to use it for sitting in a cafe or sth... But aparently it is not really possible anyways :D
If you still want to use MacOS, maybe you can try getting the old Mac Mini 2012 Gen with SSD. Got one earlier this year, and its actually faster than my MBP 2015 16gb.
Just google/youtube "Mac Mini 2012 in 2018" and see for yourself.