1. I like big, big monitors.
2. I prefer a full size keyboard.
3. I prefer a separate mouse.
4. I prefer big freaking disk drives installed.
5. I put the desktop under my desk, and with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, there is much less of a snarl on my desk.
6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.
7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.
8. I can replace/alter parts of the machine without buying a new one.
9. Desktops are cheap.
10. I can build what I want with parts from newegg. Premade powerful computers are always "gaming machines" and I don't want a gaming machine that comes with a graphics adapter that sounds like a 747 taking off.
11. I want an all-metal case because a machine caught fire once.
Edit: 12. My desktop doesn't have a microphone or camera, so they cannot be surreptitiously turned on remotely.
Only for consumer level ones. Higher end ones are "workstations" and can generally be specced from mid-range-consumer-level to almost-a-friggin-supercomputer-node. ;)
As a bonus, no RGB. :)
Examples:
* https://www.quietpc.com/sys-amd-workstation
* https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...
* https://www8.hp.com/us/en/workstations/desktops/index.html
I mean, hardware wise they are not much faster, but cooling is a different story.
Advantages of using a laptop :
- portability - I work as a consultant and I need to work on premises occasionally - if I had to switch between desktop/laptop it would be too cumbersome
- standalone when you need it - when I travel or am on vacation I usually need to do a few hours of work - I won't lug my full setup but I'm 100% ready on the go
- can develop for OSX/iOS with MBP
Disadvantages :
- thermals - I use a fully loaded 2018 i9 MBP and I have to undrvolt/disable turbo boost in office because the laptop hits full fan speed with a VM + IDE running and people start turning heads
- lower performance compared to desktop equivalent and especially compared to best available workstation
I'm hoping VS code and remote development setups (either running VSCode in the browser hosted on my desktop or remote tools) get sufficiently good that I can get a lightweight ARM Mac and then I SSH to my home workstation - feels like the ideal solution if the tooling gets there
You can have these with a laptop too. At home I use my laptop with an external screen, keyboard, mouse (the latter two are wireless), because it's much more comfortable.
It's not just the monitor being big, I want lots and lots of pixels. I'm currently running 3840*2160, and have a second monitor attached set up in portrait mode (so I can display a manual page while I work on the other one).
Of course, I'd get an even bigger monitor with more pixels if they didn't cost so dang much :-) How big, you ask? A wall size retina display! I've wanted one for 40 years.
My setup now is a laptop with the USB-C docking station. So I plug in one USB-C cable and get:
30" external display, ErgoDox Ez, USB mouse, bigger speakers, 120W power, Mic for zoom calls.
I know that purchase was effective, because a week after it was installed there was a big storm and power went out everywhere except my neighborhood. Just having a generator successfully wards off power failure, you never have to actually turn it on.
I submit this is objective proof that I am living in a simulation and none of you exist, you're just artifacts of the simulation.
I do agree with the other items, especially number 10. It's the one big thing I miss from having a desktop.
I also bought a chromebook just for fun for $150 from the pawn shop. I have a "build farm" of various computers with different operating systems in the basement for use when there's a problem with one of the D targets, but using putty to remotely access them.
This keeps most of the advantages (the processor is weaker on the smaller form factor thanks to the cooling requirements), while also keeping some size, mobility and power-saving benefits.
I got into this because I got tired of opening up the large cases, moving to a smaller form factor and external devices was much easier. I don't care for working on the move, and every place I'm likely to ever want to use the computer at will have spare monitors/keyboards/mice.
Laptops are for shallow work, not much else.
For you. I get all my work done a laptop and have been for a decade.
Also every laptop has a different - stupid - keyboard layout.
1) I have 2 "big big" 4K monitors hooked up to my laptop so no problems here. The laptop's monitor is not used as the lid is closed.
2/3) I use external keyboard and mouse. No problems here
4) I have 2TB worth of SSD in laptop and I also have huge external drives array.
5) Said laptop is sitting on my shelf, I do not even see it. On my desk are 2 huge monitors on arms with VESA mounts and wireless keyboard/mouse. Said laptop is also running NOMACHINE so I can also access my few worktations and servers without lifting my butt.
6) I have external optical drive but frankly I do not recall single time in a last 3 years when I had to actually activate it.
7) I have 2 external 10 port USB 3.0 hubs hooked up to 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 port of said laptop. Again no problem in this department.
8) Yep. Desktop is much better in this department.
9) Not my desktops ;) They're server/workstation type.
10) This is how I build my "desktops". No argument here.
11) I do not know what to say about it.
BTW, it sounds to me that your laptop setup is indistinguishable from a desktop, and your setup is even less portable than a desktop, so why not go the cheap desktop route?
I would love elaboration on what happened.
I had to wash the floor, walls, everything in my office to get the stink out.
Replaced the mobo and graphics card and I was back in business, but this time I bought some sheet steel and set the computer on that, which hopefully would buy some time to get the fire out.
The machine had a metal case, which I'm sure greatly slowed down the spread of the fire. So for me from now on, it's metal cases all the way, baby.
1. Not thaaat big, but I prefer sub-4k anyway: WQXGA support, with docking station more than one - check
2. External keyboard - check
3. Check
4. Two M2 1TB Samsung + one 500GB SATA + optional external drives of similar sizes. More than enough
5. Admitted, docking station for some cases and connections.
6. Not anymore, USB bootable devices for the rare occasion. Other former reasons are more or less obsolete for my causes.
7. Docking station again
8. Lenovos are not so bad in this respect too
9. This one was > 2000EU - but will last several years as its ancestors did too ...
12. A piece of duct tape solves all camera problems
I am a consultant, the necessity for traveling around was partly responsible for the original choice, but even today I'm not missing much. I have still NAS-es with even bigger drives and DIY desktops and rack-based servers for image processing (requiring multiple GPU's). But thats me and my area of work. For most things, the laptop ist quite sufficient.
Desktop computing FTW.
Upgrading stuff and costs are both really significant for personal use (which is why I am typing this from my home desktop), but if money is no object, I just get a desktop-replacement laptop.
I hate the whole "let's just make laptops like tablets" thing, where "like tablets" means "no ports."
I need ports for all kinds of stuff, including driving robotics and interfacing equipment. Which is also why having a laptop is nicer than a desktop. It's really great to have a built-in UPS and be able to move my office easily.
EDIT: Just checked, and it's easy to upgrade RAM or replace the battery, and I have room for a 2.5" hard drive and actually 2 NVMe SSDs (they make 8TB ones) plus an optional SIM card and a PIV card and SD card and the built-in camera and microphone array are really nice to have nowadays. But I do love desktops. You wouldn't think 10 USB ports is that important, but nowadays everything uses USB, so it's nice to have for pure convenience.
I am pretty sure your computer has a microphone, because it most likely has a speaker.
... You can put a big disk on a laptop, USB3 hub, etc etc
I think main thing missing for me is a beefy GPU and maybe a bit more RAM.
I migrated entirely off desktops and went laptop / mobile.
Got happy as my current work benefits from me being highly mobile. Super glad I did it. Ended up surprised at just how much can do with a Note type phone and optional keyboard / track pad.
But, I never did replace fast and responsive. Just kind of coped and the other benefits made the whole thing worth it.
This pandemic has me rethinking some things and yeah, I want to build a nice machine. Want that workstation type feel and performance.
The closed computing argument holds more water every quarter too.
What we need is a reasonable battery pack, and software to throttle the machine down on an interruption. Make this package a couple hundred bucks, or something a person can just load their own cells into and it's bound to be a winner.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware-Area-51m-i9-9900K-RT...
In my case a mouse slows me down. I have to take my hands off the keyboard and reach for the mouse. The touchpad is right there where my hands are. My touchpad also have three physical buttons, which are very useful instead of tapping the touchpad (I disabled that.)
I really need a mouse only for playing (which I stopped doing on my laptop since many years ago) or to try out some very rare sites linked to HN. It doesn't happen every year.
This is probably the only ergonomics pro of a laptop (except that I carry it with me, of course). Just in case I'll need a separate keyboard again, does anybody know of a good full size one with a touchpad under the space bar and physical buttons? I googled and found many keyboards with a touchpad in place of the number pad or further to the right. By the way, the number pad is not important for me. I'd love not to have it on my 15" laptop. I can keep it there on an external keyboard, but it's extra travel for my right hand if I really have to use a mouse and I never use it anyway.
13. I'd like to work on some spreadsheets from my couch.
Damn...guess I'll buy a laptop again.
You can buy fairly powerful desktops configured with just the on chip graphics or inexpensive business class graphics cards.
I'll add a '13' to your list.
13. Bluetooth is evil, and any desktop I have seen with Bluetooth had it on a mini-pcie card, and could be yanked. My desktop is always cabled via 1Gb Ethernet, so if yanking the BT also loses the WiFi, I don't really care.
If you are using wireless keyboards/mice, I don't know if the logitech adapters are more or less secure than BT. That could be an entire separate thread.
4. The size of the drive isn't an issue; you can fit big drives just as easily in a laptop. The only difference is that a desktop PC can fit more than two drives.
I've come to really like the convenience of being able to pick up my workstation and take it with me.
To me, there's only one really, really big disadvantage to laptops: the noise. If I put together a desktop, it's as quiet as possible. Powerful laptops apparently can't be quiet.
Your points are all good but this one gave me pause for thought. We're all working from home and using our microphones and cameras more than ever. I'm using my regular laptop with plug-in microphone and webcam. Are laptop makers thinking in terms of upping the specs on the microphone and webcams in their upcoming models?
In any case, because of all my remote collaboration these days, I bought a decent mike on a boom to use, and my colleagues say it is much better. Still have to find a decent camera.
You can connect an external display to your laptop. That's what I'm doing right now. Similarly for 2 through 6.
> 7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.
The external monitor will give you more.
I think reasons 8, 9, and 10 are all legit. I don't think there are any intrinsic benefits to going one way or the other. It all boils down whether you feel the time you spend building your rig is worth the money you save.
It was able to be angled for comfort, etc. So, you'd be able to put a desktop somewhere (above? below?) and use it from bed.
No idea if they're still sold, but it wouldn't be too surprising. :)
Out of curiosity, what do you use instead? I'm wondering what the best options are for workstation-type desktops.
You can, until Apple integrates all the suppliers into their supply chain.
> 1. I like big, big monitors.
I've realized that I find it uncomfortable to use more than one screen, so I just use one 27″ 4K screen. But occasionally I open my laptop and put it on a stand to show some extra windows.
> 2. I prefer a full size keyboard.
My favorite keyboard is the older version of the Apple Wireless Keyboard powered by AA batteries. It feels really nice to type on it (maybe because I'm used to it.) I recently bought a brand new Apple keyboard because I thought it would be better (and I could recharge it over USB), but it's much worse.
> 3. I prefer a separate mouse.
I use an Apple trackpad, and I love it. I only go back to a mouse if I'm playing a game.
> 4. I prefer big freaking disk drives installed.
I have a 2 TB SSD, which is more than enough for me.
> 5. I put the desktop under my desk, and with a wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, there is much less of a snarl on my desk.
I like to put my laptop on the desk, and I only plug in a single Thunderbolt 3 cable for charging, gigabit ethernet, and my monitor. I really love my CalDigit TS3 Plus dock [2].
It's really nice that I can unplug a single cable and take my laptop to any cafe or co-working space. (Before/after the pandemic.)
> 6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.
I haven't used an optical drive for about 5 years, and I don't own any optical disks.
> 7. The desktop has lots of USB ports and they're all in use.
My dock has a lot of USB-A and USB-C ports, and it's in a very convenient location.
> 8. I can replace/alter parts of the machine without buying a new one.
That's a great point, and it's one of the major downsides of using an Apple laptop. I do have AppleCare, and Apple's support is really amazing.
> 9. Desktops are cheap.
That's very true! But I was using a 2012 MacBook for 8 years before I upgraded it, and I think I'll probably continue using my current laptop for another 8-10 years. It's expensive, but it's a very high quality machine and I think it will last for a very long time.
> 10. I can build what I want with parts from newegg. Premade powerful computers are always "gaming machines" and I don't want a gaming machine that comes with a graphics adapter that sounds like a 747 taking off.
I certainly can't do that for any kind of laptop (either Apple or other brands.)
> 11. I want an all-metal case because a machine caught fire once.
Nothing to worry about there
> Edit: 12. My desktop doesn't have a microphone or camera, so they cannot be surreptitiously turned on remotely.
MacBooks have a hardware light that turns on when the camera is active, and I haven't heard any reports about hackers being able to disable it. Although one disadvantage with the newest MacBook is that you can't attach a sliding camera cover anymore, because it will crack the screen when you close it.
The microphone can be surreptitiously turned on, but it's not something I'm too worried about.
>6. The desktop has an optical drive I still use.
for what? You're probably better off (in terms of both convenience and IO performance) to store it on a hdd/ssd as an iso and mount it.
2. Burning a bluray for backup. (I do backups on different media types just for insurance, and I like that blurays are write-once and incompetence and ransomware cannot fk with them.)
This quote suggest to me the author is an integral part of the problem.
Companies are ALWAYS trying to increase their profitability. If they can lock down the computer, they can drop the price while _increasing_ CLTV.
That’s why System76 is more expensive. They’re NOT overpriced. They’re priced as “general purpose computers” must be to be competitive.
I agree with this author, but this suggests that the strength of his conviction is maybe $400.
Are these laptops more expensive than a similarly spec'd mainstream alternative? Yes. However, as is the point of the article, you're really not buying the laptop for the specs.
Unfortunately, the desire for open source being rather niche, these companies do not benefit from the economies of scale a mainstream brand enjoys. AND these companies are not positioning themselves to profit from their customers recurringly through cloud memberships, app stores, microtransactions, and the likes.
At home, though, I do run a slightly modified old Dell desktop that I bought on Craigslist for basically nothing, and for daily work I much much prefer it to any laptop. So yeah, old desktops and S76 FTW.
Other than that, it meets all the Free source and ergonomic thin laptop requirements for $200.
My ideal setup is something like that as a client, and a bunch of high end machines located far away from my desk.
That said, sure making your own desktop is also an option.
One is they don't get the volume.
Second is they don't get kickbacks for bundling an operating system, or other software or make a profit collecting data. This is probably $50 per machine.
Mainstream manufacturers have to deal with consumers who know nothing about computers. They expect full support. They will also follow directions on any website without knowing what they're doing, and mess things up. The move to lock down computers isn't really a Big Brother conspiracy to prevent us from doing things on our computers that The Man doesn't want us to. It's a safety measure to stop inexperienced users bricking their machines and demanding support fix it.
Purism (and others) sell "overpriced" computers to people who know what we're doing. When I had a problem on my Purism laptop, they told me to unscrew the back and check the connections. That's not something that Dell can do with their customers.
I think they'll always stay "overpriced", partly because we're happy paying for the extra freedom. And partly so that they don't become mainstream and end up with a huge support overhead.
Given that the author's demands are being met, exactly, by Purism (etc), then I don't think he gets to complain that it's "too expensive" - that's not how markets work. You have a niche need, you pay a niche price. Stop with the Big Brother conspiracy theories and pay the extra cash to get the specific thing you want.
How much? I bet it's not much.
> That’s why System76 is more expensive. They’re NOT overpriced. They’re priced as “general purpose computers” must be to be competitive.
They're so much more expensive because they're niche. Not because of anything inherent to the product or producing it.
So "overpriced" sounds fair to me.
> I agree with this author, but this suggests that the strength of his conviction is maybe $400.
Is that not enough? If you can spread the word enough, and get enough people that are willing to spend $50 extra, you'll find plenty of companies begging for that money. The profit margin for building computers is bad.
I'm yet to find a decent laptop in this range that's max 14.5"@min 1440p (I don't even need 4k!) and support for 24GB RAM.
Librem 14 is not even launched yet and only has a 1080p option.
They're distracting people from the real problem, and doing so is harmful.
I forget what all of the main players are right now, but I know I’ve read on at least 2 of these types of open hardware companies’ sites how they scrub the intel ME all but completely out of the machine. That’s kind of the whole point, and they advertise that pretty conspicuously in their marketing.
If I didn’t start using a (17”, 3lb!) LG Gram laptop right around the time before I learned about open firmware, I would probably use a system76 laptop. For right now, the LG is just so damn light for that huge beautiful screen.....i’ve ruined myself and can’t switch to anything else until further notice unless another manufacturer makes a similarly ridiculous screensize:weight-ratio’d laptop lol (pine, purism, s76...you listening?)
Correction: Has Ended. The vast majority of people using computers has shifted to phones and tablets. I have a friend who's a millenial who barely knows how to use his desktop PC (It's a Mac) but is fluent on his iPad/iPhone.
Most people are not content creators, they are consumers. The people who are still building their own PC's are mostly enthusiasts. There's no profit in building custom PC's anymore, so local computer shops aren't selling them (And if they are, it's at a hefty premium).
The author of the article calls the 1980's the "Golden era" of personal computing. I disagree. Networked computing is an amazing thing, but it's also been monetized and now the consumers are the product being sold. And happily so. The outliers are those who buy pre-2012 computers so they can skip UEFI and are happy to live under their rocks to do it. That's okay with me.
Personally I need a faster computer than that, so I'm stuck with UEFI and because W10 is the right OS for my needs, I'm stuck with it phoning home. This doesn't mean the golden age was in the 80's or 90's. It means that by the time we figured out how to make computing awesome, we also figured out how to make computing itself profitable, not just the computers. The golden age the could have been, never was.
For people who actually care, I think the concerns are overblown and we'll always have access to a machine that can run open software.
And yes sure, we might not be able to pay consumer prices for them, but they are not going anywhere.
And sure, we might elect a fascist government which will simply ban the technology, or the west will go to war with China making it very difficult to manufacture anything. Unlikely.
Before social media, the average person had little to no interest in the internet - or PCs in general - aside from email and instant messaging apps. The internet has changed, but it's 99.9% because more people are using it, and their interests and needs are best served by 'it just works'.
This change, along with progress in general, has also made life better for technical folks. General purpose computing is dead? Come on. Desktop Linux actually works. Municipal fiber is a thing. Capable enterprise hardware is available online for less than a second hand iPhone, and if you don't have a couple of hundred to spend, a VPS costs less than a hamburger.
What makes you so sure the restrictions will stop somewhere you're comfortable with? What happens when unlocked machines are only available to "enterprise" (not unlike a certain Windows version), and you have to agree to audits when buying them? What chance do free operating systems stand, when 99% of users don't even have access to computers that could run them?
We need not worry as long as somewhere, in some dark basement, a sysadmin is able to assemble an unlocked personal computer from his company's old hardware?
This worries me not because of any open computing concerns, but because of how FUNDAMENTAL general purpose computers are to nearly every decent paying professional job out there. All of them. No one daily drives Excel or Salesforce One or edits video or codes websites or balances accounts in Quickbooks on an iPad. Literally no one; we're decades away from that being mainstream, if it ever happens.
Everyone needs to be computer literate. Being a wiz on your iPhone or iPad does not, in any sense of the word, make you computer literate. Kids growing up with these closed-off devices quite literally destroys the fire of desire for learning how computers work, or even accidentally gaining a glancing knowledge with them enough to hold a good office office job.
Companies like Apple endlessly mouth their desire to get more kids to code, then their arms release devices so closed off that even trying to take a quick peek at how they work triggers eighteen system integrity protection alarms. You can't have it both ways, Apple.
Well, whatever. I don't really care. It just means more ultra high paying jobs for me. Apple (and Google, and to a lesser degree Microsoft) are literally actively sabotaging their own talent pool, guaranteeing that they'll never be able to hire enough people while paying the ones they do hire a ton of money.
Apple C-Suites: "We want kids to code."
Apple Ads: "What's a computer?"
Whilst it might be me, somebody somewhere doesn't understand something.
I edit 4k video on my iPad, edit pictures, memes, do a bit of drawing with Procreate. I'm by no means professional at any of these things, but it isn't the tools holding me back.
I don't see any reason not to use Excel or Numbers or what have you on an iPad with the keyboard. I'm sure it would work fine.
I know a couple professional music producers who do the bulk of their work on a tablet now.
What hasn't made it to tablets is coding environments. Codea and Swift Playgrounds feel like toys to me.
But it's only a matter of time. I think "decades, if it ever happens" is entirely too pessimistic, it's more "now, if you want it", for most of those things.
And it's definitely not "literally no one". It's more people than you think.
We look through rose colored glasses because, back then, we were able to use Excel, Word, (insert your program of choice). The people in our social circle were also able to use them. However, this was almost entirely because of who we hung out with.
The shift to closed devices (may) eventually have an effect on hobbyists, in the same way that the average person no longer knows how to change the oil in their car, but for now there's little evidence that iPhones and tablets are limiting the number of young, competent programmers (or even the number of IT hobbyists in general).
And using locked-down devices will condemn them to that for the term of their natural lives.
But actually I disagree. At different stages in their lives, people do different things. Make music. take photos, and wonder why they suck. Make family trees. Various hobbies, that require working with multiple bits of sotware on on multiple projects.
Take electronics. It's a hobby. It's nuts to use apps that each store their data in their own sandbox. One app to draw a schematic diagram, another app to plan the hardware layout, another app to record calibrations and test results, another for photos--and other apps to record the project goals and plans, and the lessons learned.
If I couldn't use a general purpose computer and store all of these files (and others, such as manufacturers' datasheets for critical components) in a single folder for each project (not part in one app, and another bit in aonther app, and so on), I'd be using paper, a drawing board and a filing cabinet.
I think the author would have better phrased his comment: "What worries me as much as the end of general-purpose computing for hobbyists and hackers is that so few seem to understand that it is ending." reply
> Correction: Has Ended.
I guess I have a different definition of "General Purpose Computing" than you or the author, because personally I see the iPhone and iPad as the beginning of general purpose computing for the masses. The traditional PC was computing for the elite/ computer experts.
This romanticism of 80s computing as the golden age completely mystifies me. The 80s/ 90s were a phenomenally fun time for geeks like me/ us. For everyone else, a PC was a thing you had to learn a bunch of esoteric bullshit to use.
"For the masses", the iPhone, Android, and the iPad are far more interesting and useful.
Even if you look at more specific PC style computing, most people don't care about whether their bios is locked or not.
I don’t think this is true at all, everybody that has a Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / YouTube / TikTok account is a content creator. There’s a reason the term “browsing the web” has died out, it’s not about passive consumption anymore.
Writing code is just about the only thing you can’t do on an iPad. And while I think we can all agree on HN that having a gateway to programming is super important, you can’t expect most people to care.
Typed on my iPhone. In bed.
All the fora you mention are characterized by lack of longform text. What people are creating today tends to be image-heavy and eschew any long argumentation or prose storytelling.
Having just a smartphone obviously represents a limitation. For example, I am a member of some niche travel communities. A decade ago, when it was common for people to lug a laptop, there was a healthier community of people writing detailed blog posts on certain destinations, editing Wikivoyage or Hitchwiki, etc. Now that those same travelers are leaving the laptop at home and traveling only with a phone where it is inconvenient to enter much text, the ecosystem of travel resources is actually poorer than it was in the past.
Swift playgrounds will actually run quite large codebases with a little fiddling around.
You can trivially get a robust Linux command line with Blink and a free tier Google compute instance.
I agree there is no XCode.
Most (all) shops I have seen will sell you custom PCs for the price of the components. Unless you are talking about Entreprise ones (not sure if they do exist), most of these cater for gamers who are price-sensitive. But the components are the same, and you can pick an aluminum case instead of the RGB ones.
Even your example describes someone who, while he isn't fluent with it, actually owns a general purpose computer.
PC is better for long text. Phones are better for photo / media. Both have pros and cons.
There's also the platform. A lot of phone content ends up siloed into auto-suggesting apps, where click-bait (touch-bait?) tends to just overrun people.
People can now sit for hours just swiping on auto-suggested content. The same can be true for text (see clickbait) but you'd tend to access that through a web browser, where you're just a tab away from something actually useful.
That's where it's going to go, the security situation is not getting better. You already see it in a lot of political organizations where many of the workers get by with chromebooks. And for joe schmo, that's FINE.
- Most computers' UEFI firmware, desktop or laptop, allows you to install your own keys.
- And every computer I've ever heard of with UEFI will allow you to disable secure boot.
- Linux runs just fine on UEFI.
I'm worried about a lot of the trends in laptops and smartphones, but I'm not yet worried about UEFI.
So I was a bit confused when I read the OP.
It is true that the billion-dollar media companies have decided a subscription model is more lucrative than a one-time-purchase model for the mass-market content they produce (movies, TV shows, music, etc.).
But also unlike the author, I don't think my ability to consume mass-market media on my own terms is a moral imperative or has much bearing on my overall freedom. If Warner Brothers doesn't want to sell me a copy of Transformers 43 that I can play with VLC, I don't see that as much of a threat to anything I care about.
We got awfully close though. Had Linux not been popular enough back when UEFI SecureBoot started being adopted, Microsoft would require x86 UEFI motherboards to not allow the user to install their own keys, like they did with ARM UEFI (https://www.softwarefreedom.org/blog/2012/jan/12/microsoft-c...).
Microsoft has enough clients that require custom keying that for them, locking it down would be a financial downside without Linux being in the scope.
The question is how much of that is thanks to this kind of article appearing for the past thirty years.
It's kind of like saying Y2K wasn't a problem: it would have been a problem if we hadn't prepared for it.
With the kid, I want to get a motherboard, power supply, RAM and disk and build it all up to a prompt.
Then do Linux From Scratch on it.
Not practical for daily usage, but invaluable for teaching what is at stake with the stack.
The percentage of “open” devices has been trending downward.
I'll give you a computer with the following:
* 256GB of solid-state storage
* 6 CPUs @ 3+GHz
* 8GB of RAM
* Weighs only 200 grams
* Battery-powered, lasts 5+ hours
* 1440 x 3168 resolution display
I would have been absolutely gobsmacked. Such a machine absolutely outclasses every desktop up into the early 2010s!
And then you would tell me that it's mostly used to shitpost on reddit and Twitter and would be completely useless as a development machine, and the manufactures would do everything to make it impossible to put what software I want on it...and also it would spy on me everywhere I went in order to sell me garbage...
We took a wrong turn somewhere, didn't we?
I have an old PSP (PlayStation Portable) and whenever I turn it on I'm amazed at how fast and lag-free it is. This probably proves that the problem is most likely the software, not the hardware.
That said, they're not so hard to dev on. You can unlocked bootloader Androids fairly easily.
It's also a trade off between installing what software you want and security - the App store means you don't have to worry about (certain kinds) of maliciousness from software you install.
I just think it's a little bit of a spicy take saying mobile devices "don't deliver" when they are most successful form of computing in history by a large margin. I would argue this is for a reason and they provide enormous value.
My point is that they have incredible computational power that is often wasted on pretty graphics and other nonessentials. Pretty much all communication/text apps (except video) could easily run on a device spec'd far lower. The web is ridiculously bloated and full of ads and crapware. Just rendering pages of decent-looking text shouldn't take so much power. Even manipulating maps for navigation is mostly a 2d graphics scaling problem that can't possibly require that much horsepower.
But yes, my point about development does pretty much rely on having an external keyboard and mouse.
Here's a pic of the logic board of an iPhone 11: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/UNjifVHATsvaagZB.f...
The miniaturization of tech is absolutely astounding to me, even today. We're pretty unappreciative and wasteful, IMHO. 20 year old me would have been absolutely astounded that that much power was packed in that tiny space, and yet what it delivers is just marginally prettier and not more usable than back then.
Of course, you need an OS that supports that and provides a proper desktop-like experience.
Two aspects are important to keep in mind for a decision of this kind:
This machine is going to be your primary professional tool for the next several years - do you really care about a few hundred dollars extra? Especially if you have niche-requirements (read: non mass-market) like strong Linux desktop support and deep concern for privacy / security?
Sure - you could do the research and build yourself and pay less for the parts - but if you consider your time at market rates, are you really making a financially smart decision by not paying a small premium on the price of constituent parts?
Of course, I am aware of the excitement that can be associated with creating a custom build - if you are into that sort of thing: enjoy it as a hobby project, not because it is a better deal.
Humans seem to have a hard time taking costs into account that are not easily quantified.
I also really like the capsule firmware update mechanism, I’ve been able to use fwupdmgr to keep all of my devices firmware up to date, from Linux, without freeDOS or windows foolery. Additionally, the Dell UEFI BIOS supports booting right to the firmware update cab or exe, further strengthening the utility of a Linux-only install.
With UEFI I can set up my own boot entries and boot directly into whichever Linux kernel I like with whatever arguments I like. I can write a script that easily boots me into another OS exactly once. And it's a delight to not have to think about traditional bootloaders anymore.
Not sure I've ever seen anyone wanting secure boot. what is it actually good for aside from generating searches for Google when you have to figure out how to circumvent it?
I tend to side with others in the thread that the "end of general purpose computing" isn't a result of manufacturers pushing in a direction but rather following consumers. The percentage of computer scientists, programmers, and enthusiasts that consider the openness of their hardware a deal breaker grow smaller each year. For the rest of the population, they can find something that's general enough for their use cases.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for opening hardware up and making it transparent. But until we as general consumers (not just the fine folks of Hacker News) care enough to let that sway our buying decisions, this trend is going to continue.
There will always be general hardware. It's just going to get more expensive.
This is an even stronger claim than that consumers don't care if their hardware is closed. Consumers aren't begging for their hardware to be closed, and companies aren't passively trying to please them. The vast majority of consumers don't care if their hardware is closed until they discover something that their hardware is capable of doing that they're not allowed to do with it or something that their hardware is doing that they're not allowed to keep it from doing. Companies close as much as they can while trying not to upset consumers enough that they leave or complain to the government - which means either that they have to find ways to 1) add or limit functionality in a closed way, or that 2) they have to get all competitors to agree to prevent or allow the same things (to eliminate alternatives), or 3) they have to advocate a POV (and lobby for it in government) that whatever functionality is missing or required is dangerous to add or remove.
This is following consumers in a way; like building a wall behind them every time they move in a particular direction could be considered following them.
I don't think the assumption that processing power is decreasing and all devices are becoming dumb terminals is true, either. Moore's law... Look at the new chips released by AMD and Intel. Look at CPU benchmarks: the more recent chips blow older generations out the water... and there's no conspiracy to keep these advancements out of consumer's hands. Anyone is free to buy a server rack and build a small super computer (should they have the cash.)
What this article raises that I agree with is the complaint that many chips contain proprietary blobs that can't be inspected or removed. Unfortunately, technology like this is how companies try protect trade secrets. It's definitely not ideal, and backdoors + security flaws have been found in these areas in the past. I think if you're concerned about such flaws you really have to ask yourself whether you need to protect government-secrets... or whether your laptop is just going to contain your shopping list and other mundane data. Once you decide what type of data you're going to be working with. You can decide on an appropriate security strategy.
I doubt it makes sense for most people to stick to decades old hardware to avoid the possibility of having someone exploit (and risk revealing what would probably be worth millions on the black market) something in their firmware or microcode.
Thought the same when skimming the post. Creators, streamers, AI folks, Kagglers, gamers, some crypto devs, all have a desktop, mainly because of nvidia GPUs. This isn't news for them for probably a decade.
Anyone who consciously thought desktops were a good idea to move away from in the above case made an initial, much bigger mistake. (Again presuming it was a general lifestyle choice and not some necessity.)
It's as simple as answering the following question:
Would you rather have a) a tiny monitor with a bunch of expensive fragile dying-to-have-coffee-spilled-on-it shit jutting way out at you in the horizontal, always at a weird angle or too low or b) a couple of big beautiful monitors and loads of desk space? If you think you can have both, you're probably wrong. Even a nice dock setup requires you to do things like install brackets under the desk to shove your laptop in to, and disable its monitor lest it become a weird bastard screen full of junk you have no intention of looking at.
All the docks and laptop stands and extra monitors in the world can't solve the problem that laptops are broadly speaking, unpleasant to use. I think the only times I've actually been grateful to have my expensive and pretty laptop, are during power outs - watching netflix in bed. Though the whole setup is reliant on a well practiced construction of pillows and an external bluetooth speaker because no laptop has ever been made with speakers worth the power they draw.
If you can even remotely get away with not using one, don't use one.
Also for whatever reason the desktop screen market doesn't know about retina style high ppi displays. It's a shame, same with dropping 16:10.
Ignorant nonsense.
UEFI, while overengineered, allows for a computer-OS to tell the firmware how to cleanly boot it, so you can have several OSes installed in parallel without anyone stepping on anyone else’s toes.
Basically it simply and cleanly solves the dreaded and always unreliable dual/multi-boot situation which almost exclusively Linux users have had to endure, with Windows update accidentally overwriting their bootloader every now and then.
But who complains about UEFI and the solutions it brings and clings to legacy BIOS boot with all its warts and complications? Yup. Linux-users who are so politically opposed to UEFI that they cannot bother looking into the actual technology to see if their political opposition is warranted at all. Talk about FUD, eh.
It’s a sad sight. And I say that as a happy (UEFI booting) 100% Linux desktop-user.
The amount of people asking if they can upgrade the CPU, GPU, SSD/HDD or memory in their new-ish laptops is disheartening. Most of the questions concerns the CPU og GPU where the answer is no 99.99% of the time these days. 90% of consumer grade laptops have the RAM soldered to the mainboard too now. Luckily the HDD/SSD is usually replaceable or upgradeable in case of failure, performance problems or lack of free disk space... but for how long?
From a purely ecological standpoint, the laptop producers should be forced to buy back and recycle all their shitty unupgradeable, unrepairable, made-to-fail consumer electronics. It's a shameful situation we are in.
If societies can get 99% of glas and plastic bottles recycled using bottle deposit money, we should be able to reach the same figures for consumer electronics like laptops.
One thing that caught me off guard was the number of low end models with 4 GB of RAM and pricier models limited to 8 GB RAM. With Windows using nearly 2 GB on boot and a chunk being used for the GPU, that doesn't leave much for applications. Having a non-upgradable CPU is not a huge issue in my opinion, except the performance of low end models is astoundingly abysmal. I doubt that many of them could keep up with my 8 year old desktop, which was not a high end build at the time. Not only is the hardware disposable, in many cases it is intended to have a very short life.
Meanwhile, the rest of us just want to get work done: my Arch Linux desktop that boots with UEFI is functionally identical to one that boots with BIOS. So.. really, who cares?
It's a mechanism to lock down a computer to only run "trusted" OSes. Who gets to decide which OSes are trusted? Does Arch have lobbyists?
It's just one falling domino in a series of falling dominos, where maybe one day you don't get to run Arch anymore.
This stuff really can go either way. People were allowed to record TV using VCRs in the 90s. Ripping CD Audio onto hard disks? Dunno. Copying DVDs & Blu-ray onto hard disks? Definitely not. What about running software on a phone? Better "jailbreak" it.
> my Arch Linux desktop that boots with UEFI is functionally identical to one that boots with BIOS
Stallman agrees with you that you don't get anything from UEFI: "This is not a security feature. This is abuse of the users. I think it ought to be illegal."
He also made the claim, "Microsoft demands that ARM computers sold for Windows 8 be set up so that the user cannot change the keys; in other words, turn it into restricted boot."
Crazy?
> For logo-certified Windows RT 8.1 and Windows RT PCs, Secure Boot is required to be configured so that it cannot be disabled.
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
edit: Just thought of three more battles currently going on:
* Oculus headsets now require Facebook logins.
* youtube-dl just got blocked on GitHub
* Iranians and GitLab
Just like many other closed platforms of yore, or how in practice Macs of today work (their UEFI is, plainly, not to spec - a lot of hackintosh work is figuring out "what Apple did wrong this time")
Including approaching the booting of a computer as if it was still KA-10 and you were using RIM10B bootstrap loader.
Seems like UEFI make sense, as it is agreed upon by all large vendors like Intel, Apple, MS.
When an article starts with a statement[1] like this I know I'm in for a whine-fest about how everything sucks now and we need to Make Computing Great Again.
What the author wants is a ThinkPad P Series or a Clevo clone. I don't know why the author is making the assumption that a more modular, utility-focused laptop or portable device doesn't exist. They absolutely exist. Just don't be mad that it's a niche and that other people who just want an appliance have different needs than you. Don't be mad that other people in the world aren't necessarily any more interested in computing than they are in fixing their car.
It's also entirely inaccurate to say that the 1980s was a freedom-loving general purpose heaven. In reality, users still bought into ecosystems and proprietary technologies, perhaps even more-so than today.
For example, remember when you had to worry about what format your floppy disk was formatted in? Remember when the same productivity program on a different platform had different save formats? Remember when different platforms had different ports and physical connections for things as simple as a mouse? It's not like Amigas and Commodores and Apple ]['s were just oozing interoperability with each other.
When you've set up your laptop to be ergonomic to use, it's as portable as a desktop, so that one thing it did well, it turns out, it couldn't even do that.
Laptops are portable, when you REALLY need to be able to compute at some different place than usual.
They're expensive and even then, still underspecced compared to desktops..
My desktop has 20 tib of storage and 64 gib ram, has a 5 ghz cpu and it runs silently most of the time, I can't even buy a laptop with those specs, if I could it'd be super expensive and noisy or frequency throttling.
This is unfortunately going away a bit, but I still have many more upgrade options for a desktop. Now everything is USB but with the right adapters, I can still use those weird ISA cards I've got hanging around, I can still read 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, and CDs and ZIP. (and yes, the "easy" way to read those disks is using a isa floppy controller on a USB to ISA adapter).
Also, I guess I just don't need to move around that much, but when I do, I have a second-hand I7 machine with 16 gib memory that runs linux off of an SSD reasonably well, if I need "performance".. If I only need connectivity, I'm using a this small blue HP StreamBook 11 that I bought for around $200 years ago, it also runs Linux well enough, but it's pretty much limited to running a terminal and ssh.
I do get a little nervous being without a computer when I'm on holiday 5-6 times a year, but in 25 years I've never actually had to do any emergency work while on holiday. I think the risk is very small.
If the day comes that I can't get a laptop that I can unfuck, I guess I'll just have to work in a remote desktop on a VM in one of the servers. I can always keep the laptop and devices from chattering through the routers. I do have a real fear that it might become hard to find routers that I can install OpenWrt on, or that OpenWrt might go the way of Firefox.
UEFI, properly implemented, is a huge improvement over old BIOS. It isn't required to be 'locked', and I have never encountered a Windows laptop or desktop that didn't not allow you to disable secure boot within the BIOS. I am not as familiar with Apple hardware so I will not comment on that.
UEFI and it GUID partition layout is superior to traditional BIOS. I develop within embedded systems that rely on GUID partitions to provide granularity of storage. One current system I support has 34 partitions, to support redundancy, safe image updates, and soft recovery.
With UEFI on the desktop, you can implement the same strategies.
So those are two statements in the post that I found to be misleading, if not outright wrong.
On the hardware front, yes, current era consumer laptops have become completely sealed boxes. If you want to own a laptop that can be upgraded and maintained, you need to buy either a gaming or enterprise laptop.
For most people, and enterprise laptop is only going to be slightly more expensive than a consumer grade device. It is not going to be as slim and 'sexy'. It t will likely have useful ports down the side.
On desktops, as long as you are buying a full sized desktop, I have not seen any (yet) that are not completely equipped with appropriate connectors and cabling to support upgrades.
I have seen 'mini' systems that are completely soldered down, but that is the price you pay for small. Connectors consume real estate.
I got my first PC 30 years ago and never bought a new one ever since. It was always upgrades, small or large. Even stepping up MB and CPU I've kept my drives, graphics card, most of the smaller peripherals, sometimes even RAM, so even the largest changes are always in several hundred dollars ballpark. The process is fun, interesting and makes me keep tabs with industry.
I've bought a laptop when switching to "digital nomad" lifestyle for several years, and it was my very worst experience with personal computing. I've spent about 15 hundreds bucks and never made worst investment ever since.
I'm using a MacBook Pro from 2014, after putting in a new battery recently it still works great, and when I'm at my desk I plug it into a big monitor. Not as upgradeable as a desktop, but even assuming I can't sell the laptop when I upgrade it, it cost me less than $500 per year.
I've tried using multiple computers in the past (big desktop + MacBook Air, costs about the same in total as a 15" MacBook Pro that is much less powerful than the desktop) but I realized that the convenience of knowing that all of my files are on one computer is more important to me.
However, I have a nice laptop from work and I really like my work setup, where I just connect a couple ports and instantly have a couple more big monitors, a good keyboard and mouse and other stuff.
So I've really been considering replacing my desktop with a decent laptop at home. I've also seen some benchmarks that are putting fairly commodity systems within spitting distance of what my old workhorse can do, meaning if I invested in a decent laptop I could probably keep about the level of performance I have today, but gain portability.
Then in the last few months we got the new Nvidia 3080 line (with AMD's RDNA 2 coming soon), the AMD 5000 series processors, new classes of SSDs like the 970 Evo Plus which have performance that used to be what we saw with DRAM.
All of these combined in a new system are going to be an entirely new class of desktop performance that my old system won't even come close to touching and portable machines won't touch either.
So I'm thinking of going with a new desktop sometime next year once inventory and prices stabilize, and if I need it a rock bottom budget laptop for traveling. Target price <$3k all-in.
From a technical perspective not many laptops come close to my desktop's performance and if they did they'd cost way more.
But the psychological benefit of having a desktop to do my work on is when I get home I don't continue working. I lock my ability to do most of my job (DevOps) to my desktop at my private office away from the home. That means when I get home I can do basic tasks on my 2020 MBP but for security reasons there's a lot I can't do.
Maybe this is something to consider when making your choice? Let me know how you get on.
- Ability to show the internals (from a few feet away!) thereby spawning curiosity on the possibilities of technology
- His coursework can be seen on TV and ensuring that TV is not merely entertainment
- "Certified" media for him to consume (we don't have youtube installed in any of our devices so I use youtube-dl to download astronomy stuff for him)
I do not remember using a laptop as my primary dev machine in last 10 years, I use the same 10 year old c2d 2.5ghz machine with newer motherboard(2014-g41mcombo gigabyte) and enough ram.
The system runs both ubuntu and windows 7 at ease and I am not considering update in at least next year. that describes the robustness of desktop. It is not that desktop does not break, they do quite often. But mostly we can manually troubleshoot them, In 10 years I have fried a motherboard, bricked 2 psu, ram and 3 harddrives. Its that I can just fix broken part and get going.
Hardware upgrades are only required if you are resource constrained, like require multiple vm, or multimedia editing and some crypot type gpu and cpu intensive stuffs. Even in those cases desktop shines.
Laptops are really great for mobility and they are really capable machines which can be configured to comparable performance with most of the desktops but not in durability and flexibility.
I wish people interested in this gave it more of an in-depth look and actually played with it.
It really attacks the problem at its source in a way a lot of these other methods don’t.
You can use a desktop, but services are still going to be largely centralized. We need a from first principles correction to fix broken incentives.
Now getting some of that configured to use the cheap hardware is a more complicated story.
Unlike the author I do use recent Laptops with Linux. Like the author I like to actually own my machine.
I would never trade this for a "gadget" running Android, ChromeOS, or IOS - other than my phone that is.
Today I have multi-GigaHertz machines that I can't build the simple projects that I could use with my Amigas because I have no way to interface directly to the buss.
The latency of what present computer supplies is horrible.
It seems like the bit-banging abilities of these current PCs are as good as they ever were.
None of this is news but it definitely makes the development experience so much nicer, and I can play any game with max settings on it too. Building desktops is also just a lot nicer than it used to be. There are tons of quality of life improvements in the cases, PSUs with detachable cables, silent fans and cooling solutions, etc.
I realized I hadn't taken my main MacBook off the dock in 9 months. When I go out, I have an older one that I'm happy to use away from my desk. Since it's acting like a desktop now, I though maybe I'd replace it with a higher-spec mac desktop. But a high end mac mini isn't much different than a high-end MacBook.
It seems if you want a high-performance mac but don't want to spend 6k+ on a mac pro, a specced-out 16" MacBook is the best choice. Is that correct?
I do wish I would have gotten a bigger internal SSD (I bought it with 256GB, but have now moved most of my files to an external SSD and it's a constant struggle).
I've also now purchased an external GPU to drive my 2 4k monitors at home (it can do 2 4k monitors of text editing itself without struggling _too_ much, but it does run about 15C cooler with the eGPU), so it's hard to say if an iMac wouldn't have been a better purchase, but the nice thing about the mac mini is I can easily throw it in a backpack when I need to travel every couple of months.
If I buy another Apple laptop it'll probably be a 16" Macbook Pro. In fairness to Apple I usually get at least 5 years out of one of their laptops so can generally live with the premium.
It was awful on all dimensions, even the portability as the thing I choose at the time was not light, I used it at home only once.
Not worth it.
Whilst it wasn't portable, it was _fast_. Granted not in single threaded performance (they are all old hat nowadays)
But I could run a bunch of containers, VMs if I wanted and run slack and chrome (although I use firefox mostly)
New work has given me a fancy macbook. Which is fine, but I miss the extra resolution of the 4k screen (which I suspect is perceived rather than actual. I have very small fonts)
I also miss linux as a local dev environment.
My new Dell XPS 13 came with Ubuntu pre-installed (which I replaced with Void Linux) and for the most part allows for a lot of tweaking. When I'm at home, I connect to my eGPU unit with one cable, allowing me to use my secondary monitor, a proper mouse, and external hard drives (although internal is already 1TB SSD). The eGPU unit is a Razer Core V2 with a GTX 1060, which is good enough for VR games, which play well on Linux these days surprisingly. Then a lot of my stuff is self-hosted in the cloud anyway, like a media server, backups, servers for development, even an IRC bouncer. I also run my own smart home software on a raspberry pi.
So while at the moment this might not be typical for an average consumer, the trend towards edge computing will really make the laptop into an "internet appliance" as the author says, and the browser an OS. Hell, with 5G, cloud gaming for VR may even be viable, and then we're back to the equivalent of terminals and mainframes.
The only real issue then is the ownership of these services — I don't agree with the author that everything will become a SaaS and no more open hardware will exist. It will always exist as long as there's a demand for it, you just have to accept that it'll be more expensive and less consumer-friendly. E.g. I have to accept that I can't hotplug my eGPU on Linux like you can on Windows, and I need to pay for my servers. Spotify and Netflix will always be cheaper than any legal means of acquiring media otherwise specifically because of their size.
I was thinking of the opposite: the case being the heat sink. The Fanlesstech blog presents these sometimes. https://www.fanlesstech.com/
I don't know if it's enough to just cool the CPU (and using integrated graphics) and let convection handle the other components? Does the chipset or memory need active airflow over them?
Totally done with laptops, honestly.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we see a resurgence in desktop computers since all the places a laptop shines: coffee shop, train commute, working on a plane, aren’t all that important anymore.
From all features of pre 2012-NOW laptops the REAL KEYBOARD is what I miss the most.
I really hoped that Lenovo will make something more from its 25th Anniversary Edition ThinkPad (some name id T25) but from what I know only 5000 pieces were made and finito. Or ar least that Lenovo will PERMANENTLY provice a classic/retro ThinkPad with every new generation with REAL KEYBOARD.
That is why I still use 2011 ThinkPad W520 and ThinkPad X220 - to have REAL USABLE KEYBOARD with REAL PGUP/PGDN HOME/END INS/DEL keys block in the top right space.
Future looks very dark since years in the laptop space.
The more I look into laptop computing (and often computing in general) the more only single word stands out.
D I S S A P O I N T E D
I now type happily on my X1 Yoga. It’s a very good keyboard, you get used to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There are tradeoffs we all have to make, and I chose having new processors and things like USB-C over having a really good built in keyboard. I just settled for a good keyboard, not a really good one.
I know I'm probably a dinosaur. I run a lot of desktop applications for work, and run most my models locally. I use the shell to automate tasks, and rarely use the "cloud" and try to limit browser tasks.
What's funny about this post is that I'm actually in the market for a new laptop, and am quite paralyzed in the process. I can't get myself to spend $1500 on some mediocre machine where everything is soldered on the mobo, I can't replace the battery, and that will become garbage in 2 years.
All the pro desktop vs laptop arguments are funny. No one wanted less performance at higher prices. We want to take the machine with us and use it in different places.
I too have been considering going 'back' to desktop recently, but it's to do with the pandemic. Laptop died last may, I got a new one, and... it's still reasonably good. However, I've been far less mobile in the last few months, and that will likely stay that way for a long time.
I've been primarily on laptops for the past 12-13 years or so. Much of my work involves traveling and meeting clients, sometimes doing some work on their premises. This was not an every day thing, but it was enough that I considered the laptop the primary tool. And I would typically get the higher-powered laptop models when I'd get new ones, as it's the main day to day tool.
The last 6+ months have changed most of my movements. I haven't met a client in person this year. I don't expect I will for at least another year. If it's sooner, it's sooner, but probably not. Being forced in to being non-mobile, my thoughts are turning back to desktops. I'll still want a laptop, but price/performance, I know I can get some more from desktop, and I'm considering switching to desktop as 'primary work tool' in the next couple of months. I'll keep current laptop (18 months old now) and it will serve fine as a secondary tool.
I'm curious how covid will impact other peoples' decisions in this area. I can't be the only one in this situation thinking about this decision.
Have set up three USB-C "workstations" with montior, keyboard and mouse (USB via Logitech Unify) in the house: One cable dock for any of the household laptops. There has been some toothing pain, but with USB-C reaching corporate machines, these are quickly becoming a non-issue.
Have been moving the SO and kids to USB-C laptops over the last couple of years (used Thinkpad X's are great value -- and tend to get full teen approval).
Do you have any good dual monitor USB-C docks you could recommend? I’ve been wanting to expand my work station a bit.
I recommend that you take a look at the Raspberry Pi and other single-board computers. They're cheap too :-)
Excluding his exaggerated motivation, why would you use a laptop for real work anyway, when you can run a multiple monitor desktop with tons of storage, no thermal problems and a real keyboard to type on?
Personally I use a desktop 95% of the time for work. I own a laptop but I only work on it when I have no choice.
Due to Covid I moved away from our central office, but next year I'll have to commute there every month or two for meetings. Obviously I can't lug a massive desktop around on a train.
So I bought a customised Dell Precision Mobile workstation. It cost a small fortune, but I reckon I'll have this for years. The CPU will probably outperform my current 4790K and it allows more RAM (128GB) than my current motherboard (32GB). I can also stick a 4G SIM card into it so I'll have broadband pretty much anywhere I am. Ideal for these days of remote working.
I'll get work to buy a M.2 drive and I'll stick a VM on it and restrict work activities to that. If I leave I can just send that back.
I'm not sure I'd buy another desktop if my current one goes kaput. Potentially for gaming, but I don't do that quite so much these days. (Ryzen would be a temptation though.)
I have a low powered laptop for 'on the go' but I only tend to use it to take notes in meetings, and rarely if never use it for work.
Gone are the days of buying a 2k-3k laptop every 18 months and being disappointed with the performance!
My solution: run desktops at home as your own private cloud and use them in various ways from you laptop or phone. Create your own services or use oss services to fulfill your needs from your thin internet devices, no middle man/woman needed, use your desktop/s anywhere. This won't solve your uefi problem if you use modern laptops, nor will it solve your usb 2.0 problem if you stick to old laptops. But set up your own services, don't let them take over! It's quite a bit of work to setup, but maybe it'll get easier if more people take on the challenge. (Disclosure: this is my personal pipe dream, and I'm in the early stages of working this out myself.)
On a side note, the open laptops you refer to can be more pricy, but if that's what you believe in, then support the cause!
I know it’s not a practical choice for everyone, but I’ve always maintained both a desktop and a laptop. The desktop tends to be both significantly cheaper and more powerful, and it typically also survives a couple laptop upgrades before being replaced.
I suspect a lot of the movement towards laptops was and is due to the desire to run macOS. It just so happens that Apple desktop computers are either way underpowered or way expensive. An MBP is basically the sanest way to run macOS. So MBPs tend to become makeshift portable desktops, with external screens, keyboard, mice / trackpads, power bricks, and cooling pads.
If your work processes are not beholden to Apple software, building (or ordering a customized) desktop is a refreshing gulp of power. You suddenly can afford much more, or spend way less.
I'm writing this from a Linux desktop, and I'm quite content with it.
Use a server! , You can get cheap used, Dual Xeons 12 cores, with like 128G of ram on ebay for about 1000$
And that's not the only thing you get compared to a regular desktop you get:
- IPMI
- Dual Power supply
- Hot swappable drives!
- ECC Ram (nice for zfs)
- A decent Motherboard with PCI extensions
Thanks to Fiber Optic based DisplayPort cables, I have my server 30 ft away from me in the basement. My work area is dead silent!
Note I also use a usb extender and a usb DAC, so I got 2 long cables and I get keyb/mouse/audio and 4K 60Hz video.
I think a comparable spec new desktop would have cost about 5-10k..
With the savings I was able to get a PCI card with NVME drives, and 2x16TB drives and that was still cheaper :)
I had desktops for a while. Then I decided to switch to laptop and bought latest Thinkpad X1 Extreme (at a time). It throttles, it struggles to play even relatively easy games. Occasionally it loses connection to the lenovo dock and I need to restart it. It can't have more than 3 monitors.
When the time of next upgrade will come I'm certainly going to desktop + some light laptop like my wife's X1 Carbon. I don't like macs and I strongly believe that Win + WSL / dual boot to linux are much better for development.
Also since you have a lot of computer science majors, and coding is a thing everyone knows about (?), it seems like there will always be a sizable portion that will need proper computers and a proper OS that isn't just a "device". I mean without programmers and technical people in the future the companies themselves will not be able to run so there must always be proper options for those who want it
I'm also using old laptops (T500s) so that I can replace Intel's firmware with libreboot and also install alternative wireless cards.
The USB 2.0 thing is a problem, and reading this article made me think that there might be a way around that, and sure enough, you can get a PCMCIA card with USB 3.0 ports[1].
I know this isn't a long term solution, but it might be an immediate solution to the time spent making backups.
[1]https://www.newegg.com/p/17Z-00GU-00075?Description=PCMCIA%2...
All that said, I have moved 100% away from desktops. I really do like to be able to work outside (two areas to choose from), kitchen table next to our parrot’s cage, living room, or bedroom. Sometimes I need to work while traveling.
Finally, iPad Pros (or similar products) are simply better devices for reading, doing research, and watching entertainment.
A beefy desktop computer - high performance/$ CPU and GPU with several terabytes of storage so I could not worry about how much stuff I download and have several OSes installed without having to shortchange some on storage.
A netbook - one of those 10"-screen dinky little things that had just enough compute to run some basic desktop stuff. I would use this as a remote terminal to the desktop so I could still use the desktop's power from my couch.
As wifi speeds have increased, netbooks have all but disappeared and laptops mostly suck, I'm seriously considering this again, but instead of a netbook I'd jerry-rig a Raspberry Pi into a "laptop".
I've always used self-built desktop towers. When it's time to upgrade we build them five or ten at a time so every system matches. It makes for a much simpler build and bring-up experience.
In this case I needed to continue working, and so I decided to task two HP laptops on the network as external processors for the FEA tool. I have to say, they worked great for about four weeks. During that time they experienced about 18 hours per day of continuous processing. Fun while it lasted.
What these people usually don't get is that computer at the end of the day is just a tool. It is a means to an end not the goal. Having a powerful computer for the sake of having a computer doesn't accomplish any meaningful.
(it also means it can run Linux properly, not with battery issues...)
The rub for me is that I really dislike Windows. I use it for work - I have to - but it's not an OS I'd choose for myself[0]. I like OSX but the problem there is that, unless you go down the Hackintosh route (which soon I suspect won't really be a viable option anyway with the move to ARM), you have to buy preconfigured Apple hardware.
And then there's desktop Linux, which fills me with dread simply because I've not had great experiences in the past. Moreover, some key software that I need simply won't run on it. Notably Ableton Live. (I know Linux-compatible DAWs exist, but I really like Live and don't want to have to give it up.)
A decade ago, for me, buying a Mac was unequivocally the best option. Now that's perhaps no longer the case and, worse, there aren't any other great options that I can see. I'd be glad to be proven wrong though.
EDIT: Actually, maybe what I could do is dual-boot Windows and Linux. Use Linux for software development and most everything else (even Office 365 will run on Linux under Wine nowadays, apparently), then use Windows for Ableton Live and games. With UEFI it might not be the worst thing in the world to set up and maintain either.
[0] The main beef I have with Windows is that it just doesn't get out of the damn way. It really wants you to know it's there, from the dreadful multi-DPI multi-monitor support[1], gimpily inconsistent UI, the shitty 10 second dance all your desktops and windows do when you plug in another monitor[2], and crappy update mechanism, to the driver issues, WiFi connectivity issues, ropey audio support, instability and blue screens. And there's always, always, ALWAYS some random thing or other sucking CPU and running the fans. Don't get me wrong: every problem that bothers me on Windows also bothers me on OSX. It's just that on Windows these problems bother me several times per day, whereas on OSX I'm bothered by one of these issues maybe once a month. The upgrade to Catalina was initially painful and enraging but after the first couple of weeks, having upgraded everything, all was well again and remained so.
[1] Granted, likely to be less of an issue with a desktop system where you're likely to purchase monitors with identical DPIs and resolutions.
[2] Also less likely to be an issue with a desktop system, unless you need to use a KVM so you can share your desktop displays with your work laptop.
And as far as USB2 limiting backups speed, I would look at a NAS with gigabit Ethernet which any old laptop should have.
* A fanless Chromebook with decent screen for travel use
* An Intel NUC that is hooked to a big monitor, which is also the device I'm typing this on
* A beefy Ryzen desktop that sits in the corner of my balcony, which I usually connect via ssh and perform all the heavy tasks
To me I'm getting all the benefits of each computer, and the combined cost is still less than a so-called macbook pro :)
I switched back to desktops when the 1st gen Ryzen 8-cores came out and haven't regretted it for a second. Bigger screens, beefy specs, more connectivity, and all of it is incredible value given the price of some 13-14 inch laptops!
I can go actually as light as I would like on my laptop now, even something ARM so that's a plus too, if you don't need mobility and beefy specs at the same time.
Two problems, it has: Weight/portability for when I do need to take it somewhere, and that it runs Windows and I prefer Mac OS. I keep my MacBook Pro because of these but am thinking of making the PC a dual-boot Hackintosh.
I've tried VNC and other remote desktop solutions but the but the performance has always been abysmal, it's a niche idea and obviously comes with the network requirement, but I think it would give the best of both worlds when you need the portability of a laptop around the house, with the power of a desktop.
I guess plan9 tried this approach....
RDP is also fantastic (text is sharper), as long as you don’t need to play movies or games or something.
I recently stepped up the game a bit and built a homelab.
I don't care if most people move on to using dumb devices that limit what they can do: they are probably not the people who were really using computers anyway.
Everyone who wants a good PC will have one, nothing is threatening the existence of PCs and the esports industry will keep them alive.
As for a brick and mortar computer store? If you're lucky you live near a microcenter or something.
A couple months ago I got full ATX case with the 16 core AMD CPU, the best GPU out there and it runs cool, quiet and I just RPD to it when needed (prob less than twice a year)
When I'm not in my computer room I dont want to be using a computer anyway, so theres no downside for me.
Those three things taken together, with a well-targeted government intervention, could turn the internet into a walled garden, in the name of stopping scams/terrorism/child porn/piracy for the first few years, obviously.
A desktop would definitely be faster. My wife has a low-end desktop that blows my top-end laptop out of the water.
But I don’t play games, and need to take my system on the road, occasionally, so I need the laptop.
I do have a couple of screamingly fast external USC-C SSD drives. They work nicely, and are teeny.
The best camera is the one you have with you.
The best computer is the one you have with you.
But, I am annoyed heavily that I can't play some great games due to lack of graphic cards, and would like to investigate the whole usb-c/thunderbolt plug in video card thing.
That said, pretty much every point of WalterBright also applies.
I personally don’t care what boot stuff is under the hood if it can boot Linux.
Cloud eating everything on the other hand does worry me. Busy building a home server to get away from that a little
Because personally I hate to do 'research' with my phone. Of course on the go, or for a quick lookup that's perfectly fine.
1. 104-key is in my muscle memory and i'm much more efficient.
2. Laptop plus keyboard plus power supply = desktop.
3. By being flexible, I can use only secondhand hardware.
/linux laptop owner who paid up
It’s great!
I also had fun researching how to get the best deal ~$2,000.
I do use a laptop when necessary, on a plane, etc...
/linux laptop owner who paid up
mine laptop (T520) was released 9.5 years ago and I have no issues with performance after upograding SSD hard drive and adding RAM
Something like a Mac cheese grater is probably more power efficient than my custom built PC, but you lose a lot of the value going with a prebuilt system.
The best way to see this is to buy a watt-meter and test it while doing what you normally do. Also remember that two decades ago you'd probably have had the computer _with_ a CRT sucking several hundred watts constantly, probably with some nice incandescent / halogen bulbs to keep things extra toasty, and a decade ago if you weren't using a Mac you probably had most of the power savings features disabled for system stability and/or compatibility. By now even the faster components have great power management when they're not fully loaded.
This is one of the reasons that I ditched my desktop and switched to a laptop for my daily driver (moved heavy workloads to the cloud inc. gaming via GeForce Now, ditched all file sync tools to keep my desktop and laptop sync'd, etc). I can now comfortably close my office door and not have my office heat up to a zillion degrees.
Depending on the workload, a device that consumes a lot of power but also goes into an idle state much faster could actually use less overall power.
My plan is to next time buy the cheapest laptop I can stomach and assume the thing will pretty much only last a year and then move resource intensive stuff to a desktop.
Also I'm not ever buying HP again, they make overpriced garbage.
At this point I'm pretty happy with cheap small laptops and ssh into my larger ryzen desktop in my workshop.
I was actually shocked to see on my iPhone that I’m spending several hours a day on the device. I remember five years ago, my main activity when laying in bed was thinking about things going on in my life or sleeping. Now I spend hours in bed reading on my phone — and honestly, it’s not the most productive or uplifting content. It doesn’t necessarily better me in any way.
I agree that newer devices aren’t necessarily improving in the right ways. The MagSafe charger on my 2015 MacBook was a fairly innovative and user friendly design choice. It no longer exists, presumably to make a thinner laptop, but honestly — the weight of my older machine was never a problem. Apple solved a problem I never had, and I carried that MacBook to and from work everyday for the past 5 years.
It basically feels like a rat race where companies, to show value and drive earnings for their shareholders, are making pointless design choices with no real vision. Even the larger track pad on the new machine doesn’t really solve a problem I previously had. If anything, I just needed a more performant machine, preferably with a larger screen. I honestly would have preferred a better front facing camera, but instead, I have a thinner machine, different keyboard, and larger trackpad. We’re in a period of cheap money with cut throat capitalism — in my mind, the federal government have made all this possible and massively inflated asset prices. Apple’s stock continues to go up up and up because of this.
I’m singling out Apple for examples sake. They’re not alone in this.
Laptops have mostly regressed into consumer appliances; my 2011 thinkpad is significantly faster and has more memory than a 2017 macbook pro. The monitor (and I guess speakers if I'm using it as a TV) is better in the macbook; that's it!