What are the current “minimum system requirements” for a coding laptop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26677888

by jasmes • 5 years ago

1 3 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Now that spring is coming I'd like to pick up a laptop to be use to work on light coding tasks outdoors -- mainly learning JS/HTML/CSS, which I've been using VSCode and WebStorm for.

I have a savage Ryzen based desktop, which doesn't really give me a reference point for what I'd need, since everything for this work flow is kind of immediate.

I'm OS agnostic, but I'm expecting a Linux distro will be best on light hardware.

Any guidance you guys have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

Stay healthy, - Jas

mrverify2• 5 years ago

You can code with the cheapest Chromebook available. Everything can be in the cloud, including your Ryzen desktop via VNC or RDP--linux/Mac or windows respectively. I had a team that did all of its dev work in our VMware internal cloud and then pushed production into the amazon cloud. You can, and I have done, good work on a Samsung Dex based phone plugged into a monitor with keyboard and mouse because you can either use cloud based resources or your own 'internal' cloud based systems via the web.

mrverify2• 5 years ago

If you like luxury, I hear a MacBook M1 air is more powerful than my mid 2020 high end MacBook Pro for 1/2 the price. If you have a powerful android smartphone, getting a lap dock will do the trick, especially if you can get termux working on it, although that is slowly being eaten away by android.

jasmes• 5 years ago

I failed to mention that this would be a machine meant to be able to run coding tasks locally, rather than via ssh'ing or using cloud hosted solutions. I'm not sure how that slipped my mind.

What are the current “minimum system requirements” for a coding laptop?

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