Ask HN: Do you maintain two laptops for work and life?

I use my work laptop because I have an iMac with a huge screen at home where I do most of my personal stuff (personal dev, licensed software I use outside of work, accounting, storage, etc)... I end up having to synch both machines anyway when I'm on the go since I only have one laptop. Most of that synch comes from the cloud anyway. The benefit of having one single laptop is that you can switch contexts when you're traveling, etc. You can connect with work while doing your personal stuff. The iMac is where I store all my personal files like photos, etc.

If you need a second machine for personal stuff I'd highly recommend a larger screen. A desktop machine seems to be a great add-on to your life.

One laptop, but I VPN -> Remote Desktop into a work PC and keep work stuff isolated there. This works fine for development/Microsoft Office/etc. It may not work for all industries though.

The biggest downside is that it assumes a data connection, but given the development I'm typically involved in that is largely unavoidable regardless.

I do try to keep the Remote Desktop host clean of work files on purpose, in case it is lost, I quit, the machine dies, or I want to use a different machine on a whim. As long as I have my physical 2F key and a Cisco Anyconnect client I can work from any machine.

One thing to keep in mind if you use one laptop/phone, if there is ever a case / investigation against your employer your personal device might be called in.

Virtual machines for work. One per client, never cross the beams. Host OS is for own stuff.

I think it is highly dependent on the work you do.

If your two lifestyles are developer (work), and gamer (leisure), then purchasing 2 workstations to accommodate that could be prohibitively expensive.

However, if you're a developer by day, and say, love to work on your house at night, having a decent development workstation, and a simpler pc for browsing ideas and sketching things out, I would imagine that could be beneficial.

It's all about reviewing the situation that you're in, and seeing what fits your income and organizational needs.

Personally, I switched to a single laptop for everything. I purchased a laptop powerful enough to run WoW in the most vigorous situations, and something that maintains a semi-regular keyboard layout and proper specs to build small to medium sized applications.

Separate. On my personal laptop(s) I can do whatever I want. On my work laptop, things are somewhat locked down. Even if it was not locked down, keeping things separate is just a good idea. It's cleaner.

Separate. Work laptops and personal laptops. A better work/life balance is a benefit. It helps you focus when there's less distractions on your laptops, it also looks more professional.

If your work laptop is issued by your company and you work on side projects whose IP you want to continue to fully own, you need a separate home device. Surely you don’t want your employer to have ownership over your personal emails? Your contract may even have policies that when read closely or interpreted conservatively prohibit doing things like social media browsing, gaming, or online shopping on your work computer.

Even if you’re founding your own startup, keeping IP separate can be worthwhile from a legal and governance perspective.

I find it can also help with getting into work vs relaxation mindsets to configure the UIs a little differently to create a sense of boundaries between the two.

I do as of a couple a weeks ago.

Benefits as far as I can tell: mental compartmentalization (this is big; I wish I could write this in 24-pt red Impact font), makes writing off the laptop simple rather than having to estimate personal vs. business use.

Downsides: Travelling with two laptops is going to be annoying, expensive if you're paying for the laptops out of pocket.

This situation was kind of an accident for me, but I like it, enough that I might go to the trouble of maintaining it.

if you are an employee, then for love of god, dont cheap out and buy another laptop for your personal work / side project. My roommate who used to use company laptop as a personal one, had to go through a lot of legal hurdles when he moved to a different company.

if you're working as an employee then i'd recommend isolating as many devices and accounts as feasible. share nothing between work and non-work.

if you're working for your own business and there's any chance you might like to sell the business to someone else in future, it might also be a good idea to think about how to decouple the business from the rest of your life. (perhaps less value in isolating laptops than isolating bank accounts, credit cards, email addresses, *aas accounts, etc)

Dual-boot.

Its better to have separate laptop for your day job and your business. You can use a virtual machine on your day job laptop and back up your VM on your hard drive.