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

1 points by jasmes 5y ago ↗ HN

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

3 comments

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mrverify 5y 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.

mrverify 5y 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 5y 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.