What should be my next development “platform”?

1 points by intrasight 3y ago ↗ HN

My current desktop (on-premise, on my desk) machine is serving me well, but It's going on five years old. Today, for the first time, I started thinking about it's replacement. Got down into the weeds about Intel vs AMD, etc. but then realized that the first question that should consider is whether local compute makes sense as a developer. My local machine is really just a host for my "desktop" and "development" VMs. Is it time to just start using cloud VMs? What are the pros and cons? I know that a big pro would be the ability to work from anywhere. Currently I do this by bringing my VM with me using VMware Workstation Player.

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verdverm 3y ago ↗

Real hardware will be cheaper and faster in the long run. You can get pretty far with a $25 / month VM on GCP or AWS.

I just bought a https://frame.work Chromebook and am quite happy with it. Had the Pixelbook Go before that. There are probably certain things that will only work locally, like video chat. You'll want decent hardware even if you offload development to the cloud. Running virtualized systems in the cloud has limits, because the VMs are already virtualized, so you essentially have nested virtualization and they prevent certain low-level changes that would make it perform better.