Hello fellow devs.

I’m in need of a new machine as I had a little mishap with my notebook. For a long time, I thought on buying a gaming notebook as normally they should have the best hardware for my personal (gaming, light video edit) and professional (full stack web dev) needs.

Next week, Asus will launch the ROG Ally X officially on my country. So, I’m wondering if it could be a viable alternative.
The other possible devices would be ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme) and Lenovo Legion Go, as Steam Deck is not available here.

I work from home for a foreign company. I have a monitor, a wireless keyboard, and a usb trackball already. I bought them to use with a mac mini my previous company lend to me. I do not have a desktop and do not intend to buy one right now.

So… My questions: Does any of you have experience using a handheld device as a main dev machine? Are there any cons I’m not considering?

Thank you!

  • T JediOPAEnglish
    2·
    3 months ago

    To really succeed as a developer, I’ve sometimes needed to be willing to make risky changes to my development machine, that I’m not willing to do to my gaming machine.

    My plan is to install BazziteOS (Fedora Silverblue derivative) on the device to have a “stable” OS with all the dev environment on distrobox containers or something like that.

    I’m not sure if it’s going to work, though.

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      I run Silverblue on my work laptop. I haven’t really used Distrobox, I just use podman because I’m more familiar with it - under the hood though I believe they’re more or less the same though. But in either case, both work just fine on it.