Is it viable to use a gaming handheld as main dev machine? (bolha.forum)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by Jedi@bolha.forum to c/ask_experienced_devs@programming.dev

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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!

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[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 5 points 7 months ago

I personally, haven't been successful mixing my gaming rig with my main development machine.

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.

If I absolutely had to, I could make it work. But I wouldn't do it on purpose.

[-] Jedi@bolha.forum 2 points 7 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.dev 2 points 7 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.

[-] Hammerheart@programming.dev 2 points 7 months ago

Can you give an example of what you mean by a risky change?

[-] MajorHavoc@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

The big ones that affect gaming are removing and reinstalling various runtimes (C++, .Net, Python, Java).

In most cases just getting them all installed side by side by side is great for both development and gaming.

But once in awhile, I just got a favorite game working, and it relies on the exact redistributable that I need to upgrade, tweak or reinstall to try out a new code library.

After procrastinating a couple times from such experiments, I started running separate gaming and dev boxes whenever possible.

this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024

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