What do you consider essential in a laptop for programming / development?

Cromulent · 2 May 2019 at 19:57

I'm thinking of repurposing my old gaming laptop as a Linux laptop for doing programming on, but since I have never used a laptop for programming (yeah I'm old school and mainly use my desktop), I'm not sure if I should upgrade it or not.

What are your requirements for a programming laptop? I want to be able to do Android development along with web development using the JetBrains tools. I'd also like to be able to run Windows 10 Pro in a virtual machine so that I can use Microsoft Office for my university work.

Cromulent · 2 May 2019 at 21:18

peterwalkley said:
What are the current specs ? Memory is the most critical, 8 gig minimum imo.

I've just booted it up to check.

Intel i7 6700HQ @ 2.6Ghz
16 GB RAM
Nvidia GTX 1070
250GB SSD and 1TB HDD
1080p Screen

I'm trying to decide which Linux distro to install on it. There are so many options out there. My favoured one would be either Ubuntu 17.04 or Manjaro but I'm open to suggestions.

Cromulent · 2 May 2019 at 21:59

I didn't think the laptop was as good as that. I'm pleasantly surprised. I'm downloading the ISO image for Ubuntu 19.04 to get it up and running.

Cromulent · 3 May 2019 at 14:14

Spunkey said:
I hate programming on a laptop. Sure it's useful for meetings, but day to day programming? Hell no. The keyboards are awful and the res is too low. Give me a mechanical keyboard and at least 2 1440p monitors, ideally 4k.

As said above, the main thing you need technically is RAM. The laptop spec you've posted will be more than you need for web/Android dev, the biggest pain for those will be the slowness of the Android emulator, but there's not much that can be done with hardware to solve that. In fact, that laptop is more than powerful enough to do Unity dev work if you felt inclined.

Normally I'd agree with you. I have a big desktop with three monitors but I'm starting a university course in October and I want to keep everything separate so I thought I'd use my laptop for university work.

Cromulent · 3 Jun 2019 at 07:23

dowie said:
Why is Microsoft Office a requirement for university work?

Specific to me my requirements when I was looking for one in the not too distant past was simply a lightweight laptop not running windows or at least dual boot... I tried a Dell XPS 13 initially and then ended up sending it back and getting the new model 13" MacBook Pro. Have been quite happy with it, resolution is fine IMO, not sure how much resolution one of the previous commenters needs for programming, maybe he's doing something w.r.t graphics? Plenty of cloud services out there too to rent GPUs etc.. for heavy lifting so don't really need a laptop to be massively powerful these days.

Microsoft Office being a requirement is mainly just out of habit. I've been using it for so much longer than anything else that I get frustrated when I try and use one of the open source programs.

I've just installed Linux on the laptop to see if running Windows 10 in a virtual machine is going to be fast enough to use. When I played around with QEMU and KVM in the past, I was pretty impressed with the performance.