In response to a post by Luke, I thought that I would give some insight my current PC setup, past setups, and reasons for what I have right now.
Background
I put together a pretty decent desktop computer 6 years ago, which would eventually evolve into an Athlon ~2000 (can’t exactly remember) with 1 gb of ram and ~800gb of disk space. When I went to college, I wanted a brand spakin’ new laptop, so I got myself a Dell 600m (1.5ghz centrino w/ 768mb RAM). Until recently, this was all I had. My desktop was sufficient for whatever gaming purposes I had, and my laptop did a pretty good job of running whatever I put on it.
Past Setups
I’ve had a lot of past setups with varying degrees of usefulness. Each setup has brought new experiences and has delighted me in several different ways.
Desktop (Win)/ Laptop (Win)
This was my initial setup before I started college and before I really got into Linux. I would mainly use my desktop for gaming / torrenting, while my laptop I used for going to class and portability. Once I started learning Linux and realizing that all my assignments for the rest of my college life would be in a Unix environment, I decided to put Linux on my laptop and finally start to learn it. It took awhile to get use to using Linux (Ubuntu was an infant and not very popular at the time), so I went through almost every major distro attempting to get my wireless card to work. I think I settled on Fedora Core 1.
Desktop (Win)/ Laptop (Linux)
With this setup, I used my Linux laptop for all my CS uses and my desktop gaming purposes. I also ended up using my desktop for non-CS school work because of Microsoft Office. I have never quite enjoyed using OpenOffice or AbiWord, which is why I don’t use Linux for any office-related activities. Another use for my desktop was for multimedia. Not only did I have better stereo equipment on my desktop, but I also enjoyed Windows Media Player. The only downside to having the Linux Laptop was that wireless at Purdue’s campus has never been kind towards Linux. Ever.
Desktop (Server & Router & Desktop)/ Laptop (Linux)
After I realized that I was pretty much solely using my laptop and had stopped playing games/watching movies, I decided to dive into how to create a router / webserver / mail server. This setup lasted for around 6 months while I toyed with DNS, CUPS, Apache and many different firewall applications. I learned to cope with the Linux media players, and decided that a stable wireless connection at Purdue was over rated, and pretty much only used my desktop machine for storage. I was primarily a laptop user at this time, working solely in Linux. The only game I played was Warcraft 3, which worked fine under Wine.
Laptop Only (Linux)
My server had started to become really flaky due to hardware issues that I believe I found to be a faulty north bridge fan (yes, I have a fan on my north bridge). I would eventually move all of my internal storage drives to external enclosures, and anything that connected to my desktop I connected to my laptop. I had an external mouse, 3 hard drives, speakers, microphone, headphones, a USB TV connection, and thumb drives. Every single time that I wanted to move, I had to unmount and unplug all that stuff. The wireless connection on campus didn’t help either - so whenever I did take my laptop to campus, I would be able to be on the internet for about 5 minutes before the signal dropped. This became cumbersome so I ended up not taking my laptop with me everywhere I went - thus losing the exact portability that they are suppose to provide. I sure as hell wish I had a docking station for this exact purpose. When I did take it with me on my trips home, it would take a book bag and 1/2 to carry around all the drives and peripherals.
My New Apple
Starting my senior year, I was getting tired of my current laptop as it was quite under powered for my usage and my desktop machine was getting really, really flaky. After the north bridge fan finally gave out, I decided that I needed a new computer. Yes, a $20 part made me purchase something 2 orders of magnitude more than what I needed to spend to fix the problem. I had around $2k to spend on a new machine and didn’t know what to get. I decided to get an Apple 24″ iMac for several reasons, but the most profound is that I wanted to see what all of the apple fanboys were raving about. With Leopard coming out, I thought that it would be the perfect timing, and I would be able to run Vista on it.
After about 2 months of using my new Apple, I must say that I haven’t had too many complaints. It took me awhile to learn “The Apple Way” of doing a few things such as menu bar’s and their use of ctrl/alt/apple keys. A big reason why I decided to go with Apple was because the OS was based on Unix, which gave me my beloved command line. I thought that this was the Holy Grail; I get nice usability combined with the powerful command line, what more could I want? Well, fast forward two months and I barely use the command line as it is right now. The mappings of the terminal aren’t the same mappings as they are on linux, and I find that they sometimes conflict with OSX bindings. I know that it’s something that I can fix, but it’s a hassle and nullifies a huge selling point.
Why I Changed to Only Using My Desktop
As of recently, I have basically stopped using my laptop entirely. One of the biggest reasons is because of the flaky wireless connection on campus, and that I don’t do anything on my local machine anymore. I guess I can install my LAMP setup on my laptop again to not need the wireless but then I have to worry about syncing up all my databases and start needing to do partial SVN commits for when I want to switch the machine that I’m working on - not fun. I think I’m going to go back to dual booting my laptop to Windows and Linux, and use Windows while on campus and Linux when at home.
Another reason for my sole desktop usage, my laptop doesn’t have the screen space that I have grown to love. I have a 19″ LG monitor, and a 24″ Apple monitor that has basically made me love screen space. Whenever I start to do development work on my laptop, I feel cramped. When I’m in full blown development mode, I can have around 3 full-screen coding windows + firefox + mysql query browser + command line, and still have screen space to spare. When on my laptop, I can have 2 emacs windows and my screen space is used.
I have also started using my desktop as my TV. Ironically, the software that came with the device does not work with Mac or Vista 64-bit (even though it’s Certified for Vista). I tested out Nero 8 on Windows and found that it has about a 3 second response time, which makes it 100% unsuitable for playing Playstation games. I purchased EyeTV and found that it is a great piece of software. It even responds quickly enough so that I can play games!
Finally, the ability to store passwords on my desktop. I never stored passwords on my laptop for fear of it being stolen. With my desktop, I feel a bit more secure with saving some passwords on it and find it’s very convenient. I also don’t have the problem of undocking / docking my desktop, I can just plug everything into it.
Conclusion
After several years of using my laptop as my only machine I have recently switching to using my desktop as my only machine. The main driving force behind this was the fact that my laptop was not really portable, had small screen space, underpowered at the moment, and didn’t really have a working wireless connection on campus. My desktop has become one of my greatest joys because of the mammoth screen, ability to use it as a TV, and it’s large amount of system resources which make my applications all the more zippy.
