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 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!
I’d strongly recommend against it. Nothing to do with specs or viability but psychologically you’ll want to play games - they’re enjoyable. You can work around that in a few ways: only use the keyboard/mouse for dev work, only play games outside the workroom, etc. it will still take a lot of self discipline, but it’s nothing compared to having a different OS, physical machine, etc.
In terms of specs - if it can run vs code, you can use the remote development plugins to run things on a beefier computer if you do heavy data work, etc. I don’t know if it will do video editing though.
I’d strongly recommend against it. Nothing to do with specs or viability but psychologically you’ll want to play games - they’re enjoyable.
This is my main concern, if I’m being completely honest.
But that also applies the other way arround. I’m a bit of a workaholic, so most of the time I open my current notebook on the sofa I start to code. Having a device without a physical keyboard may stop me from on working outside my workroom or coding during vacations, for example.
I have worked remotely on and off for years. Having a physical separation between the space where I work and the space where I play is an absolute must.
Beyond that - the hardware needs for development and gaming are wildly different. If you want something that’s going to be good at both, you’re going to either going to have to spend a lot of money or compromise heavily on quality.
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.
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.
Can you give an example of what you mean by a risky change?
The con is that it’s not very powerful. I haven’t attempted to code on a gaming handheld, but I’ve had issues with a midrange laptop being under powered. RAM is probably the biggest issue. My life improved noticeably when I upgraded my main machine to 64 GB. Granted I was doing particularly heavy work. It really depends on what you’re doing. You could get away with it for some work, but it’s going to be painfully slow for other stuff.
The ROG Ally X has 12 GB of RAM. That could be an issue if you run lots of VMs, docker images, big databases, etc.
1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C support DisplayPort™ / power delivery
1x Type C support USB 4 (Thunderbolt™ 4 compliance, DisplayPort™ 1.4 with Freesync support, Power Delivery
Connectivity for external devices seems good. Although it doesn’t say what resolutions are supported for external displays.
It is 24GB of RAM (12 GB x 2), but from my research, 8GB are dedicated to video memory. So it leaves 16GB “usefull” for development.
Also, display is not a concern as my monitor is 1080p.
If you end up doing this, you should write a blog post about how it went after a couple of months. It’s an intriguing idea.
Oh, for sure!
I did see lots of youtube videos using theese handhelds as “gaming pcs”, or from someone whose main workflow is office work… I’m having a hard time find any article about general development. At max, I did find some reddit comments saying they use a Steam Deck for gaming dev, which makes a lot of sense if the Deck is the target.
