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!
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.
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.