Most Devs don't want to deal with hardware restrictions. Its a lot easier to just get a good, general all rounder instead of coding on a dinosaur. Many lightweight distros barely have any meaningful functionality and usually require all interaction with the console to get even basic things usable. And quite frankly, even though you can do more with a console, its a lot easier to remember how to do things with a GUI then without one.
Older hardware generally means older, unsupported, unsecure drivers as well.
Also, I'm confused as to why you claim that you shouldn't outsource to someone else, yet you're fine with working in the cloud...
No idea how you'd run into hardware restrictions; T440 is from 2013, and I have yet to run into a driver issue dual booting Debian and Windows.
I don't understand the bit about the console; I haven't met a dev who doesn't find terminals worlds quicker than hunting and pecking in a GUI. Maybe an argument to keep general users on Windows, not really an argument against devs running a linux distro.
I was suggesting you should understand what's running on your machine and why, and if you do, that $2k mac isn't doing anything for you that a machine worth less than a quarter of that will. Whether or not you have a top of the line machine, there's still reasons to reach for an AWS instance with a powerful GPU attached.
> No idea how you'd run into hardware restrictions;
Hardware can become unsupported when you update the OS. It's happened to me with wireless cards when running FreeBSD on an old EeePC. Even when using xfce, having wpa_supplicant UI was much simpler than remembering and writing a bunch of scripts to set all the crap involved with getting it working. Not everyone uses Debian.
> I don't understand the bit about the console; I haven't met a dev who doesn't find terminals worlds quicker than hunting and pecking in a GUI
Doing a few clicks in a GUI can often result in very complex command executions in the CLI, sometimes across multiple processes. It can be confusing what's going on, especially with redirecting I/O and if you have to do something different, it often requires editing multiple arguments depending on what you want to do.
This is good if you want to script a common task that's repeatable and changes infrequently, but frequent changes in a GUI are much faster and you don't have to worry about copy/paste errors or spelling errors.
And if consoles were so much faster, why does everything evolve into a GUI at some point?
> I was suggesting you should understand what's running on your machine and why
There's hundreds of processes running on the machine at any given time. I would guess that most people don't know or aren't even aware of what and when each process runs at any given state of a machine.
The point is, with a $2k mac (which I would never get by the way), there's easy room for expansion.
> And quite frankly, even though you can do more with a console, its a lot easier to remember how to do things with a GUI then without one.
I don't know about this. Whenever I do something unfamiliar/complicated on the command line I copy every command I used to a text file for later reference. Repeating these actions in the future is as easy as copy and paste. If I figure out how to do something in a GUI and I don't have to do it regularly I will almost certainly find myself flailing and clicking around randomly when I have to do it again in 10 months.
Older hardware generally means older, unsupported, unsecure drivers as well.
Also, I'm confused as to why you claim that you shouldn't outsource to someone else, yet you're fine with working in the cloud...