Overkill or Overpower for Web Development?
I recently decided to switch back to a PC away from my all Apple products. I have an iMac 27″ and the MacBook Air that I use both for development. Unfortunately the retina displays just mess with my eyes way too much and I wanted something with a matte display that’s a little better on the eyes. After looking through the lineup, most of the laptops that had any real spec to them were gaming laptops.
Out of the gaming laptops, the one that stood out the most to me was the Alienware x14. I was looking for something with a little more power and something that didn’t weight like a ton of bricks. I needed a laptop that was compact enough for me to carry around and work from. After looking through quite a few laptops, this was the one.
Since most of my work is done with Laravel currently (writing a book on Laravel), I simply needed Docker to work. The first 2 days didn’t go as expected. With my MacBook Air, I was up and running in the first 20 minutes of booting up my laptop. Everything just seems to work on it. If they only offered a matte screen option…
I read that in order to use Docker, you simply need to run the wsl --update command in your terminal, download Docker and start using it. It seemed to work until I started pulling images from the Docker website. Even something as simple as the alpine/git image could not clone a repo from GitHub. I downloaded GitBash to verify that there wasn’t something weird going on and it worked perfectly. I had to go back and make Docker work.
I tried Command Prompt, PowerShell and even download Cygwin to attempt to make the commands work. Nothing seemed to work. Just when I was about to write it off and return it, I posted the question on StackOverflow and a user stated that they had the same issue until they installed Ubuntu from the Store. How could I have forgotten that? I installed it and viola. Everything worked perfectly. I simply needed to use the \\wsl$ directory in order to open my project, but that was fine by me. I’m running all my Laravel applications on the laptop without needed to install any additional programs besides Docker.
The x14 handles everything as it should. The only complaint that I have is that the battery life is less than the Apple product. I know it’s a gaming laptop and it takes its toll, but that would be one feature that I would strive to improve. Overall, 10/10. I’m back on Windows and not planning on going back to Apple (unless they start offering a similar display).