How I Computer in 2024

Introduction

I love consumer technology, so it’s always interesting to see how people set up their devices to get work done. I try to be particular and reasoned when choosing tech solutions for myself. So after reading Jon Seager’s blog on how he computers in 2024, I figured I’d also write up how I use my machines today.

Hardware

Computers

This may be controversial, but I don’t have a desktop computer. Back when I was refreshing my setup in 2020, I was on the fence about getting a desktop. Ultimately, the deciding factor was that I anticipated needing to move across the United States for college in 2022, which would make it pretty impractical to have a desktop computer. This ultimately turned out to be true, so now I have two laptops: one for general productivity/travel/school, and one for gaming/more intensive stuff. It’s probably not the most economical solution, but this setup has satisfied my needs for the last 4 years. And as a bonus, it’s super easy to move my setup between Detroit (home) and Los Angeles (school and work).

Productivity Laptop

This is the laptop that I carry around with me everywhere: on trips, to classes, etc. For this purpose, I use an HP Dragonfly G4 with these specs:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-1355U
• RAM: 32GB DDR5-4800
• Disk: 1TB SK Hynix NVMe SSD
• Display: 13.5″ 16:10 1200p LCD touchscreen
• This might also be controversial, but I don’t use any external display, camera, dock, speakers, mic, etc. with my laptop. I find it’s just not worth buying this type of stuff when I’m not really at my desk that often. Plus, the Dragonfly has some pretty solid audio/video built-in by any account – more than good enough for my use case, which is essentially just Zoom meetings.

I recently upgraded from a 2020 HP Spectre x360, which was a nice machine, but it suffered from bad performance and poor battery life thanks to its 8GB of RAM and 4K OLED display (which was beautiful, but a real battery drain). I thought it would be nice to have a 2-in-1 device, but frankly I never really found myself using the Spectre as a tablet… ever.

On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier with a laptop than I am with this HP Dragonfly. I wanted an HP enterprise ultralight because of the amazing build quality and excellent keyboard. This laptop has truly delivered on all fronts: it feels super premium in the hands, has more than enough power for my everyday productivity and programming work, the 16:10 display is great for reading and writing, and the battery lasts an entire workday. It’s simply delightful to do work on this laptop, and the magnesium build means it feels like nothing in my backpack when I’m travelling.

This laptop usually sits on my desk at home, reserved mostly for gaming, virtual machines, compiling code, rendering videos, and other processing-intensive tasks. I have a 2020 ASUS Zephyrus G14 specced as follows:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 4900HS
• RAM: 16GB DDR4-3200
• GPU: RTX 2060 Max-Q (6GB version)
• Disk: 1TB WD SSD
• Display: 14″ 16:9 120Hz 1080p LCD

The Zephyrus G14 is also technically a thin and light laptop – it weighs just over 3 pounds – but I think ASUS did an outstanding job designing this machine. It’s light enough that I have no problems throwing it in my backpack with my Dragonfly for a flight, but it’s got enough power to handle just about anything I want to throw at it. I also have remote access set up just in case I need some more power on the go – more on that if you scroll down.

Others

Every day, I wear a Garmin Venu 2 smartwatch. I’ve been a smartwatch user for over eight years now, so I don’t think there is any way I could go back to a normal watch. It’s just too convenient to see my notifications and health data literally with a flick of the wrist. I use my Venu 2 to track my sleep, track my runs/bikes/hikes, monitor my heart rate, and much more. This Garmin watch has much better GPS, heart rate monitoring, and battery life than any of my previous Android Wear watches. Even though it probably lags Apple Watches in terms of “smart” functionality, I still feel that Garmin leads the market on the features I actually care about: access to health data, a great GPS that works in the woods, and long (>48 hours) battery life. Of course, it helps that the Venu’s price is a fraction of a comparable Apple Watch’s.

I have a couple Raspberry Pis, but the one I actively use is a Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB. I don’t run anything serious on it, but it’s fun to tinker with, and it’s useful if I need to build anything on an ARM system specifically.

Lastly, I use my Logitech K380 keyboard and Logitech MX Triathlon mouse all the time. These are relatively cheap peripherals but they’ve held up well over the years. Plus, the integration with the Logitech Flow virtual KVM switch is nice when I have both laptops sitting next to each other on my desk. I also occasionally use an Ember self-heating mug that I received at a conference a few years ago.

Connectivity & Security

I’ve experimented with mesh VPNs for several years now, but the solution I’ve settled on now is Tailscale. Their technology is truly magical, and I have everything hooked up to it: cloud servers, laptops, phones, etc. I have a self-hosted VPN in the form of a couple servers set up as Tailscale exit nodes and with V2ray on them. This works well for me; Tailscale exit node is super convenient in most cases, and V2ray is useful for circumventing things like airline wifi paywalls or the Great Firewall in China. I use Cloudflare Zero Trust Gateway combined with a custom script to have DNS over HTTPS and DNS-based adblocking on all my devices.

I use 1Password to store my passwords and sensitive information. Their apps just work on every platform, plus 1Password hasn’t suffered from security and privacy incidents that many other password manager services have. For FIDO2 and WebAuthn, I have two YubiKey 5 keys, and I also use Windows Hello. Termius is my SSH client of choice, so I use the built-in vault to store things like my SSH keys and sudo passwords. I’m looking into replacing this with the 1Password SSH agent and/or Tailscale’s SSH authentication features. Finally, Parsec and RDP are my solutions of choice when I need to remotely access any of my non-server computers.

Productivity

I pay for Google Workspace for my personal domain (@alexwang.net). Despite the price increases, I feel the feature set is compelling enough that I don’t mind paying $12/month for this. I just haven’t found any email solution for a single user that’s as good as Gmail and Google Drive.

I love Todoist and I use it to manage all of the tasks that go on in my life. It’s so simple and frictionless, but it has essentially all the features I need to keep my life in order. I combine it with Google Calendar (and Notion Calendar as a desktop client) to handle things that need blocks of time, and to collaborate with other people. Additionally, I’ve started using ClickUp a little bit to manage my teams – it’s easier to use for tracking large work packages, and for providing that visibility to everyone on my team.

All of my photos are backed up to Google Photos, while my files are synced using DriveFS to Google Drive. I used to use Seafile for backup and sync, but I found Google’s apps are just less friction and simpler than anything self hosted, especially on my iPhone.

Most of my notes are stored in Confluence Cloud. Confluence is definitely not the most usable solution out there, but the way it operates seems to work for my mind. Plus, it’s easy enough to share my notes with other people (as a webpage or through Atlassian). For office applications, I use Microsoft Office, especially Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Although their collaboration features still lag behind Google Workspace, Office desktop apps just feel smoother to use and have a more powerful feature set (e.g., better integration with my citation manager, Zotero). Word in particular is a nice place to just write when I need to do that. Plus, the Google Drive integration in Office desktop apps is pretty solid at this point, so I don’t need to bother with OneDrive.

In terms of synchronous collaboration apps, I honestly haven’t found anything that I really like. I tolerate mainly using iMessage, Signal, Discord, Slack, and Microsoft Teams, while adding Zoom to the mix for meetings. It’s too many (mostly crappy) apps to achieve a pretty simple task, and I think most people feel this way.

My browser of choice is still Google Chrome. I rely on too many Chrome extensions to switch to anything non-Chromium, while a lot of alternative browsers lack the excellent cross-device sync features that Chrome has. I tried Arc for a while, but I ran into serious performance issues once I started hitting my normal number of ~100 tabs open. I don’t believe in giving away my privacy to my browser, but unfortunately I still haven’t found a competitor that edges Chrome.

Development

I’m still in between the JetBrains suite (PyCharm, WebStorm, and DataGrip mainly) and Visual Studio Code for development. However, I’m finding that VSCode is taking up more and more of my development time. It’s smoother and less resource-intensive than JetBrains IDEs, while having nicer support for polyglot stacks. Additionally, I use Gitpod extensively for development. It’s super convenient to have a high-powered machine with an environment ready to go whenever I need to code, while being able to share running previews with anyone I need over the web. The Gitpod VSCode integration is much better than its JetBrains integration, in my experience.

For the limited design work I do, I resort to Figma. Windows Terminal is my terminal emulator of choice. If I need to run or host applications in the cloud, I typically use Cloudflare’s developer platform, Netlify, and Microsoft Azure.

OS

For four years, I was a full-time Linux user, bouncing between Ubuntu, elementaryOS, Pop!OS, and a few other distros, but now I use Windows 10 and Windows 11. (I’d have everything on Windows 10, but my HP Dragonfly’s Intel hybrid CPU doesn’t seem to play super well with Windows 10.) One big part of this shift is that Windows Subsystem for Linux has actually become pretty good. In my view, it works well enough at this point that I don’t feel compelled to dual-boot a Linux distribution anymore. I’m most familiar with Ubuntu Linux, so naturally it’s my WSL distro of choice.

I don’t care about customizing my desktop that much, so I don’t really mess around with skins, Wallpaper Engine, or anything like that. The most customization I’ve done is moving my taskbar to the right and installing StartAllBack on my Windows 11 machine to restore the Windows 10-style taskbar. I also enjoy using Flow Launcher as a Spotlight-esque universal launcher that doesn’t disrupt my flow (no pun intended) as I’m working.

Servers

I don’t have a true homelab (i.e., servers in my house), but I do have a collection of about 20 VMs hosted around the world. I use these servers mainly to run some web applications I find useful:

• Grist, spreadsheet software that’s a cross of Airtable and Google Sheets. It has all the relational database features I need, while including fun spreadsheet features like conditional formatting. It also has a nice RESTful API, which I use for automations via N8N.
• Keycloak, which handles SAML and OAuth based single sign on along with MFA for many of these other self-hosted applications.
• Paperless-ngx, which allows me to easily scan all of the paper documents I receive into a full-text indexed, searchable database. It’s reduced the clutter on my desk so much.
• Actual Budget, a super snappy, offline-first budgeting app (it’s envelope based like You Need a Budget). This has helped me gain more visibility and accountability into my day-to-day spending.
• Content management systems for my various websites – WordPress and Directus.

I’ve significantly pared down my list of self-hosted applications, mainly because I don’t have as much time anymore to tinker with stuff. I now look for applications that are well-maintained, supported by a strong community, and that generally work without too much fuss.

Everything is run in Docker containers with Docker Compose or Kubernetes as orchestrator and Traefik as reverse proxy. Most of my servers are backed up daily via Restic to my dedicated server in Winnipeg, Canada, as well as Microsoft Azure Blob Storage. This is probably much more redundancy than I actually need, but it costs less than $6/month, so I’m OK with this setup. It means I have the peace of mind I’ll be able to recover quickly if anything goes wrong.

Conclusion

I’d imagine this is far more detail than most people could possibly want about my computing setup, but it’s here anyways 🙂

Do comment if you’ve got suggestions for things I should try out!