I do not know if Boston is unique in this regard, but there was a lot of company housing in the region.
Where I worked in Longwood (Boston), the offices surrounding me were massive, historic buildings with plaques commemorating their origin. They were originally built for housing nurses and doctors who worked in the area's hospitals (there is a concentration of hospitals in Longwood).
So in this case, these were built and used as housing before a later conversion to office space.
These are currently utilized hospital buildings. IMO, they are unlikely to be converted back to residential at this time.
I have followed this approach as well. I use a larger display from further away. I did get a deeper desk to enable this in my current setup. Previously, I mounted my monitor on the wall and moved the desk out ~10" (~25cm).
Either way gives me a greater range of suitable monitors, and they are all cheaper than going for unicorn displays.
Nowadays, I think it is doable with modern displays.
My 165Hz 1440p 32" (31.5") LG with 8 bit color and two external speakers consumes ~20W, measured at the wall.
My 14" laptop screen is about 19.8% of the area of that display. I have loosely measured it from ranges of ~<1W at min brightness to ~8W at max brightness. It is 1440p, 60Hz, 14", HDR (DV). I usually run it at ~20% brightness, which seems to be around 3W.
My office has the usual LED lighting at night or a large window + sliding glass door during the day. Not a dark cave by any means!
IMO (i.e, not an expert, only fiddled around with IC design at .18 micron in undergrad), no fast/cheap try-observe cycle.
Software for web? I (often) can see the finished product as I'm typing the characters in my IDE. Even for PCB design? The output can be acquired and tested under a week with low cost.
IC fab? Not cheap and not fast. All built on machines and processes that discourage experimentation on running lines, since even the slightest mistake can scrap weeks or months of work. Work that involves high pressure, high energy toxic gasses, and lots of them. Also some non-toxic elements/chemicals. Capital costs are extremely high (IMO, this is also part of why working with HW doesn't pay as much - capital costs are high, allowing employers to have serious leverage).
IMO, that is similar to: why the James Webb space telescope cost so much, and why many Mars rovers cost so much. They have to get it right, at almost any cost, because it costs so much to deploy them. Unless a fundamental change in costs (w.r.t. Earth --> Deep Space) occurs, the cost of failure will remain high and so will the costs of development.
For me it's probably Ghidra or Jetbrains IDEA in 2023. Both are desktop, thought I could see the debate on whether or not developers are considered mainstream consumers. I use them on Linux and Windows, so I definitely get value out of their cross platform capabilities.
I use Eclipse-based tools at work (again, I can see the debate). It seems like Samsung's Smarthings (IoT platform) used to use Groovy, but has recently migrated away.
I also know you said desktop, but a weak argument could be made in favor of the (also weak) JVM connections of Android. I'd put forth that some Android usecases are basically former desktop usecases.
For the ones that used later gen Nanos (same form factor as early Shuffles) as music devices during running/jogging, the Watch supplanted that role with the added benefit of combining the Nano and fitness bands (GPS, heart rate).
I agree, a full phone was annoying large and hard to carry (tried forearm straps at one point) and often ran without one. Though I know people who still ran with a phone anyways.
MediaTek is pretty decent in terms of open source support for their WiFi chips and SoCs, to the point of continuously supporting a long time OpenWRT developer (Felix Fietkau) to work on their OpenWRT device drivers. This is an effort that is independent of their closed source drivers for the same devices.
Doesn't mean everything MTK does shines under the sun, but in Linux WiFi, they are probably the most open and well supported in the modern age.
I started in C, and am still in it for systems/OS development at work.
In UI development, we had older C toolkits, but are replacing them with newer toolkits that are C++. I started off trying to just do C business logic with some C++ glue code for the UI. Sticking to what's familiar. In the end, it was just easier to do everything properly. All C in areas that are C. All C++ in areas that are C++. Same with C#. Trying to mix them is just more work than necessary.
At least I get to add C++ to my resume. There is a little joke at work, w.r.t. our existing codebases and code choices. They are career-driven choices, not technical choices. The result is a mess of a codebase, but I'm fully embracing that now.
So.... what happens when someone decides it's a smart idea to replace all of those commonly used functions that had physical buttons on the steering wheel with more touch buttons? Let's even say, capacitive touch zones? :D
I do agree that a good physical button arrangement on the steering wheel is quite useful.
On my car, the layout is quite good, IMO.
* All of the audio is controlled through a D-pad on the left side.
* All phone/voice handled through three physically different buttons on the lower left, accessible without changing how my hand grips the wheel.
* All car-computer/cruise-control through a D-pad on the right.
* As a result, any "type" of command is specifically associated with one hand, and one area of the steering wheel in particular.
As I've learned through a number of long term rental cars, the physical button layout can be bad.
* Many have the audio spread across both hands.
* Many require one to break grip to even do simple audio adjustments (my car doesn't).
* They often overload each area with too many buttons and controls.
* The car GUI can also have many slow, confusing layers that one navigates to get commonly used functions, like digital speedometer, estimated range, etc.
This isn't even getting to strange things, such as having the older generation UI completely present under the veneer of a newer, slower UI.
The car brand I have isn't faultless either - all of their newer cars exhibit the same bad habits. Some bad habits have been slowly walked back a bit in the latest 2022/2023 cars, but the damage is still present.
Sort of like bad ideas in Windows. The worst UI elements (IMO) in Win 8 were walked back a bit in 8.1, then successively more rollbacks via a number of Win10 updates. But the baseline is still worse in some ways vs 7 and before (e.g, start menu is less meaningfully customizable than 7, which is still less than XP, IMO). We see tiny hints of that with Win11 updates. I expect 11.1 or 12 to mostly remove the worst offenders.
My native Gsync monitor, a now discontinued LG 32GK(?)650 is quite fast as well. I’ve complained a tiny amount about monitor reviewer blind spots, and this is one of them. The speed of every interaction on this monitor is very very fast. It is why I am very unwilling to let it go, even if it keeps me locked into the Nvidia side of things, since my monitor predates native Gsync modules that support DP Adaptive Sync and HDMI VRR.
I agree with the idea, but it may depend on how the X11 application was written.
My experience with X11 over a network (across a city, geographically and distance-wise) was very poor. Slow updates, just extreme latency in doing anything. Not impossible to use, but definitely unusable by any reasonable metric. We're talking dozens of seconds for most GUI interactions.
I eventually piped it through RDP (mRDP, iirc), which itself was piped through a VPN. This vastly improved performance and made it so that I didn't have to be physically present at my workstation. Just as well, since it was during the early covid timeframe.
My LG monitor has a brick that goes to 65W, but the measured power consumption is ~20W at the wall. ~12W in short idle (screen turned off less than ~1 min ago). ~0W in deep sleep, which is where it spends most of its time.
I am running on minimum brightness, since I'm indoors.
Where I worked in Longwood (Boston), the offices surrounding me were massive, historic buildings with plaques commemorating their origin. They were originally built for housing nurses and doctors who worked in the area's hospitals (there is a concentration of hospitals in Longwood).
So in this case, these were built and used as housing before a later conversion to office space.
These are currently utilized hospital buildings. IMO, they are unlikely to be converted back to residential at this time.