All of these can be done much better on the cloud (I can spawn as big of a machine as my pocket can afford). And with today’s tooling (vs code & jetbrains remote development) you don’t even notice that you develop on a remote machine and not your local.

So the desktop developer market is for those who are not willing to use cloud. And this is a very small minority.

(FYI I am not endorsing cloud over local development, I just state where the market is)

Much of my PhD thesis was/is done traveling in places with poor, poor Internet. Currently on my laptop in rural Calabria, where I pull a blazing fast 60 kbps, sometimes. Would be very irritating waiting for the compiler/theorem prover to go brr, remotely… I can hardly edit a Google doc out here!

This doesn’t contradict your minority point, but it really does make me appreciate local-first.

Yes, until the day you get an attack by a North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe, losing your gigabit+ connection and your entire set of tools with it.

> of these can be done much better on the cloud. If you forget about the latency, yes. Suddenly your "cc a.c -o a.o" becomes " issue the command, wait for the server to start it, ping pong between your teminal and server for messages, final file available on the cloud"

Indeed I use such a machine in my day job. 64 slow Epyc cores, presumably power efficient. But even on that machine, builds are slower than they could be, and distributed builds are the way.