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There's a lot of "one device versus two device" discussions here. I have a work laptop and a personal laptop that I use carefully to try and keep things separate. But, this means I'm now ~doubling the environmental impact of electronic devices (impact of production, disposal). So there's tension, in my mind, between the public/private work separation and minimizing the damage I'm doing the environment.

In all fairness, I suspect me buying 2 laptops every 3-4 years instead of one laptop over the same period is a small environmental impact compared to other things (air travel, dietary choices). But it also seems like that's not a reason for me to ignore its impact. And the aggregate cost of many people having 2 laptops instead of 1 is probably worth considering.

I thought about ways to only have one device (running my personal "machine" as a VM on my work laptop or vice versa) but couldn't come up with anything cleanly satisfactory.

3 comments

I think the environmental impact is overstated. There's a healthy second hand market that thrives because of companies buying laptops and eventually selling them. I've gotten plenty of great laptops at great discounted prices over the years that probably wouldn't be possible otherwise.

I remember when advice to not use company/official email for personal correspondence was considered a radical idea. Why would anyone need two email accounts?

Today I don't even want my personal phone connecting to corporate wifi. I work with these cats, I know how they think. So yes, two devices please.

Yet today phones have really excellent separation of personal and private data. Like Android Work Profile which basically is a small virtual phone inside your phone which is controlled by your employer, with the benefit that they can't look at any of your personal stuff and you can switch the whole thing off easily.

We have a “guest wifi” at the office. I noted it was MITMing some https sites (which firefox failed to load due to the certificate)

This goes against corporate policy, but it’s a good reason to not trust any wifi you don’t control.

What did you find lacking with the VM approach? Have you considered or tried Qubes?

I’m a two-decvicer. It increases the lifespan of my personal computer. And, more often than not, when I have left a job, employers have let me keep the old laptop, saving me from buying a new personal one. Honestly, are you really telling me you’d not own a personal computer? This sounds extremely trusting towards your employer, and puts you at a lot of risk depending on their policies and philosophy.

> What did you find lacking with the VM approach? Have you considered or tried Qubes?

It wasn't technical aspects of VMs per se, it was how to use them while still keeping things separate. If I had my personal machine as a VM on work baremetal, then in principle the personal VM wouldn't really be isolatable from work because if they had a keylogger then it would capture all input.

Edit: To be clear, I don't think that my employer uses keyloggers. But if the purpose was to keep personal and work separate, I didn't think a personal VM on a work machine really provided enough separation.

I didn't carefully investigate the reverse (having my work machine be a VM on top of a personal laptop) partly because MacOS is easiest for a work machine and I didn't want to mess around with trying to run MacOS in a VM.

> This sounds extremely trusting towards your employer, and puts you at a lot of risk depending on their policies and philosophy.

That's exactly why I didn't go down that route.