[Jach]

If you work at a desk, why do you need a laptop?

I'm glad my employer outfits me with both a Linux workstation and a Linux laptop. One of the little fears of looking for a new job is I'll want to filter out some high percentage (like 90%?) of positions for the petty reason that they just dump a macbook pro on every dev as their sole machine. Thanks but no thanks, I can't stand any Apple hardware or software.

As another comment mentioned, there is no perfect "for devs" computer. Developer tastes are too broad and disjoint.

[h1d]

Why? Because you can end up with a single machine than having have to constantly worry about having same environment and data and all that between multiple machines.

If you plug in your laptop to an external monitor and a keyboard, you essentially get a desktop, except you can take it out there with you without worrying about leaving any data or config behind.

[Jach]

If you have to "constantly worry" about your setup, something is wrong. There are many ways to right such a wrong. In my case I don't worry a bit, I set things up when I have a new machine and I'm done, my tweaks afterwards are few and far between and easily synced or reapplied. I'm not even making use of VMs or containers. If I do find I'm missing data on one or the other, a quick scp later and I'm fine.

When you plug in to a dock you "essentially get a desktop" except in all the important ways: workstations are much more powerful (for me the full build difference is 25 minutes on a 2014 workstation vs 45 minutes on a 2018 laptop; our newer workstations are faster still and will bump me from 64 GB RAM to 128 while the laptop has only a passable 32), don't overheat or degrade from constant power, have faster and bigger storage, have various peripheral ports already (often more than docking stations even (and functional, though this is a jab at a specific keyboard: https://matias.ca/aluminum/mac/viewer/3.jpg -- imagine what happens if you plug in a yubikey)), support proper gigabit+ networking, typically have better GPUs (or make it trivial to insert better GPUs) and can drive more and bigger and faster displays...

Workstations also contribute to healthier work cultures. They demand a desk that's "yours" and can be personalized some which is a tempting thing to take away in laptop-only orgs, they demand a reasonably secure office space and trustworthy maintenance staff, they demand a good office network that among other things also enables a dumb and cheap windows laptop work flow: sign in remotely (like with NoMachine) and everything is done on the workstation, it's also another solution to the 'worry' of missing state. (Some companies take that to another level and cheap desktops are also dumb clients to a cloud VM.) Finally they help avoid the feeling of your work always being taken home with you -- even if you additionally have a laptop it's more there for work-from-home or travel support, not the primary work mode, and expectations of out-of-the-office-hours tasks and availability being normal are gone.

[thesmok]

I wouldn't buy a MacBook until they sort out the keyboard problems, but when my employer gives me the latest MacBook Pro to work on, I'm absolutely happy! It's a wonderful machine, and if it breaks – not my problem at all.

[Jach]

> if it breaks – not my problem at all.

This should go without saying I hope!

There was a time when you could reasonably evaluate employers with the Joel Test: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... But if you take "10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems" as accurate, it seems very few orgs these days lack serious problems. Ignoring the other criteria, few seem to meet even the relatively easy to meet criteria of having quiet spaces (8) and having the best hardware (9) -- or at least if not 'best', then more impressive than what the typical employee has at home.