[unionpivo]

I was/am thinkpad user also. I have migrated to desktops. They are cheap enough to have one at the office and one at home.

Sure the above wont work for everybody, but if you are like me, you unpacked the laptop at home and at work each day at exactly the same space, where all the cables and extra monitors were.

I used to use laptop in coffee shops and outdoors, but nowadays between phone, and tablets (wel phone and kindle in my case) I almost never feel the need.

Buy silent box, mobo for overclocking and underclock it for extra silence, and throw the box under the table.

Still have my laptop, but its mostly just "backup" and in case I travel somewhere, but honestly I don't care about it as much

[pedrocr]

With the quality of networks these days it may pay off to just have a single beefy desktop at work or home and a very simple desktop in the other location that you just use to remote in to the first. Keeps the environment consistent over time and even allows leaving long running computations running and picking them up later. Two remote stations and a headless server in a rack somewhere may even be better. No worries about noise and cooling.

[belinder]

What remoting software do you recommend

[kettro]

Honestly, it depends on what you need, and what your platform is. Windows has its Remote Desktop, which works fine.

I’m on Linux, and use mosh as a more reliable ssh client.

[d21d3q]

mosh + tmux

[drunner]

Mosh and tmux is classic setup. If you need x11, I have recently found x2go to have the best performance.

I use wireguard to access my home network when I'm visiting my parents.

[trepatudo]

Exactly what I did. 2 desktops at home and office, sync via dotfiles for OS config, documents via Nextcloud and src via git.

A laptop (xps 13 9360) for traveling or working in remote places.

Even have a yubikey on each desktop and one for travel. All storing the ssh keys.

I don't use the laptop for months, open it and update the packages and dotfiles before going for a travel and that's it. Ready to go.

[e12e]

> sync via dotfiles for OS config, (...) src via git.

This is something other than just having your dot files in git, and system config in git via etc keeper?

[unionpivo]

i just keep my personal dot files in git, not system config.

Systems are slightly different, at work i have two 27 inch monitors and at home i have one 30 inch, and I do play some paradox games on home computer on ocasion

[rvanlaar]

My main reason to go for a laptop was that I wanted to continue coding where I left off and not have to worry about differing settings and system configuration.

Did you solve those problems? and if so how?

[nightowl_games]

I do all my development in VSCode, and symlink my settings to a git repo. VSCode really let's you customize a lot of stuff, and if you lean into it as your development environment, you get awesome cross platform support.

That same git repo has scripts that apply some of my system configurations, and a readme to walk me through the GUI stuff I have to do.

My first few setups were hard. I had to debug some weird issues on my Linux install. (Not sleeping properly, remapping some keyboard keys).

But now I've got it cased. I setup 3 machines (2 Linux, 1 windows) over the past couple days and all are essentially equal development experience now. Was super fast to setup l. If your going the Linux route, make a repo where you record all the tweaks your making so you can redo them if you need to on a new machine.

It's shitty the first time, but now I know I can buy any new machine and have it ready to rip in mere minutes. With my custom keyboard layout (home, end, pageup, pagedown, alt, cntrl, alt+tab), my custom VSCode hotkeys, my ssh key identity management, my terminal font and themes, my system hotkeys (moving windows around and switching workspaces). Now that I've got all this setup, it feels great. Feels very fluid on all 3 machines.

[Ignacy-s]

3 machines Syncthing setup between desktop, laptop and a cloud instance in case laptop wasn't on to sync and the desktop is off for some reason. It takes about 15s from connecting the laptop to the internet to having the files synced to it. Just need to remember to save files in emacs.

Setting up Syncthing in the cloud was a challenge, had to tunnel the web-ui with ssh port forwarding.

[criddell]

I do it with Windows by using remote desktop.

If you don't want to do something like that, with a Microsoft account a lot of settings can be applied to multiple machines.

[rvanlaar]

I use Linux for application development. Python, C++, occasional R and use linux containers as well.

[intrasight]

I too went desktop route. Built what I want - including lots of ECC memory. I too have a laptop for backup and travel (and a Chromebook used as RDP client).

Sync isn't an issue. All work is on VMs, and they get backed up every day to my Synology.

My backup laptop is a 6 year old Thinkpad, which hasn't been out of it's bag in over a year.

[albertzeyer]

The downside with this is extra effort to keep them in sync. Depending on what you do, syncing can be easy (or even trivial if you do everything remote anyway) or more annoying.

[deckard1]

Just install Syncthing. And if you have an Android, you can even sync photos/notes to and from the device to your computers.

[stock_toaster]

Syncthing has been life changing. Very much "set it and forget it".

[jdhawk]

cannot say enough good things about unison

https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

[baybal2]

Rsyncing home directory worked for me for 15 years.

[lupire]

Carrying a disk on your commute is easier than carrying a laptop.

[samstave]

>>>*laptop at home and at work each day at exactly __the same space__, where all the cables and extra monitors were.*

Nope. Actually, just like with my phone chargers, I like to have a laptop charger in all the spaces I like to compute.. I like to have a charger in my bedroom, my living room and in the garage.

I used to have this for all my machines - though I now have a new HP Omen (bad ass machine) - but I only have one charger for it currently.

I havent touched my ipad in a really long time.

But here is a tip - this super light and super cheep USB screen is AMAZING to have with a laptop:

(This thing was $69 when I bought it - but its now $99 but still - a USB only monitor is fantastic.

https://www.amazon.com/AOC-e1659Fwu-1366x768-Brightness-3-0-...

What I do, is I make it the top monitor - and I have this TV Tray stand that is at the perfect level for me to have my laptop on my lap, a tray or a TV tray, and then I have the AOC monitor on this stand and I just move up to click on that mon...

And this is dope because during this pandemic, I am trying to take every free training I can get my digital hands around.

https://digitaldefynd.com/free-udemy-courses/

So I have the training vid on the top screen and then I can use whatever program(s) I need on the laptop...

Blender courses are a good example of how this works great. The point is to have the two screens stacked vertically so that you only move your eyes up and down and dont have to turn your neck...