A lesson for my next mothership is to not skimp on the case, it's the single factor that keeps my current 2009-era desktop from being a real ship of Theseus. Over the decade I've upgraded RAM, GPUs, added a network card (mobo's jack died), more storage... but I can't get a pair of the beefy GPUs I want for lack of space for the cards themselves and a beefier power supply, plus I'd need to upgrade the mobo. Might as well do it all at once for a new rig and start fresh.

I am actually going the other direction, I used to build my own, went to laptops-only for a while but then got a mini-tower prebuilt. That one died after about 18 months so I recently ordered an even smaller Gigabyte Brix, with a 10W CPU (Celeron J4105) instead of 65W, but better I/O, and compatible with my existing RAM and storage options. Small enough to mount on the back of the new monitor I'm also getting. I have gone smaller with every desktop I built.

Basically, I now use laptops for games and the desktop for storage/office tasks. The single board desktops are quickly growing out of the RPi-type niche and look increasingly competitive with the traditional ATX platform for this role, and opting for them means that I define my system around the storage and RAM, rather than the multitude of PSU/motherboard/CPU/GPU/case combinations, which is both easier for me and eliminates most instances where components push each other out of their tolerance range. So long as I'm on the same memory and storage, I can replace everything else in the case for <$200. This is really what sold me on the idea; since my existing system fell out of warranty after one year, repair would be the cost of a new board. But if the whole system is the board, then a failure is a forced upgrade.

I tried the super minis but cost & availability start to get unreasonable. I've settled on ITX, usually a tower, and LP cards.

Same here, I got tired of building PCs and got a Zotac EN1070K. It runs modern AAA games smoothly and is small enough to carry in a backpack.

You still use a desktop? The portability of a laptop is something I couldn't do without.

There's nothing that precludes you from having both. My computing needs are adequately met by my laptop, desktop, and personal server at work. Without the laptop, I definitely wouldn't be anywhere near as productive but the same goes for the desktop.

My laptop is always ssh-ed (mosh provides the "always" aspect) into one of the others anyway. It's stuck with 8GB of RAM which is often a bottleneck, especially since Docker holds onto a couple gigs and Chrome tries its hardest to get the rest. Portability is necessary but not sufficient to addrrss my computing needs.

It's impossible for me to write code on the weenie screen of a laptop. Plus I hate the laptop chicklet keyboards and the touchpad that my palm is always accidentally brushing against.

If I could, I'd have a 4x8 foot display with no decrease in pixel density. I.e. an incredible number of pixels.

Heck, why stop there. Give me a wall sized display! Phooey on laptops.

I am completely in favor of having a work station (better performance per Euro than a laptop). However, nothing holds you from using a nice screen and keyboard with a laptop.

I have my MacBook Pro hooked up to a 4k external display, Microsoft Natural Keyboard (or whatever they are called today), and a nice big Magic Trackpad 2. I can undock it and have exactly the same system on the go. the MacBook Pro can drive multiple screens (2x4k on 13", 4x4k on 15"). You also use an external GPU over Thunderbolt 3.

> nothing holds you from using a nice screen and keyboard with a laptop.

What's the point of having a laptop if you can only use it with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse? A powerful desktop is much cheaper, and you can stuff huge disk drives in it.

When I'm on the go, I bring a cheap laptop (in case of loss, theft, or damage) that doesn't have my whole life on it and mainly take a vacation from working. (And I'll use the time to catch up on my professional reading.)

My wall of pixels is a 42" 60hz 4k display I bought on Amazon for $200 3 years ago. Best purchase ever, it's basically like having four 21" 1080p monitors stuck together with no gap.

Really hard to get myself to code on my laptop now.

> If I could, I'd have a 4x8 foot display with no decrease in pixel density. I.e. an incredible number of pixels.

i think you would find this setup to be really poor.

you need be within ~2ft viewing to appreciate the difference between 1080p and 4k at 24" diagonal display size.

sitting 2ft from an 8ft wide display will give you very poor viewing angles for the majority of the content. at greater distances than 2ft, the pixel density of a 4k 24" display become nothing more than waste of gpu, cpu and electricity.

Maybe. I know I could easily make use of one double (in both x and y) the size I currently have.

As for discerning pixels, I know that the retina display is distinctly easier to read than non-retina (both from Apple) even though I could not see the pixelation on the latter. Watching video does not make much difference, but reading text sure does.

PDF’s are a good example of things that look terrible on non-Retina displays

I have a 5x1 monitor wall and it's great for coding, but it curves around through 90° so all the screens are equidistant. Portrait mode is so much better for coding (for me) and I can see multiple source files, application, documentation and reference material all at once. It's great!

Depending on your requirements you could make it work with a powerful desktop and small and lightweight (but obviously not powerful) laptop, at least I found that’s what works for me rather than those giant and heavy “desktop-replacement” laptops. It gives me the best of both worlds.

I'm running that configuration with a somewhat powerful desktop and an el-cheapo 10.1″ 2-in-1 (worth ~$200, I bought an used one for ~$120). I was initially saving up to replace the latter with a powerful small laptop, but over the past couple of months necessity made me learn to work more over SSH. So today, I can do 90% of my work somewhat comfortably on that small 2-in-1 via SSH-ing to my desktop and running an extra Emacs frame in terminal. Since that's just a "view" of the same instance I have running in GUI mode on my desktop, I can switch between the two machines almost completely seamlessly. This fits my current needs so well that I actually refrained from buying new hardware right now, and will just keep the money in a "hardware fund" until the poor little 2-in-1 dies.

Yes this is very similar to my workflow. I have pretty much given up on finding a "powerful but small" laptop because I realised that this type of machine is also guaranteed to suffer from thermal throttling

Each of my two 1080Ti GPUs is about half the size of a laptop.

I have 1 desktop and 3 laptops. Sometimes it's good to have a large screen and a comfortable (ergonomic) keyboard. Rigging these to a MacBook with a USB-C can be done, but sometimes it's better to use a desktop.