Needless to say, I can no longer work on macOS or an Apple device. The speeds you get with a bare-bone install and a window manager are unparalleled.

Just curious, as I’m looking to upgrade the processor that I bought - are AMD processors widely known as being better than Intel?

Not trying to start an argument about which is better, I’m just genuinely curious as I have no idea as I’m not a gamer and have always gone for Intel processors.

Basically AMD did a full redesign of their processors when they introduced their Ryzen CPU line. That and Intel's problems in manufacturing has resulted in AMD chips beating Intel on price, performance, and temperature.

AMD's high end desktop chips literally perform better than Intel's top commercial Xenon.

Gamers Nexus is a pretty good YouTube channel with detailed benchmarks, but there are others, too.

It's not perfect and perhaps not good replacement for many of those things, but it is so practical. Especially if you live in a small apartment where desktop and TVs would take a lot of space.

So I bought a Dell gaming machine, for the GPU.

First impressions from the week:

* Windows is still pretty kludgy.

* There are no good Gmail cients for Windows (settled on eM, but it crashes a lot, on macOS I used Mailplane, Mimestream and Outlook; Outlook on windows doesn't automatically connect to Google Calendars, even though the macOS and iOS versions do).

* The Dell came with a terrible keyboard, I'll have to buy a better one. It didn't come with speakers, so I bought some (I was planning to get reference monitors anyway, but having NO sound for a few days was interesting). It doesn't have a webcam, which is fine, but I'd have to buy one if that becomes important.

* The cables, cables, cables.

* I can use the Phone app to connect to my iPhone, and iCloud on Windows works well enough (for Drive and Photos).

* Windows apps don't adhere to the design guidelines nearly as consistently as macOS apps do. Fonts and usability is far more varied.

I will see about dual-booting Linux, and I'll see about getting Davinci Resolve working.

I use Mailspring (has both MacOS and Windows version).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxH3RabNWfE

How long were the train trips

Something about being in motion really aligns my creative and productive juices simultaneously.

I also tend to do different types of work in different places.

* Coding - Desk with monitors * Meetings - Table looking out of the house * Writing - chilling out on a couch

My work is done at a desk with monitors, meetings with a tablet and stylus, and my laptop is for recreation and work when I have to travel.

I spend 99% of my working hours at my desk so it's a no-brainer for me to use a desktop. For the rare times I need to work somewhere else I just git push on the desktop, git pull on the laptop, and keep working.

Also some people prefer buying gaming laptops for better performance. The problem often is insufficient cooling, fans too noisy and ridiculously low battery time (obviously) from already-big and heavy battery pack.

This is configurable on many laptops. I keep my laptop around 75% charged unless I'm traveling for this very reason.

This is exactly what I've returned to as well, and I'd forgotten for a while (or maybe didn't understand) what was so good about this setup. Working only in my own "do work stuff" office at my own desk means when I'm not working, I'm free to enjoy things without technology getting in the way, and I find that when I do get to my desk I'm a lot more focused, energized, and ready to go. Best of all, I don't have to deal with obscure laptop config issues.

I have a Linux box: it's an ATX tower, a 40" monitor, an Apple Magic Trackpad 2, and most significantly a mechanical keyboard. The importance of the latter can't be overstated: having good key travel, Cherry MX switches, and tactile feedback makes development a vastly better experience.

My work is done in a nice quiet room and I don’t have to or want to travel. I never understood why people want to optimize for working on trains, planes and in meetings. Even when I was going into the office, I didn’t need to bring my computer home because I had the exact same machine at home since it was so cheap.

I do have a 2015 Macbook Pro and an Acer E5-575g laptop as well. If I feel like working on the couch or in bed, I can absolutely do that, but I never do. Mostly the Mac is just there to test Mac things or compile iOS things. The Acer was just so cheap and it also runs Manjaro perfectly.

People may be most familiar with WireGuard as a light-weight proxy, but as a true virtual private network, it's also been great for making my home desktop accessible to my laptop on the go (desktop <-> digital ocean droplet <-> laptop).

All my machines now have static public addresses. All my containers too. The firewalls are simple. It’s refreshing doing this in 2020. It also brings a sense of freedom (but not mobility) that might explain why I’m happy without a laptop.

What’s old is new. I must have had an unrequited nostalgia for 1990s Novell Windows NT Workstations, but with Linux. (Come to think of it, when I was using WinNT at University we had so much IPv4 space that they too all had routable IP addresses. When I were a lad...)

[1] Ha, I used the word uplift before remembering https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)

Couple it with a USB switch and you won't have to bother with unplugging cables when switching between your work laptop and your personal desktop. (The only thing I have to unplug and move between my laptop and desktop is my microphone cable).

Granted, my high end gaming machine can get a bit noisier compared to my macbook, but even then the kind of noise is more pleasant than the relatively high pitched wind coming out of the MBP. The 3900X and the GPU do generate a ton of great though, so the focus is not on noise and heat output like in your case.

Older generations [of the hardware!] have more stable Linux support. I currently have a gen 4 Intel NUC (Haswell) and it is a lovely platform.

Not a lot of local compute power though. For that, it seems better to go all-in on well cooled datacentre hardware and connect to it remotely.