On Thu, 17 Sep 2020 07:15:58 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

On 9/16/2020 7:43 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Wed, 16 Sep 2020 08:06:13 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

On 9/15/2020 3:34 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 14:43:26 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

On 9/15/2020 12:38 PM, Frank Slootweg wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
[...]

I'm different in this respect from almost all the rest of you. If my
keyboard gets old and and dirty, I just toss it out and buy a new one.
They're inexpensive, unless you want a very fancy expensive one; I don't.

I would like to do that too. The problem is that the rest of the
laptop is attached to it! :-)


One of the many disadvantages of using a laptop instead of a desktop.

Why not both? The machine in front of me is primarily a laptop. When I need
to use a desktop, I RDP to it.


Having both is fine if you want to use a desktop at home and a laptop
for traveling. I see no advantage to using a laptop by itself at home,
or using both at home. In fact, to me there's no advantage to having
more than one computer of any kind for use at home.

I travel for work, or at least I did before the current situation arrived,
so I use my laptop for work. It makes sense to me to use it when I'm
working from home, as well, to maintain a sense of continuity.


Yes, I agree. But that's an exception that doesn't apply to most people.


So my laptop
is my work machine, and when I want to do something not related to work,
I'd like to simultaneously use a desktop, so I RDP to it. I view the
desktop full screen on a second monitor.


If it were me, I'd just walk over to wherever the desktop is.

The desktop PC is on the floor, in the otherwise unused space between the
desk and the wall. It has no keyboard or monitor attached. When I'm sitting
at my desk, I'm as close to that PC as I can comfortably get.

snip

My wife only uses a laptop at home. She likes to be able to move from the
bedroom to the living room to the breakfast nook to her sewing room, etc.


It's the same, I guess, for many people who only use laptops, but not
for me. As I said, I think it's a bad mistake for almost everyone.

I think there are solid reasons why desktop PCs make up a small and rapidly
shrinking presence in the consumer space. You can get the same or better
performance with a laptop, but even laptops are being replaced by tablets,
which got replaced by Chromebooks, which got replaced by large-screen
smartphones.

For me, the biggest reason to keep a desktop PC is the capability to put a
large amount of storage in it. USB-attached storage is a non-starter for me
for multiple reasons, and NAS solutions are way too expensive for what they
are. My other reason for having a desktop PC, as a VM host, could be done
by a laptop just as well.

snip