It was to replace both my ThinkPad T400 (RIP in peace, ol' rusty trusty) and some other old hand-me-down ThinkCentre from over a decade ago. I probably beefed it up too much with 1TiB disk space and 32GiB of RAM but considering I was literally crashing from out-of-memory errors before from a prior bring-your-own-device job, this is a lifesaver just in case I have to do that again. Hopefully not and I can use that for testing in virtual machines instead.
If it wasn't my main machine to use on a 4K display, I wouldn't be using GNOME on it. That's just a few cents for your thoughts.
Desktop: Dell Precision 7920 2 x 2.9GHZ Xeon 6226R, 192GB RAM, 2TB SSD
VM host: MacMini 2018, 1 x 3.2GHz 6c i7-8700B, 64 GB RAM, 1TB SSD
NAS: QNAP TS-451+, 1 x 1.9GHz 4c Celeron J1900, 8GB RAM, 8TB HDD
The laptop is old, but it's solid and has the decent keyboard, and I haven't _needed_ to replace it yet, and I can't bring myself to spend the $5k a decent replacement will cost. One day.
The desktop was paid for by my employer. It's a beast. Not what I would have bought, but ... it's pretty good for big C++ project builds. It has two 30" Dell monitors too.
The VM host lets me run macOS, Windows, and Linux VMs. Renting Mac/Windows VMs is expensive, so I ended up with this instead. Very happy with how it worked out.
The NAS just has a mirrored pair of 8TB drives (one Seagate, one Western Digital). I do BTRFS snapshots onto a 16TB backup drive, which gets removed and swapped off-site once a month. I need to grow this: I'll probably put the backup drives into the NAS, and get a pair of bigger backup drives.
Desktops:
Daily driver: Skylake NUC with 16GB RAM, FreeBSD with KDE
Gaming: Ryzen 5 5600X, RTX 3080 Ti, 64GB, Windows 10
Work: Mac Mini M1 with 8GB (meh, 8GB is not enough but my work only buys off-the-shelf SKUs and these are not upgradable :( )
- The above 3 are all connected to the same 4k 24" screen (200% scaling) :)
Laptops:
Work 2: Thinkpad T490s 16GB RAM, Windows 11
On the go: Ultra-cheap "Chuwi" Atom laptop with an old Ubuntu version (been meaning to change it as I hate Ubuntu). I rately do laptopey stuff anyway.
That's about it in terms of workstations :P Servers is another story (mostly a Linux and ESXi one)
I just bought a 2017 Macbook 12” to travel by bicycle and motorcycle. It’s a whole kilogram lighter, and cheap enough to be worth it. It can run my dev stack, or just let me edit my website through a CMS.
At work it's the same 7 year old docked dell laptop I got when I started, but I only use it as a terminal, I work on a shell on a machine in the server room.
This laptop is more of a mobile workstation, very heavy and bulky. But I don't mind.
I really prefer a lightweight laptop and a separate desktop. Which is what I have now, luckily. Our work has a strict "one laptop per employee" policy but I got a desktop for "testing" purposes which is now my daily work driver :P
Laptop: Thinkpad X260 with i7 and 16GB RAM.
I also use an iPad Air M1 for whiteboarding and sketching.