Not any one thing is a dealbreaker. It's the combination.

Once the laptop is festooned with hubs, external drives, cables everywhere, might as well just buy a desktop.

I think it just comes down to how important you find the convenience of using the same machine when you're at your desk and when you're not.

I used an external monitor, keyboard and mouse when at the desk, even when I only owned a laptop. But I also use the laptop a lot on the couch, not just for traveling - so I wondered if I would find it annoying to have a separate desktop machine.

So far it's been well worth it. The desktop performance is much better (especially for gaming) and Dropbox, git, Chrome sync and VS Code sync make having multiple machines relatively painless.

Edit: I see in previous comments you were looking for a full sized bluetooth keyboard. I recently got a Logitech G915 [0] and I'm pretty happy with it. Expensive though.

[0] - https://www.logitechg.com/en-eu/products/gaming-keyboards/g9...

I cannot type unless I'm sitting in a chair at my desk. Trying to type on the sofa or in bed means my hands are at all the wrong angles and touch typing completely fails me. (I wrote this not looking at the keyboard at all.)

The couch is fine for reading a tablet.

For me the trick when moving back and forth between the office and home was to have an external drive with everything on it and carry it back and forth. A better approach is probably remote desktop or remote login.

I travel with a cheap laptop loaded with only what I anticipate needing on the trip. It eases my mind to not worry too much about having it stolen, lost, or smashed.

I've gotten used to the convenience of a laptop, but I'm never happy with them. Now that I'm working remotely, the lappy just doesn't cut it. But I want to veg on the couch with my laptop once and a while. My solution is to use my older laptop as a thin client for my desktop.

I tried that (using Windows Remote Desktop) but the latency was just high enough to be annoying. What do you use?

Not OP, but I use Parsec to do things remotely on my desktop from my laptop. Latency and frame rate are far, far better than VNC or RDP

https://parsecgaming.com/

Well... tbh I'm still working on the build. But I don't do windows and I don't play FPS or anything where latency would be super important. I use VNC across town to my office and that's generally good enough... but we'll see. I had small hopes that "laptop as linux thin client" would have an easy PNP solution by now, but my research indicates that this still isn't the case. Definitely open to suggestions.

It's been a bit since I had a second device to try it with, but my experienced with Windows Remote Desktop have been less of a "this would be hard to game with" lag and more a "the delay in my mouse movement is making my head hurt" lag.

That is weird. For me the mouse cursor is always rendered locally, so feels as responsive as on the desktop itself.

Sure if I'm on a high latency link I might have to adjust to clicking taking a wee bit to register, but normally I don't have to adjust my usage.

Windows to Windows.

Linux. SSH. Command line.

I tried WRD too, with the same result.

My laptop is festooned with a hub. It covers power, peripherals, HDMI and networking. And that’s all I need. So really not very different to a desktop, except I can also pick it up and take it with me if I want.

Hub, keyboard, mouse, monitor. There's no festooning.

I have a few USB devices (a colour calibrator springs to mind right now) that insist on being in a directly attached USB port, and won't work even with a powered hub, or, in the case of my Surface laptop, a dock.

It's a dealbreaker for me.