One significant bottleneck in a common desktop Rpi would be the SD card. You can improve a lot by putting the root filesystem on SATA-over-USB or use the CM wit

One significant bottleneck in a common desktop Rpi would be the SD card. You can improve a lot by putting the root filesystem on SATA-over-USB or use the CM with an appropriate board. If you'd have been in the market for a new board, I would have recommended something that exposes PCIe, or at least SATA. The best non-SoM option < USD 100 for that is probably RockPi 4 (but please fill in). You can fit it with an M2 NVMe (with limited lanes) or multiple SATA drives. RK3399 or RK3399pro have been holding that segment for some time now. Sadly RK3399 has max 4GB RAM. Armbian works great. There is also Quartz64 and Rock 3A (max 8GB RAM, PCIe3). But it's going to take a while until community and mainline kernel support make the RK3566/RK3568 ready for a casual user. You're going to have to be conscious about multitasking. Having 100 browser tabs open is not going to fly. And while 4k may be theoretically possible, you don't want to do that. Other than that I think it's all right. ----- I have a similar profile to yourself. Currently drafting a small cyberdeck - maybe more as a replacement for smartphone than PC use.