Question. Why a laptop if you're plugging it into a monitor and therefore using it like a desktop? Does it have to be a laptop? If you just want something port

Question. Why a laptop if you're plugging it into a monitor and therefore using it like a desktop? Does it have to be a laptop? If you just want something portable you can take from place A to place B and use with a monitor have a look at mini PCs. They're smaller than a laptop (about the same weight) so you can pop it in your bag easily to move around if that is your need. The only real limitation is you can't sit down in a coffee shop to work. But if you have a couple fixed areas of work they are far more cost effective than a laptop and actually allow for upgrading (RAM and SSD anyway, more than you get on most laptops these days). FWIW I picked one up for my son a couple of months ago. It's a Ryzen 5600H with 32GB RAM and 500GB NVMe SSD. Runs Windows 11 and Fedora perfectly. Does a little gaming but is mostly for school work. Makes a solid little dev system though. Not to mention it had perfect Linux support out of the box. Literally everything worked (wifi, bluetooth, both HDMI with 4k60, etc) whereas on a laptop it can be a real pain to get everything working right. You can avoid so many headaches going mini pc over laptop.