I've read comments in the past of people adventuring into these kinds of scenarios though I haven't tried to use a pi as a desktop. I use old laptops. My daily

I've read comments in the past of people adventuring into these kinds of scenarios though I haven't tried to use a pi as a desktop. I use old laptops. My daily driver until a year ago was a Dell e7470 which worked well enough for browsing and coding in VSCode.. until the keyboard broke, twice. Now it's gathering dust because I'm too lazy to change the keyboard again but it should work fine on linux atleast. My current daily driver is a thinkpad t490 with an i7-8565U and 16 GB of ram that was provided for me at work and which I can buy used for 500$ atm. But if what you want is fanless and decent hardware I'd recommend a NUC.