My 2020 desk setup

&quot;I found that using only one monitor allows me to focus more on what I’m doing, and I don’t miss anything about a multi-monitor setup.&quot;<p>This.<p>I had the same realization maybe 7 or 8 years ago and it is true for me. With multiple monitors it&#x27;s like moving your hands away from the keyboard all the time and looking for the mouse. Same happens for me while looking for anything across the 2 or 3 monitor setup. It just weakens your focus... If I&#x27;m on a laptop (and I usually am), I just use the laptop&#x27;s screen. Getting used to a different screen size while working with my laptop setup would also slightly slow me down when I&#x27;m bound to use only the laptop.

The WH-1000XM3 are just about the only recommended bluetooth headphone anymore that makes switching devices that much of a pain. Most will either automatically switch between a few active devices or allow you to switch by just initiating the connection from the target device.<p>Have you looked at installing the patched pulseaudio-bluetooth modules to gain LDAC support? :)

&quot;Probably another macbook setup&quot; &quot;Oh, nope, lots of terminals.&quot; &quot;Hey, is that i3?&quot; Then I realized who the author was.<p>Honestly: I tried i3 and it wasn&#x27;t for me. The psychology of slightly overlapping windows (i.e. &quot;just put this over here, out of the way but still visible&quot; as a way of making a physical reminder for myself) is just too much part of my mental model to give up.

His monitor resolution is unnecessary AFAICS.<p>I have one, also 31.5&quot; which is 3840 x 2160, without any scaling, and the text is sharp as fuck. Given my experience the only thing I&#x27;d do if I bought another monitor given what I know now is to buy one same res but larger because 3840 x 2160 is <i>a lot</i> of pixels in a small space. A single black pixel on a white background from 60cm away is very, very close to invisible (just tried it).

8K monitor sounded ridiculous until I realized that&#x27;s basically Retina @ 32-34&quot;

Is he me? Same CPU, CPU fan, SSD, monitor, RAM, case, WM, linux distro.. Except I never made the switch to vim from emacs.<p>In all seriousness, I have great respect for Stapelberg and I thank him for posting this. I love seeing other dev&#x27;s setups and learned a few things in his post.

That&#x27;s a lot of money between screen and GPU just to get crisper fonts (as the rest of the GUI is scaled x3 and thus you don&#x27;t get that much more screen real estate). Is this really worth it for you? I regularly switch between a 5k iMac and regular 1920x1200 display, and sure, I can see pixels, but I don&#x27;t find myself caring that much.

“ For redundancy, I am backing up my computers to 2 separate network storage devices.”<p>Hopefully he understands that this is not a true backup....he’s basically created a more complex RAID 1 running two NAS...<p>For example a flood, a House fire, theft, or a power surge is probably going to lose&#x2F;fry both then everything is gone. This is a perfect example of thinking you have something backed up but if you store it in the same place you just created a more complex RAID 1...<p>If you want a backup you need to store a copy in a different location preferably a different region because if you put it at your friends house down the road they are also likely to be hit by the same disaster (i.e flood, tornado, hurricane, war, etc.) as you are.

I’m a couple of weeks into using a single giant (32”) monitor at macOS’s 3k resolution, and I’m finding it works pretty well with a 3x2 set of windows for code, terminal and docs. The center third is usually a single emacs window with two frames, web browser on the left, and inspect window or terminals on the right.<p>I’m also really liking the usb-c power delivery, so it’s one cable to the work laptop, and from there, it’s got a usb hub for the kB&#x2F;mouse.<p>The killer feature is the built in KVM switch, so by switching the input to hdmi, I can switch the keyboard&#x2F;moose to my mini and use it when I’m not at $day_job.

Love these threads, it is always nice to see the setups of productive persons.

Why Kinesis doesn&#x27;t produce higher quality build variant of its keyboard? One that doesn&#x27;t feel like a flimsy&#x2F;cheap plastic. It seems they are charging premium just for the layout and PCB.

What&#x27;s the Raspberry Pi for? You put a Raspberry Pi in the picture and you don&#x27;t tell us what it&#x27;s for. That&#x27;s like total cruelty. ;-)

I second the Logitech MX Ergo &quot;thumb ball mouse&quot;. Once you&#x27;re transferred your mouse motor skills to this (takes about two hours) you&#x27;ll never go back to a moving mouse. Especially, if you&#x27;ve got a sore shoulder, or elbow or wrist do yourself a favor and try one of these. (Full Disclosure I own no stock in Logitech, just a very happy customer of this product.)

Given that this is the closest thing to a monitor discussion thread I&#x27;ve seen on HN, I&#x27;d like to ask if anyone has a recommendation for what I should upgrade to next.<p>My progression has been the 2560x1440 Thunderbolt display to the Dell P2715Q, which has been my main monitor at work and home for the past 5 years.<p>I&#x27;ve tried to upgrade from the P2715Q three times now, and always end up going back to it because I&#x27;m dissatisfied by the quality of the other panels in comparison.<p>I want a larger screen that can support 4K, or even 5K, with comparable panel quality. I avoided the LG 5K display sold by Apple because I heard bad things about it, but never actually tried one. It&#x27;s 27&quot; as well, so I think it would still be too small, even if the panel quality and resolution are better.<p>I&#x27;m starting to think I should just get a TV and use that as my display, but I don&#x27;t know which would best suit my needs for writing software. One nice thing about a TV is that it would be much easier to do returns&#x2F;swaps if I need to play the panel lottery for something that will make me happy. I have never done this with a previous display, since I always bought second-hand from people who had already done that for me. The original owner of my P2715Q apparently returned theirs three times before they were satisfied.<p>I&#x27;ve toyed with the idea of getting an Apple Pro display, but I really don&#x27;t want to spend more than $2000 on a monitor.<p>The UP3218K described in the article seems like it would be a good upgrade, but it definitely exceeds my price range. I would be open to spending that much on a monitor if I knew I wouldn&#x27;t be replacing it for at least five years, but I can&#x27;t know that for sure. Although funnily enough, that&#x27;s what has happened with my P2715Q. It&#x27;s the only piece of computing equipment I haven&#x27;t replaced since I first started using it.

I prefer the multi monitor setup and use at least one in portrait&#x2F;vertical mode. Fits with my ide and jupyter notebooks

I am also of the opinion of needing only one monitor because I can only focus on one thing at once. Whatever is not the work I am doing when I focus, goes into another desktop space. I am also a power user of an OSX window manager called Spectacle. The tools and practices that help me focus are key.

I&#x27;ve always been curious about higher-end USB microphones (the Rode is ~$230) compared with a potentially more upgradable XLR setup like:<p>- Behringer UM2 USB Audio Interface<p>- Behringer Ultravoice XM8500 Dynamic Cardioid mic<p>This would give the upgradability of an XLR audio interface and a seemingly decent mic for about $125. I imagine once everything is plugged together, it similarly comes down to just plugging in a USB, and I&#x27;d be surprised if it wasn&#x27;t plug-n-play on Linux. I don&#x27;t know how well the audio quality would compare, though. I&#x27;d be interested to hear more about the challenges of getting a working setup with XLR audio gear that are alluded to in the post.

On switching peripherals between both work and home computers, I&#x27;ve been using for a few years now a UGREEN USB Switch. It&#x27;s around £21 for the USB 2 version at the moment in the UK. So it&#x27;s basically what the author uses but you connect both machines there and click a button to toggle between machines. On mine there&#x27;s 4 ports only but maybe that&#x27;s enough for most people - I&#x27;m only using half.

One minor benefit of TFA to me this morning is I had a 120mm case fan that has been vibrating &#x2F; buzzing, but I&#x27;ve been delaying buying a replacement just due to not wanting to choose the wrong SKU (again).<p>Scrolling through the size I see the recommendation of the Noctua NF-A12x25. Probably 3x what I paid for the fan that is being replaced, but it could be the only component in the case that stays during the next rebuild!

How much performance are you able to get out of your router7 setup? If it&#x27;s unable to saturate the gigabit, do you know where the bottleneck is?

My 2020 desk setup: a cushion, an empty book block and a board both in wood as support for my laptop. Haven&#x27;t used a chair or a desk since ages

I often get asked about my equipment too and wrote up my bill of materials. Surprised you&#x27;re not using LED lights. Try them, you&#x27;ll enjoy the upgrade. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;bill-of-materials-for-my-home-office-f7f417dfbf0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;bill-of-materials-for-my-home-office-f7...</a>

The hardware section makes it sound like he&#x27;s rebuilding his computer multiple times a year. Do people really find upgrading that often is worth the cost and the bother? What sorts of workloads do people deal with that having top of the line hardware even matters?

Interesting about switching from the 3900x back to Intel.<p>I recently built a desktop around the 3900x. I’m happy with the performance but coming from a decade on MacBooks. Feeling the FOMO about my choice now :)

Cool thanks for sharing. My work from home setup has a legal marijuano vaporizer within reaching distance to help deal with the bullshit from managers &amp; other bumbos in our digital corp.

Huge fan of i3. It also allowed me to reduce down to one monitor. I use a MSI Optix 34” curved monitor.<p>I like your idea with the USB hub to switch between computers — I will probably adopt that.

That keyboard looks weird - maybe its because I haven&#x27;t used it myself. Anyone used it? Can you share your experience?

About the slow package managers complaint, you should try out Void Linux! Xbps is god speed compared to apt or pacman

yay, a neo user.<p>If you have a keyboard programmable with QMK you can make the upper layers work in hardware too though (you still need to decide to which OS layout you want to map it)

I read this as “Steven Spielberg uses this: my 2020 desk setup” before I clicked through. I was so amazed that Spielberg used a tiling window manager before I went back and figured out my mistake!