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Christian Baer

The only real reason to get a desktop environment as workstation, is the price. Yes, desktops are still cheaper when the performance is the same. This has two reasons:

  1. Desktops are more customizable than Laptops (aka you build this yourself)
  2. Laptops are tinier and this is going to cost you

On the other hand: They are not portable! Not at all!

For me the invest in a nice mobile workstation beats the desktop advantages. I have a six year old ThinkPad that is still in good shape, thanks to my RAM upgrade and the switch to an SSD. I originally paid 700€ and invested 250€ over the last two years (RAM, SSD, and new battery).
I can still do Android development with this machine. The Android VM might start a little bit slower than on current laptops, but hot code replacement is really nice :-)

Also I don't need VMs. If I need to encapsulate something to not clutter my Laptop, there is docker!

TL;DR
My advice: Buy a customizable Laptop (ThinkPad or something similar) and try to skip VMs in favour for docker.