Sound/Cooling
I thought all desktops must be more silent than laptops due to bigger fan size, but it turned out to be opposite. But there are brands of computer parts that can make it barely audible.
I also found out that Intel and AMD have “stock” coolers shipped with the CPU. They are garbage, a computer with a regular power supply and stock Intel cooler on high load sounds like a printer working.
Also something that, i can’t expect soyboy normies to tell me, is that hard drives are a big part of noise generated by a desktop. There is a difference, but i think you can get used to that, these noises are not much louder than average household noise of someone else living wall next to you. It’s just stupid that hard drive noise is irregular and diffrent than white noise. I used a dedicated white noise device for a few years that was louder than my desktop on idle.
Power usage
I was worried that it might use more electricity than a laptop. I used a smart plug to measure watts on idle, and my modern desktop + 24" monitor use nearly the same amount of power as an older 2015-2018 laptop.
By the way, don’t get fooled that a different ISA reduces power usage, literally every truly powerful ARM processor uses as much power as any other modern CPU. Look at size of transistors, number of cores vs. TDP and technologies that reduce idle power usage, because that is a whole separate thing. Just like RISC-V is an open CPU architecture but not all RISC-V CPUs are open source. We live in a world of proprietary CPUs and architectures, so i understand that people tend to simplify their logic to just “new fancy CPU”, rather than hard facts why something is better than competition. Many ARM laptops are not more power efficient if your OS doesn’t support idle power saving features of that CPU.
Don’t buy USB Wi-Fi adapters.
I bought 2 Wi-Fi adapters, surprisigly both had the same chipset inside and the drivers were open source, yet still didn’t work out of the box. No, drivers are not the problem, these adapters are a scam.
One was a small adapter without antenna, the other was Brostrend AC1200. For how surprisingly cheap i got it, it was good, but both of them overheated after a few minutes. I even opened the small one to see, and the chip was very hot to touch. I don’t know how i am one of the few people that have this problem.
You should buy a good PCIe Wi-Fi adapter instead.
Get ethernet connection if you can, it’s much better than wi-fi.
Monitors
There are actually new monitors with only VGA-DVI-HDMI ports, without DisplayPort. Absolutely disgusting lol. There also exist monitors with VGA-DVI-DP, but they were older and refurbished. I don’t know what is that about. New and higher price monitors will have HDMI-DP input, because it would be weird to have a lower quality analog input that doesn’t support your display’s resolution and refresh rate. HDMI is a proprietary standard that is partially open, they leave the newest HDMI version closed and not available for all hardware manufacturers. For your freedom and convenience, you should prefer DisplayPort.
Unfortunately most laptops jumped from VGA display output, to HDMI. Most laptops are not high-end enough to really limit you, especially with most powerful laptops using nvidia GPU anyway.
Storage space
If you don’t have a 3.5" HDD, you’re basically a soyjak.
Tech