Uses

OS & software

I typically dual-boot my systems with both Windows 10 and Manjaro Linux, with Manjaro being my main OS for development and Windows 10 being, well, required for some apps I have to use at work.

I'm currently running Manjaro GNOME edition, but I tend to distro hop a lot. My favourite DEs are GNOME, KDE and i3. Lately I've focused on GNOME since it's quickest to set up, and I've used i3 for a long time, but found that some apps (especially Electron apps) are quite high-maintenance and require tweaks to set up properly, so I typically go with a full-fledged DE (GNOME or KDE) on my work machines.

IntelliJ's WebStorm is my IDE of choice. WebStorm has amazing support for everything you might want to do with Javascript, including support for Node, Typescript, React, as well as GraphQL. For simpler text editors I use VSCode and Vim.

Hardware

Thinkpad X1 Extreme

My main machine is the powerhouse that is Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Extreme (gen 2). It boasts an hexa-core i7-9750H, 32GB of RAM, 1.5TB of blazing fast SSD storage, as well as a pretty powerful Nvidia 1650 Max-Q.

I customized my X1 Extreme with a very bright 500-nits FHD display, now I can actually see things during the day, even with dark IDE themes. Living in a sunny area it's quite a breath of fresh air, my old laptop had a very dim screen (around 250-300 nits) and was unusable during sunny days, even in the office.

One of the key reasons I went with X1 Extreme over other options (such as Dell XPS 15) was the great keyboard and the TrackPoint. One of the first things I did was swap the Fn and ctrl keys in the BIOS section.

Work setup with the monitor

At work I tend to hook the laptop up to my 32 inch 4K monitor (Acer ET322QK), which I use at 100% scaling for a ridiculous amount of real estate. The DPI of the laptop's screen is virtually the same as the 4K monitor (15,6 inches at 1080 vs 32 inches at 4K).

The massive 32 inch monitor allows me to have everything I need on the screen at once, including the IDE(s), browser + the developer panel and multiple console windows.