I have always been obssessed with having the finest gadgets on my desk. Although I am still far from having the best setup, I have certainly made some good progress. I am a fan of clean and minimal setups, and keeping it that way is a tough task to do.
Outset
My desk is nothing spectacular. I have a :
- 4.5ft x 2.5ft custom-made desk
- Misuraa Red and Black – Xenon Gaming Chair (ridiculously comfortable)
- Scarters 90 cm X 45 cm Mouse Pad
- Tukzer Gel Mouse Pad Wrist Rest Memory-Foam Ergonomic Mousepad (more of a wrist-pad)
Coming to the main things – machines…
My setup is powered by three different machines:
- Lenovo Legion Y530 (Primary)
- MacBook Air M1 (Secondary)
- Raspberry Pi 4 Model-B (Personal Server)
Primary Device
I use a Lenovo Legion Y530 as my primary device, it has the following specs:
- Intel i5-8300H
- 16GB RAM (8 + 8)
- ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro 256GB (NVMe SSD)
- Western Digital WD Green 480 GB (SATA SSD for archiving data)
I also use two external drives to backup data:
- Seagate Backup Plus 2TB (External Backup Drive)
- Seagate Barracuda Pro 1TB (External Backup Drive)
My primary device runs Zorin OS 16 Pro and it is attached to an LG 27″ 1440p monitor. I use my primary device primarily for development.
Lenovo Legion Y530 is one of the best laptops that I’ve ever laid my eyes on. It is built well, has no RGB (I absolutely hate RGB), and does not cut many corners.
Peripherals
I believe that a setup is only as good as the peripherals. I only use peripherals on my primary device and these are the peripherals that I have:
Keyboards
I own two keyboards, one is a mechanical keyboard with Cherry Blue swithces – Gigabyte Force K83, and one is wirelesss – Logitech K480. Even though I really like Gigabyte Forece K83, it is not the finest mechanical keyboard. It is wired and it does not have that ‘THOCC’ sound!
Mice
MX Master 3! The best mouse ever built. I have two mice, one on either side of the desk. The main mouse is an Logitech MX Master 3, an absolute beast. I also use a Logitech B331 Silent Plus, mainly dues to its silent clicks.
Secondary Device
I use a MacBook Air M1 (8GB + 256GB) as my secondary device and I bought it mainly because of two reasons: portability and battery backup. It’s UNIX so most of the Linux commands work just fine; however, due to the ARM architecture, EasyEngine does not work on M1.
Development Server
Having multiple devices comes with its own caveats: synchronizing data and your progess is one of them. You can use GitHub to pull and push changes but in this part of the world, the internet can go out any time. Fortunately, I had a spare Raspberry Pi 4 Model-B with 8GB RAM which I use to run Ubuntu Server 20.04 and it has the following services running:
- SSH
- RDP
- HTTP/HTTPS
- FTP
I have Waveshare SSD 1327 (128×128) OLED display which I use to display system info.
I will be writing a separate blog post about my Raspberry Pi.
