my new desk setup
My last post on this blog was a little summary about the health struggles I am facing; what I didn't know while writing that was that it would put me in the hospital for a week soon, relying on IV nutrition and a blood transfusion plus a ton of Prednisone.
But I am back and recovering at home, and now I can finally talk about my new desk setup and new laptop! I was just putting the cables and devices together when the emergency hit, and some of the stuff I still waited on to be delivered arrived while I was in the hospital.
For context, I have two desks; one larger L-shaped one (one where you can actually use both sides significantly; so many L-shaped desks barely offer any space on the second side..) and one normal white one from IKEA. They're arranged in a U-shape; I enter from the right side and front, left and back are all desk around me.
Since I work from home most days of the week, I have a work laptop with docking station at home with its own work-provided external screen. My private and work stations used to be separated, one on each L-side (which has its own advantages!) but I missed when my desk only had one screen area while the other spots were free for my studying and my crafts (I have an embroidery hoop holder and a sewing machine and need the larger desk area to cut fabric).
Sadly, with my old laptop, it wasn't feasible to combine the workstations and screens in a sensible way. I tried before, but I was missing some hubs and cable opportunities.
Since I have fully switched to Linux for a while now, I was also fed up with the NVIDIA issues and wanted to switch to something fully AMD. The recent upgrade to KDE Plasma 6 convinced me once again that I don't want to rely on things like optimus-manager to be able to use an external screen. That update forced me to save some stuff not in my latest backup via the USB installer and completely wipe the system because the desktop environment would not load at all anymore and all I could use was the TTY. There was an issue around loading the Breeze themes with both X11 and Wayland with the setup and optimus settings I had. It was working after the wipe, but as long as some things around NVIDIA drivers weren't fixed by the maintainers, I could say goodbye to using my external screen.
So I finally committed and ordered a new laptop. I simply love the portability of laptops and dislike tower PCs, even if I mostly use them on the desk. I love to be able to have a normal desk setup while also being able to take it with me on travels, my girlfriend's place, or possibly the hospital now, I guess!
With this new setup and device, I also wanted to fix the following:
- better ergonomics with an external keyboard instead of having to use the integrated laptop keyboard
- no more feeling the heat beneath the keyboard while gaming
- being able to use Wayland
- avoiding screen tearing issues under NVIDIA / X11 in some games
- 2 external, bigger screens plus if needed the laptop screen as a third
- being able to sit at the same spot while using both of my laptops
- if needed, being able to use two screens for work; I have a dual screen setup in the office, so being able to have that at home is also fantastic.
It's a success so far!
My new laptop is the Lenovo Legion S7. It's a full AMD build (surprisingly hard to get in the EU! So many are AMD/NVIDIA or Intel/NVIDIA) with two USB-A ports, two USB-C ports (one of them supports DisplayPort), a HDMI port, Bluetooth and a card reader.
I've realized my dream setup with the screens and other hardware I already had by:
- Ordering a USB-C to DP cable to hook up one of the screens; that's my private one, the left one. It can be switched between horizontal and vertical, and I usually switch it to vertical for coding.
- Connecting the other screen (center screen) via HDMI. That one is also hooked up via DP to my work docking station; I can therefore switch it freely between the laptops.
- The work laptop is in its docking station beneath the two external screens. My private laptop is flipped open in a holder; I initially wanted to keep it closed, but realized that I needed to access the on-button anyway, and it's better like this for airflow and access to all hubs. Plus, the external screens only activate after login. I could maybe fix this with some systemd config changes, but I don't want to mess with it.
- Headset and keyboard are in one USB-A each.
- Mouse is attached to the second USB-C via a USB-C/A adapter. I thought about switching headset, keyboard or mouse to a Bluetooth one, but they all still work so well and I prefer a wired connection.
I still keep my old one around as a backup and to transport around.
My next plans for the station are
- a screen holder so I can save space by not having the screen stands anymore; this also leaves more space for my work docking station
- better cable management; but I do have to keep three cables free and flexible.
- possibly: a KVM switch, because I currently switch keyboard, headset and mouse between the laptops, but to be honest, it's not that big of a deal and KVM switches are kind of expensive for such a non-issue. But I keep it in mind!
One known issue so far with the laptop is that the internal sound is broken for (among others) the ARHA17 models - there is a lengthy kernel bug discussion thread about it. It doesn't really bother me though because I prefer listening over headset and at least the external screens work as well, so I don't really wanna bother with the ALSA workarounds :)