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Why would you stick to your desktop so much? It looks like any laptop is a better device for you right now.

I’d suggest agreeing to the proposition of the kind person who offered you to ship his ThinkPad. (In this very thread.) If there’s more than one person willing to help, I’d suggest agreeing on getting a couple of laptops, as it will allow you to have a backup computer. Someone offered his MacBook Pro 2012 here too. I have a similar one, and it does the web dev job just fine. It’s like tires to your car, I’d have at least two, the 2nd one can be any that would boot and work, regardless of its state and how powerful it is.

If you feel very uncomfortable about that, I’d suggest you to treat it as a credit. You can buy that laptop from that person later, offering them the market price for that.

Any basic web dev work should not take tremendous resources from your machine, so even if your computer is super powerful, you don’t _require_ it to do the job. Selling or not is your decision, but to me, it’s just secondary. You can get any old laptop for very cheap. Just throw any Linux on it. Fedora or Ubuntu is modest even if you never interacted with it, and they will allow almost any 10–15 years old laptop to work relatively well.

I’d strongly suggest having two, just so you could have any backup option to do the job, even if the primary laptop is down for some reason. It’s real to work from anywhere, your car, a café, a street. You might need a battery for that laptop, but it shouldn’t be too expensive, and should serve you at least for a year or two, which might be plenty for you to get to a better state than yours now.

I have a super powerful desktop for more than a decade now, and due to various life obstacles, I’m unable to work from it most times. It was shelved for a couple of years, and now I’m able to reach it only once or twice a week. If I had no laptop, I wouldn’t be able to deliver anything. I used a 2011 entry-level MacBook Pro till it was broken, now I use a 2014 model, and it’s my primary machine for everything. So don’t underestimate laptops.

Since you’d benefit from a battery life, I’d suggest you to find any cheap second-hand iPad. The newer, the better, obviously, but those that are no longer supported can be very cheap. I have a 1st Gen. iPad Pro, and it works almost full day from its (quite drained) battery. This device can work as a 2nd screen for any relatively modern macOS device (e.g. a 10 years MacBook). Plus, such a device might allow you to have more screen time from a battery, and might be better than just a smartphone when you’re on the go. By juggling these devices, you might have a full-day battery life.

Just my ¢2 about your desktop. Go for laptop and try to find any computer-related job, I’d say.



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