# Battlestation

My company offered me to choose a new computer for the next 3
years. So far I used a X1 Carbon 6 which was working amazingly but
suffered a bit when using several VMs or some compilation tasks.
As I work fully remote now I asked if I could get a classic tower and
keep the laptop for the times I need to get to the office. No problem
so I chose the most powerful machine I could find for the budget and
it arrived yesterday, I was like a kid at Christmas opening the
package!
It's been like 15 years I hadn't had a desktop computer and oh my this
beast screams! It's a Dell Precision 3650 with the latest 16 cores
Xeon processor and 64GB of RAM. Perfect for browsing Gopher :D
It's my work machine and I still need to use Docker so I settled on
Arch Linux. I would have loved a BSD but running containers in a VM
did not seem really handy for my everyday tasks. I don't particulary
like or dislike systemd but as I need to work with it I didn't install
Void which would have been a great choice otherwise.
For the window manager I chose KDE Plasma, I used to use sway on the
laptop but now that I have screen estate I wanted to try something
else.  As time goes by I like using the mouse and I'm not a hardcore
keyboard power user anymore. Blame Plan9's rio :p Plasma is really
great so far, you can really customize it to your workflow and it has
some tiling options as well.
No real benchmark yet but running one of my Elixir app test-suite went
from 15s to 3 which is already quite nice. Everything is snappy as can
be, the only downside is that you can hear the machine but that was
already the case with the laptop. This time it's less strident at
least.

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