A workstation/desktop is way better for your posture and has more power for the money.
If you need to travel you can always use a cheap laptop to start a remote desktop session on the workstation.
But maybe this also depends on the kind of computing power you need. Personally I need an RTX GPU which saves me a huge amount of time. Those are just not available in laptops.
This!
I'm currently in a hotel room using a cheap laptop (5-year old Lenovo 330) to connect remotely to my fast workstation (home-built Ryzen, lots of memory, lots of storage and LTO6 tape for backups). There's almost 1000mi between them but that's not stopping me doing anything I require. If someone steals the laptop, no big deal, buy another one. All I do is sign and and connect to remote stuff, pretty much nothing of value is stored locally.
"My home [PC] is my cloud", as Sir Edward Coke didn't quite say...
I personally just use vim over ssh.
I used to use a desktop workstation for the above, but after I got a rack server (running 24/7 with a bare-metal hypervisor) I'm finding I'm using the desktop less and less unless I require the GPU. If I was back in school now I would've forgone the desktop altogether and gone with a cheap laptop and a used server.
By the way, it's not just about performance. It's about the fact that your data is protected and secure, and you can have backups and redundancy in your private cloud instead of relying on a single laptop. Depending on how your remote access is set up you could even have a browser interface and thus be able to work on a borrowed machine or even on a public library computer.
> a very cheap laptop
Overall I think the problem here is just how many things are tied to the price. Quality of screen, keyboard, battery, etc. If it's really only for occasional use, fine, but otherwise, it's probably still worth it to get a mid-ranged but competent laptop to complement the desktop/workstation. (It would be easy to devolve into each user's personal use cases here, on whether to prioritize screen, battery life, etc.)
> RTX GPU ... are just not available in laptops
This is not true, though I'm sure what you mean is "full wattage desktop-version RTX GPUs are not available in laptops." You can get up to a ~150W RTX 3080 in a laptop, plus there are a few "external GPU" solutions like the Asus ROG Flow Z13 which let you plug a desktop-class GPU into your laptop.
The secret here is to get an old high end laptop. Then the screen and keyboard are good but the price is low.
Docker Image and Proxy are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30909178
It's not just about saving money either. I just can't really get the performance in a laptop, but I occasionally need to be portable. Not too often, but sometimes. Desktop tends to get the budget and laptop gets the rest.