I got into the hobby before the internet was a thing and we only had recommendations from friends and colleagues. For me this was fellow musicians and audio engineers. My regret is not breaking out of my lane and moving to more colored headphones earlier on. I was stuck in neutrality for close to a decade and only using headphones that I could also justify using in the studio.
The irony is, even as someone that’s tracked, and mixed a lot of music over the years, I prefer a much more colored, V-shaped tuning for music enjoyment/personal listening. So while I love the LCD-X, MM-500, Sennheiser HD600 and DT1990s, I rarely listen to them when I’m not working in a daw. For that, I prefer stuff like the FatFreq IEMs, or the Focal Radiance, Apos Caspian, HarmonicDyne Zeus Elites, etc.
My two main rigs are a 13900K/4090 equipped PC and a fully spec’d 16” M1 Max MacBook Pro, which I use for work; they are both fairly high end solutions.
Most of my file management is done via a local network/home labs setup, with a few synch tasks keeping critical files updated and managed in real time. Decided I wanted to test the Deck out as an all around productivity and entertainment tool. Spun up my dev environment in roughly 30 mins; offloaded some of my environment to Portainer/Docker running from my NAS. Was able to get all of my design and development work done without a hitch. Ended up running all my gaming, work, and personal tasks off of it for roughly a week, connected to a dock and external display.
Didn’t miss a thing. Undocked to game; didn’t miss the 4090. Watched Plex from bed; didn’t miss the TV. Honestly, if the next iteration provides native eGPU support, I could see this being a viable all-in-one solution for a large segment of users who are not locked down to Windows or MacOS. If it wasn’t for some mandatory MacOS tasks, I’d even consider it.
Also forgot how much I missed running Linux desktops. Last time I used a distro as my main machine was 2006 or so. Forgot how flexible and utterly malleable it is to work with and tweak.