[fian]

Agree with you on laptops not being ergonomic by themselves for long term use.

Perhaps not an issue for many development activities, but anything involving lots of calculations (CPU or GPU) will inevitably generate a lot of heat.

Desktops tend to be better at dissipating heat.

In a previous job, our desktops massively out performed our similar spec laptops for long running simulations.

Also you can typically attach more storage and GPUs to a desktop than a laptop if you need to.