My home office setup

This past year was no big change for me in terms of my daily work routines. I haven't worked from an office in years. Since 2018, in fact, I have been busy working from all over europe. Due to my studies, I have been moving back and forth between Berlin, Copenhagen, Bonn and Marburg on a weekly basis.

What has definitely changed is that I now have an almost permanent office at home. One with a proper table and comfortable office chair.

Desks

For the moment I maintain two different desk configurations. A standing desk and a traditional desk with an office chair. This allows me to switch seamlessly between the two modes of "standing" and "seated" over the course of the day. In the beginning I thought hard about whether it would make sense to invest in a height-adjustable desk. However, in my case, I know that I very rarely used the up/down functionality in the office back then. Having both options available at the same time makes me think about changing the way I work more often. By now I'm actually standing more than I'm sitting. That used to be the other way around with the variable height desk.

Standing desk

• Desk: High Desk Milla
• Screen: Dell 27" Screens with Ergotron LX Monitor Mount
• Mouse: Logitech MX Anywhere 3
• Keyboard: Varmilo VA88M
• Mic: Rode NT-USB and Blue Compass Mic Arm
• Headphones: Sony MDR-7506
• Physical Time Tracker: Timeular

Seated workstation

• Desk: Table legs and Ikea table top
• Screen: Dell u3417W
• Keyboard: Apple Magic Keyboard / Novelkeys NK65
• Mouse: Logitech G703

Operating system

Over the last few months, my MacBook Pro from 2016 has become incredibly slow. Restoring it has only temporarily helped the situation. Now, after about 6 months, it is virtually unusable yet again. To finally address the issue, I made the switch to Ubuntu as my primary operating system around two months ago. I decided to convert my old windows gaming machine (7 years old i7 CPU, GTX 1080, 8gb RAM) and installed PopOS on it - the super beginner ubuntu linux distro.

And I have definitely not changed my mind about this decision so far. All applications that I use every day are running smoothly. Webstorm, Visual Studio code, Chrome, MS Edge, Slack, Telegram, Signal, Discord, Spotify. All there.

The only two things I miss are the shared clipboard on macOS/iOS devices as well as sketch as a design tool. For the latter I'm trying to use Figma now, but moving the large existing sketch library is a bit of a hassle still.

At the moment I have the Linux desktop hooked up to the standing desk which is where I primarily work right now. At the seated desktop I usually work with the MacBook, if I want to use Sketch again or just want to see a decent looking operating system. Because, let's be honest, Linux is kind of ugly for the most part.