I went to BestBuy last month with this same idea in mind. I've got 4 desktop PCs under my desk I use for game dev but I'm curious to travel and remote desktop into them. I was on the fence about maybe just getting a small laptop and large portable monitor but eventually landed on a $329 "HP - 17.3" Laptop - Intel Core i3 - 8GB Memory - 256GB SSD - Natural Silver" that seemed to check my two boxes cheap & large screen.
I haven't made the purchase yet because I'm concerned if I should reach for a more expensive laptop that I can do work on in case I'm ever unable to connect over RDP.
Curious to hear if anyone else has had any success with this kind of setup?
The weakest link in this setup is your current internet. I've found while traveling, internet is generally pretty bad under, 10Mbs. Making this a rather difficult task. American view.
At home, my "laptop" is a dumb terminal that docks to my desk monitors. But computes to servers in the closet.
At my families who have (150:down/10:up)Mbs it was no different from being at home. I connected over wire guard. I even took my zoom/client calls in vms over rdp. Passing my webcam from my local laptop -> wire guard -> server. I also used parsed to stream gaming from home.
Conversely, I was at an Airbnb recently with (5/0.512)Mbs DSL. It was a real chore. For the internet black hole, I've opted to go for a SFFpc instead. That can fit into checked baggage or carry on. Even if I can't setup a monitor and keyboard at the airbnb hotel. Having both off in lodging wifi is suitable enough.
I haven't made the purchase yet because I'm concerned if I should reach for a more expensive laptop that I can do work on in case I'm ever unable to connect over RDP.
Curious to hear if anyone else has had any success with this kind of setup?