Buying a second device is not just expensive it is also quite a maintenance task. Ensuring you have the data you need on it takes effort, plus ensuring the config matches your other device so you can work comfortably.
But at some level it doesn’t matter whether it’s two devices or one. If I want to automate the maintenance in effect I need two things:
- verify that none of my private info is found outside of my home dir (or of /home perhaps)
- whitelist the portions of my home dir that can be sync’ed from my primary device to my travel device
The difference between having one device or two is whether the whitelisted stuff gets copied to the second device vs. the non-whitelisted gets deleted (after backup) from the one device.
One thought I had is to use a subvolume for each activity, for example one for my media files, one for my embedded systems coding projects, one for 3D printing, one for trip research, etc. Then I could whitelist the subvolumes I want on my laptop and make the others disappear (or not synced). The main catch I’m finding is that it’s pretty unpredictable what apps leave in .cache, .local, .config and other dotfiles.
An assumption I’m making is that it’s fine to have all my apps on the device. E.g., it’s OK to have OrcaSlicer visible, I just don’t want my 3D models to be present/accessible.