Accessing a thick client from a thin client - advice needed for a clamshell purchase

[drone4four]

I was thinking of purchasing a thin client clamshell laptop with the intention of logging in remotely to use my thick client when I am not at home.

I have a number of questions. But I think it might be a good idea to share my current hardware specs and provide a background on my use case first.

Here I go - -

I have a Desktop PC (tower) with Manjaro, Ubuntu, and soon NixOS installed natively. It’s an Intel i5-13600K CPU with 64 GB of RAM and AMD RX 6600 XT 8GB GPU with 6+ terabytes NVMe, SSD, and HD storage in total spread across my root fs, home directory, and back up data directories. It’s a terrific workhorse.

In terms of my use case for this hardware configuration, I am in a seemingly perpetual state of research, writing works of non-fiction and social science in Google Docs in Chrome (dozens of tabs) and searching and reading similar topics also in Chrome (hundreds tabs). So on the one hand while I do academic and literary research, I am additionally learning data science and algorithmic software design. For this I use VS Code and seem to accrue hundreds of Chrome tabs to support these endeavors as well. I furthermore interact with my peers on various communities on Discord and Slack. Having said all of that, with all of these Java heavy and electron/chromium based apps I rely on, this is how I justify the need for 64 GBs of RAM. My system monitors tell me that I usually hover around the 40%-60% range on a busy day.

Now for my line of questioning:

1. How realistic is it to remote into a thick client from a $400-500 thin client? Comments? What kind of user experience could I expect to run Gnome or Plasma on my home PC but through a secured ssh internet connection from a clamshell?
2. I’ve used ssh to login from my Desktop PC into virtual private servers in the cloud in the past. But in that case I had a static IP and was able to set up a DNS so that is why ssh worked so easily. I gather that my ISP is forever leasing and re-assigning unique IP addresses on rotation, so it is never static. This makes it difficult to set up a consistent ssh connection. I’d have to reconfigure it manually every 2 weeks or whenever my ISP arbitrarily decides to change my IP address. What might the solution be to this issue?
3. If I am able to establish a decent regular consistent ssh connection successfully, is it as easy as running `startx` from my shell to launch an X / Wayland wm session?
4. What alternatives might there be to ssh to remote in?

Some more rationale: Laptops with 64 GBs of RAM or even 32 GBs of RAM are prohibitively expensive. To me it doesn’t make sense to lug around a heavy ultra expensive laptop in a public place like the library where a thief and opportunist could take advantage of the situation and swipe it with all my data on it. While I could encrypt the storage, I’d rather be out $400 than $2,500+.

I don’t travel around the world so latency is not an issue.