I've been using a desktop at work for the last ten years and hopefully to the foreseeable future. With a price of a MacBook pro you get 16-24 cores, good cooling facilities, 32-64 GB of RAM and excellent Linux support.
I built a desktop a few months ago after 10 years of laptops. Wow, what a difference time makes! It's incredible what you can get on even a modest budget when speccing desktop components.