In the details, laptops and desktops are different (not the same processor, not the same optimizations, perhaps not the same kernel and compiler versions, often not the same graphical cards and screen sizes).
But as a software developer you mostly use some version control (e.g. git) on the software you are coding.
I'm in the same position as you and just use git to maintain the same source code base on both machines.
Of course it really depends on the kind of software you code. For an example OpenCL source code is extremely dependent on the hardware.
And for GUI or web development, you could have different fonts installed on the two computers. And different preferred window sizes or colors.
Also two different Linux distributions have different kernels, different libraries versions, different compilers or debuggers etc.