What hardware specs would you go for when building a PC for Linux development?

[Cromulent]

Seeing as black friday is coming up I thought I might look into building a small PC for Linux software development. I'd like to use it for C++ and Python programming mainly although it would be cool do try out things like Erlang or Haskell as well. I'd probably go with Arch Linux as my distribution of choice.

I used to have Linux installed on my main desktop PC which was built to handle gaming primarily so it is pretty powerful but it includes things I don't need. For instance my Linux dev box could quite happily cope with integrated graphics. The only things I really need are a minimum of 16GBs of RAM and a very fast SSD.

So what hardware specs would you chose if you were building a dedicated Linux development PC?

Edit: After thinking about this a bit I've decided that I might just upgrade my ancient copy of VMWare Workstation 10 to the latest version and use that instead for Linux development. Virtual machines aren't normally ideal but VMWare Workstation is miles better than Virtualbox and seems to work a lot better so I'll see how I get on with it before thinking about getting a dedicated PC for Linux development.

 

[joeyjojo]

I see your edit but will answer anyway.

Depends on the project i.e. how much compiling needs to happen. I make do with various i5 and Xeon machines (4-12 cores) but you might need fewer or more. For an extreme example I recall that building Chromium takes 30-120 minutes on a typical workstation.

Same with memory - 16 GB would be overkill for most things but it depends (again it's the minimum for building Chromium for an extreme example).

The fast SSD is indeed critical.

 

[Cromulent]

I see your edit but will answer anyway.

Depends on the project i.e. how much compiling needs to happen. I make do with various i5 and Xeon machines (4-12 cores) but you might need fewer or more. For an extreme example I recall that building Chromium takes 30-120 minutes on a typical workstation.

Same with memory - 16 GB would be overkill for most things but it depends (again it's the minimum for building Chromium for an extreme example).

The fast SSD is indeed critical.

Thanks for the reply .

The reason I need so much RAM is that I often have a lot of programs open and Google Chrome eats up RAM like there is no tomorrow when you have multiple browser tabs open with documentation from lots of different sites. I'd always prefer to have too much RAM than not enough. Plus if I did build this system I could KVM virtual machines to test on before deploying to servers. So it would be good to go for a CPU that supported virtualisation well as testing on a client machine isn't really ideal. I like to copy my server environment as much as possible which KVM allows me to do. That is why I decided to go with VMWare Workstation as I can have multiple VMs, some for development and some for testing.

I doubt there is that much compiling that is required. I'm probably only an intermediate C++ developer but when you start adding templates and stuff the compile time goes up massively so anything to reduce that would be good. My main programming language is Python but I tend to use PyCharm as my IDE.

 

[Chaos]

The intel nuc is a nice little linux dev machine, small , quite, low energy usage and has good linux compatibility.