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I would love to hear more about your experiences using Intel NUC since I'm exactly leaning this way for my development machine.

by netule 10y ago

verisimilidude 10y ago
Sure thing. First, some details. I switched to the NUC three or four months ago as my main machine. Mine is the NUC6i5SYH model. I installed 32GB of RAM and filled both drive slots. Windows 10 is installed on one drive, Fedora 24 is installed on the other. As long as you have no plans to play games, it's a wonderful machine for development. It's really fast for its small size, noticeably faster than the Macs I'd been using before. I spend most of my time with the NUC doing Ruby development in Fedora, with some Clojure and Node.js on the side. I've done some office type stuff with LibreOffice. I've dabbled in OpenSCAD while working on a 3D print. The NUC is more than enough power for all of that. I haven't played with Windows 10 too much, but it's also snappy when I need to boot into it. It's a very quiet machine. On full blast, you might get a blowing sound similar to a stressed MBP. But usually in normal usage it's no more than a low hum; I can't even hear it unless I listen for it. You can throttle down the processors in the BIOS to make it nearly (totally?) silent if you like. The most annoying thing about the NUC was installing the BIOS updates before getting started. The NUC6i5SYH had a lot of problems at launch that needed to be patched. Once I got beyond that, everything was smooth. The NUC is basically a laptop board shoved into a small box instead. If the things you want to do are possible on a laptop, they'll be possible on the NUC no problem.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  I wonder how Visual Studio runs on it - I am a gamer but I'm very tempted to go NUC for development and stay with the Xbox One for gaming until I can afford a proper gaming rebuild.
- netule 10y ago
  Thanks for the response, it seems that your use case is very similar to mine (Ruby, Node.js, etc.). I actually decided to go with the i3 model with 16GB of RAM, since I don't think that I will do anything extremely demanding or graphically intense and it's super affordable to boot. I'll run elementary OS or Fedora on it, hopefully it will all work out.
fdiotalevi 10y ago
I still use a 2010 MacBook Pro (i7 8GB RAM 256SSD) to run my IDE and all the "normal" apps (Skype, Slack, Chrome), and a NUC (NUC5i7RYH) on Ubuntu to build and run the stack. I mostly access the NUC via SSH (and rsync my codebase between the two computers). The NUC is also connected to a monitor and I use the MacBook keyboard and mouse to drive both computers with Symless Synergy.

I would love to hear more about your experiences using Intel NUC since I'm exactly leaning this way for my development machine.

by netule 10y ago

I would love to hear more about your experiences using Intel NUC since I'm exactly leaning this way for my development machine.

verisimilidude 10y ago

Sure thing. First, some details. I switched to the NUC three or four months ago as my main machine. Mine is the NUC6i5SYH model. I installed 32GB of RAM and filled both drive slots. Windows 10 is installed on one drive, Fedora 24 is installed on the other. As long as you have no plans to play games, it's a wonderful machine for development. It's really fast for its small size, noticeably faster than the Macs I'd been using before. I spend most of my time with the NUC doing Ruby development in Fedora, with some Clojure and Node.js on the side. I've done some office type stuff with LibreOffice. I've dabbled in OpenSCAD while working on a 3D print. The NUC is more than enough power for all of that. I haven't played with Windows 10 too much, but it's also snappy when I need to boot into it. It's a very quiet machine. On full blast, you might get a blowing sound similar to a stressed MBP. But usually in normal usage it's no more than a low hum; I can't even hear it unless I listen for it. You can throttle down the processors in the BIOS to make it nearly (totally?) silent if you like. The most annoying thing about the NUC was installing the BIOS updates before getting started. The NUC6i5SYH had a lot of problems at launch that needed to be patched. Once I got beyond that, everything was smooth. The NUC is basically a laptop board shoved into a small box instead. If the things you want to do are possible on a laptop, they'll be possible on the NUC no problem.

voltagex_ 10y ago
I wonder how Visual Studio runs on it - I am a gamer but I'm very tempted to go NUC for development and stay with the Xbox One for gaming until I can afford a proper gaming rebuild.
netule 10y ago
Thanks for the response, it seems that your use case is very similar to mine (Ruby, Node.js, etc.). I actually decided to go with the i3 model with 16GB of RAM, since I don't think that I will do anything extremely demanding or graphically intense and it's super affordable to boot. I'll run elementary OS or Fedora on it, hopefully it will all work out.

fdiotalevi 10y ago

I still use a 2010 MacBook Pro (i7 8GB RAM 256SSD) to run my IDE and all the "normal" apps (Skype, Slack, Chrome), and a NUC (NUC5i7RYH) on Ubuntu to build and run the stack. I mostly access the NUC via SSH (and rsync my codebase between the two computers). The NUC is also connected to a monitor and I use the MacBook keyboard and mouse to drive both computers with Symless Synergy.