for the past few years my main computer has been a self-built 3930k 6-core 64gb ram linux box with a couple of SSDs, lately running pretty much everything in i3

for the past few years my main computer has been a self-built 3930k 6-core 64gb ram linux box with a couple of SSDs, lately running pretty much everything in i3 under virtualbox VMs (see my profile for my blog describing how I set it up, basically debian based with networking running over pfSense to firewall individual VMs) with 3 monitors,only upgrade would be to move to 3x1440p, but I am doing ok with only the center being that resolution and the side ones being smaller. Works amazingly well to have everything in VMs, very easy to maintain and to use. Giving up a little bit of speed compared to bare metal but hasn't been an issue up to now and is worth the peace of mind to run everything virtualized. This of course would not work for games development and/or GPU-based development in general, but for general back-end dev work it's been great.