Comment by technofiend

Intel's NUC bricks come in two varieties: prebuilt and bring your own memory, storage and OS. The latter does not impose a Windows license fee and as long as you're running kernel 4 all the hardware is generally supported, although I see running Ubuntu combined with a thunderbolt switch doesn't work.

Sporting laptop-class processors these are not powerhouse machines and fall below the latest Mac Minis in performance. But for a development platform they can be plenty, particularly the newer models that ditch classic SATA for two NVME slots.