[uvw]

I built one for development three years ago because I was tired of my slow ass cheap laptop. I had similar requirements like you.

I only needed a machine that was fast and responsive, so I went with the fastest consumer grade cpu at the time, Intel I7-6700k, I opted for 16GB DDR4 RAM. After that it was easy to find a motherboard that supported these with onboard graphics, as I don't do gaming. Ended up costing me around $600, much cheaper than anything I could buy off the shelf.

I run Debian testing on it.

Since then I upgraded it with 1 TB m.2 ssd and 32gb ram. Also a graphics card with four dp ports for high resolution output.