I built a Linux workstation with i9 and liquid cooling, 128 Gb ram, RTX4090, 1 x 4K monitor + 2 x 1920x1080 monitors

and Macbook pro M1MAX when I go to the office

I run LLM with Llama.cpp, or python scripts under the control of an Elixir application, but my goal is to run wasm with wasmex under the BEAM

Looking back, I am glad to have learned Elixir and found a dream job

Not boring at all Lucas!

One of my most loved computers was a 2012 11" MacBook Air which I bought after getting fed up of being tied to the desk all day. It’s not a computer I would have considered but DHH had recently bought one and said it was more than adequate for Rails dev, so I got one to try and fell in love with it! It was such a nice cute little computer that had some decent power too for tasks like dev and photoshop. I used it with my 27" monitor when at my desk and when not, I learned to love Spaces in macOS with full screen mode - I’d have a browser on one space on the left, Macvim in a Space in the middle (with split screens) and Terminal in a space on the right, and I’d use 4 finger swipes to navigate between them. I ended up using it as my daily driver for about 8 years!! Though part of that was because I wanted to get a MBP and they kept releasing rubbish ones until they finally released the 16" in 2019.

So then I went to the 16" MacBook Pro and because I had gone so long without an upgrade, spec’d it fairly well and for the long term. And I loved it to begin with. It reminded me of the power of my first Mac, the Mac Pro, along with with some of the portability of the MBA. But the honeymoon period didn’t last long - after about 10 months, after each consecutive macOS release it got slower and slower and noisier and more annoying. Apple really did a huge dirty on Intel Mac owners when they released their own silicon. I refused to upgrade and instead kept reporting issues to Apple… which they’d fix after a few releases… but then other issues would creep in! Fair play to the Apple devs as they do usually try to fix issues, but it’s obviously upper management who are responsible for them being introduced to begin with.

What have I got now? The cheapest Mac you can buy! an M4 Mac mini base model.

Pretty much exactly 5 years after I bought the MBP I felt I just couldn’t use it any longer as it had become so irritating and I had a huge load of work to catch up with, so got the base M4 mini to tie me over - and you know what? It’s actually pretty good! I installed macOS on an external drive (which is actually faster than the built in 256GB drive) and so far it is working well (have had no issues with the drive to date and it works/feels no different to an internal drive).

I do have an issue with Spotlight tho (it does not return any files when searching, just apps, even tho Finder returns files) but I think this might be a configuration error on my part or because I ended up adding a huge amount of locations to the ignore section. I’ve reported it and Apple have said they are looking into it.

The thing I really dislike about it, tho it probably won’t bother others, is that there is a lag in the animation when you go to Mission Control via a hot corner. Once you’ve done it once it’s fine for a while, but then it seems to re-allocate resources and prioritises efficiency (so it’ll happen again afterwards) I use hot corners a lot so it bothers me quite a bit. I’ve reported it to Apple but I don’t think it’s something that can be easily fixed as this is the most basic model you can get. I don’t think it will impact many other people though, just those who use a lot of Spaces and have a lot of apps/windows/browsers/tabs/files open.

For anyone curious though, I highly recommend giving a Mac mini a go! They are very good value for money - just buy the base machine and either run macOS via a standard external SSD, or if you want some extremely fast, make your own with a TB4 or TB5 enclosure and with the SSD of your choice (like the one in this guide).

My Elixir Development Setup

Hey fellow alchemists! Thought I’d share my current development environment for Elixir projects.

Hardware

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D (16 cores/32 threads) with 128MB L3 cache
• RAM: 32GB
• Display: 34" ultrawide monitor
• Input: Split ergonomic Tergo Sofle keyboard
• OS: Kubuntu 24.04

What’s Working Well

The high core count is absolutely fantastic for Elixir/BEAM’s concurrency model. Compilation is blazing fast, and I can run multiple nodes without breaking a sweat. The system handles Phoenix LiveView hot reloading instantly.

The split keyboard has been a game-changer for comfort during long coding sessions, and the ultrawide monitor gives me plenty of space for having IEx, code, and documentation visible simultaneously.

Kubuntu provides a clean, minimal environment that stays out of my way. Terminal-centric workflows with Neovim feel very natural here.

Room for Improvement

I’m currently using the integrated Raphael GPU, which works fine for most tasks, but I’ve noticed limitations when working with Nx/EXLA for ML experiments. If you’re doing serious work with machine learning in Elixir, a dedicated GPU would be a worthwhile addition.

Would love to hear what setups others are using for Elixir development!

MAIN MACHINE

iMac Pro, the 10 CPU / 20 threads variant (Xeon W-2150B ), with Radeon Pro Vega 56 GPU, 64GB RAM, 2TB NVMe SSD (never seen it hit more than 2.7GB/s, though I don’t recall ever seeing it bottlenecked on I/O either).

Still works great to this day but it’s prone to spinning its fans in unexpectedly calm conditions and it gradually irked me to the point of really wanting to get rid of it. Add to that the subjective but still somewhat tangible feeling that macOS is gradually deteriorating – too much services in the background, can’t do a plethora of things I would want to do with my own machine, not easily anyway (at least 3 such things now but won’t explain as it’s not on topic), and started feeling a tad slow at times, and sometimes a task can load it to the point of the UI becoming fully unresponsive for 5+ seconds – inexcusable!

I am guessing Apple is gradually stopping the good updates on Intel Macs and stuff just starts getting worse with time.

SECONDARY MACHINE

HP 15s EQ series laptop: AMD 5500U CPU, some Vega GPU but can’t remember which one, 32GB RAM, 2TB NVMe SSD (Corsair MP510; awesome SSD btw, I recommend it to anyone).

I am lost for words as how insanely good this laptop is. It’s extremely fast, it regularly outperforms my Xeon-2150B on the iMac Pro, fans turn on much less often even under load (and they are less loud when they do, even on maximum), graphics performance is always great and I’ve observed the SSD hit ~4.5GB/s quite a number of times.

It’s the better machine in every way… and it’s just a laptop.

Of course maybe it would perform worse if I hook up my gaming 34" display (21:9 ratio), who knows, but I really doubt it. I’m definitely going full-AMD from here and on. They are much more open-source friendly as well, which is a very important consideration for Linux systems.

Future plans

I want to make a comeback to Linux. I don’t miss the occasional fight with it to even have my machine boot or make a kernel module get loaded on startup again… but I heard from many people that Linux has improved in this regard a lot in the last years and my own limited experience with the laptop confirms it. I also have a server and it very rarely had any trouble at all. Thinking of it it was only once when a certain SSH crypto algorithm was hard deprecated and I couldn’t remote-login anymore so had to hook up a display and a keyboard in order to fix things.

But at one point in the next year or two I’ll start assembling a Linux workstation that I want to last me at least 10 years, if possible. With the current-gen tech, what with PCIe 5.0 and some insanely fast SSDs and RAM modules and motherboards with a ton of PCIe lanes and CPUs that can nearly never get fully stressed due to memory and I/O bandwidth always being less than what the CPU can handle… I think it’s very doable.

My main machine is a Mac Mini M4 Pro with 64GB, 500GB HD with an extra NVMe 500GB, 3 monitors, 2* 27" and a 34" as my main display, MacOS Sequoia.

My secondary machine is a Gigabyte Nuc with 8-Core i7, 32GB and 1TB HD running Ubuntu 24.04LTS, no monitors attached, I SSH into this machine only.

My third is a Intel Nuc, 8-Core i7, 64GB and 1TB HD running Windows 11 Pro, no monitors attached, I use RDP to access that one.

My main is used for all my regular development work, the Ubuntu machine is used for my development for my GratWiFi firmware and other OpenWRT or Nerves related work. The windows machine is used to maintain a POS software I wrote in 2005 using .NET.