Need advice on hardware requirements for setting up a development system running devcontainers

I have been following the developer documentation, and was able to get a devcontainer up and running with VS Code and Docker Desktop, per the steps at the below link … only it completely crushed my Windows 10 machine with 12 GB RAM. Briefly investigating the upgrade options, I quickly determined that another system would be preferred approach for me, rather than trying to add more juice to the Windows PC.

I am thinking I would set up a “headless” mini PC running Ubuntu with KDE desktop and then access it from my Windows machine, but am having difficulty spec’ing and pricing a machine as I have so far found only general guidance related to the docker desktop requirements. Statements like “64 bit kernel with support for virtualization” and “at least 4GB RAM” are fine, but 4GB RAM is likely insufficient for larger images/containers … and maybe I’d have a need to run multiple containers (?).

I suspect that there are readers of this forum that have experience running VS Code with Docker Desktop, specifically with the Home Assistant core devcontainer on a Linux distro’, and so was looking for guidance on the following …

  • does the headless mini PC approach sound good?

  • any mini PC setup that you used and like (e.g. a NUC?)

  • thoughts/experience about how much RAM such a system might need for “reasonable” performance?

  • as someone newer to setting up a Linux PC, I was looking at the Kubuntu distribution, which is Ubuntu with the KDE Plasma desktop … any thoughts or opinions about that?

Appreciate any thoughts or feedback.