I've been doing a lot of research into Deep Reinforcement Learning, Machine Learning and other areas. Without much non-apple hardware laying around. I have spent countless hours rebuilding tensorflow 1.3-1.7 from source with all of the known .diff changes required and the constant rebuilding effords in order to get things working. I tried moving to Linux on the machines, but sadly neither the MacPro or the Macbook Pro 2017 supports Linux that well nor the supported the Nvidia egpu on previous versions of ubuntu.
But then comes 2018 and I got back from one of my MacMini and I decided to try with it. I have heard people having luck with ubuntu 17.10 on a NUC and thought it would be a good idea to try.