The problem with i7 nucs is that they are small, but not silent. This generation does not fix it. For all the usual tasks, like watching youtube, doing office work or really light gaming, it is quite and stays around 40 C. But if you were hoping to use its i7 to its full potential, be prepared for the nuc to hit 85 degrees with irritating fan noise.The single best solution I found to cope with the noise is to turn off the TurboBoost in BIOS. For example I have a python script that does some data analysis. Without turbo boost it ran for around 19 minutes at 50 degrees package temperature with little noise (ambient temperature was 23 C). With turbo boost on, it took only 11 minutes, but at the cost of hitting 90 degrees with a really loud fan. Also keep in mind that if you want to analyze performance of your code, you will need to turn of the TurboBoost anyway for reproducible results.One also might look for Akasa to release their cases for the new 28W nuc's to see if they offer better cooling.Now about linux compatibility, in my case that's OpenSUSE. As usual for nucs (and all other PCs I had), the microphone from the 3.5mm jack is noisy. This can be solved by using USB microphone/headset, I personally use Logitech H800 (+it is wireless). What is new for me, is that the wi-fi card does not show on the first boot after the nuc was powered off. I have to restart it to show up, don't know yet what is the problem.One final note. If you want to use hardware encryption for an NVMe drive, I don't think the BIOS supports it yet. But there are software solutions, like LUKS in Linux.