If I'm not using my Mac, my Elementary OS desktop becomes my dev machine.
I used to run Gentoo on my desktop which I used primarily for Dev for over 2 years long before I got a Mac, machine was super fast and well tuned - there was almost no latency doing anything - except for keeping the OS up to date since it required compiling everything myself. If you're looking to get some Linux experience under your belt at the same time, take Gentoo or Arch Linux for a test run and use it daily no matter how hard it is initially, if you want to get some work done and don't care about the extra Linux experience, Elementary OS / Mint / Ubuntu are all great and works mostly out of the box.