Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?

The only caveat is, use it if all hardware works right off the box (Eg: you don't need proprietary drivers for your display and suspend/resume works without twiddling etc...). If that's not the case, don't bother with fedora because you'll just end up fighting the hardware with every update.

fwiw, fedora has been my default OS for 10+ years now. My dev usually happens on the system (since I don't want to keep replicating my dev environment) and testing happens in containers and/or VMs. It's easier to spin up docker/lxc instances than VMs imho.

Now to me stability is everything. I have shit to do and don't have time to fuck around with the system every two days (that's why I was on 14.04 in late 2016). But a friend of mine convinced me to invest some time, install Manjaro and learn the slightly different ecosystem. And I can say, it's been worth it. Fantastically stable, things work, and in the 3 months of usage I have yet to find a bug.

I started with Ubuntu, which technically seems to do fine; however I always ended up wanting/needing to use some current version of some dev software (up to date compiler or a newer Qt Creator for cross compilation for example).

To get those newer versions, I found myself having to rely on PPAs providing them as well as the necessary libraries, which ended up destroying a dist upgrade half a year later. That happened to me at least 2 times.

After that, I tried Fedora and had various problems from the start (maybe that's not the case anymore). Then I ended up with Arch, and have never looked back.

So, if you want to use up to date software, I'd recommend you to strongly consider a rolling release distro. The occational fixing of a single package is worth it over the loss of multiple days/much hair reconstructing your old dev environment on the next distro version any day of the week.

- Pacman is a great package manager (esp. when compared to e.g. ´yum´).

- The Arch User Repository (https://aur.archlinux.org/) has a large list of additional packages maintained by the community.

- The PKGBUILD format used by the AUR is easy to read and essentially just generates Pacman packages you can install alongside packages from the Arch repo.

- PKGBUILD also makes it really easy to create a package for some obscure software yourself (or e.g. a specific font), if necessary.

- There are tools that create PKGBUILD packages from language repos like gem, npm or pypi (via pip). Those are really useful since they prevent language based packages from clashing with pacman.

In addition, I really like that arch is built with choice in mind: There's no default "way to go" - you can e.g. choose from several desktop environments without having to install a specific one first, meaning you can configure your system from the ground up.

I think Slackware and Gentoo work similarly? (I've personally never tried them)

After just a few weeks, even using the same distro, everyone's installation is customized to its user like a glovesl. Some start with more more comfortable distros than others. Something like Ubuntu will give you a very stock, GUI heavy, "beginner/I don't want to think about my OS" operating system. From there, you get into Debian, a much more "pick and choose distro" than Ubuntu, but still with great support and stable packages. After that, maybe into Arch, a rolling release distro with grear, always-up-to-date, system with a very minimalist and well designed base install. After that, Gentoo, a hand crafted, labor intensive distro that will be completely bespoke to you.

Some never move on from Ubuntu, some never make it to Gentoo. AND THAT'S _OKAY_. It's about what YOU are comfortable with.

As you grow and become more familiar with the CLI and Linux, you'll want to take more control of what you install and I think you'll start to appreciate simplicity and purity over "initial ease of use". You might even consider trying out different window managers like KDE, i3 (my current love affair), or awesome wm. At that point in your Linux journey, you'll actually have some intuition about how a window manager is different from your distro and how most window managers are built on top of X server. You'll have your own hand rolled .Bashrc. You'll know what you _want_ from your OS.

Personally, that's where I am now. I've been running Arch for 2 years now and made the switch from GNOME to i3 about 6 months ago.

My advice is not to try the most highly recommended distro, or the most "barebones" but simply begin with so.thing very easy like Ubuntu. You might quickly hit some frustrations and identify things that you would like your distro of choice to better. At that point look elsewhere. Migrate and give that some time.

Don't just jump onto the "perfect developer's distro", ease into the easiest and most comforting distro for you "where you are now".