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

* Ubuntu. Works fine (I used kubuntu and xubuntu).

* Mint. Tried it and it seemed to work okay until I upgraded it one day and ran into issues that I think were related to the system having an identity crisis over who it really was (ubuntu or mint?).

* Fedora: had a few more driver issues than ubuntu but still worked okay for the most part.

* Debian: pain to set up and a lot of issues - there wasn't a bootable ISO I could find that would let me boot into a USB and test run the latest version with all of the (nonfree) drivers I needed.

* Arch: ran into more bugs than on ubuntu/fedora: the project maintainers don't do QA as effectively as ubuntu, debian and fedora. There seems to be a pervasive attitude that since its the distro where you get your hands dirty, that you should hand-fix a lot of bugs too. I tried manjaro as well because I wanted to try Arch and didn't want to configure every little thing until I saw this horrifying post and then ran far, far away: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/31yayt/manjaro_forgo...

* Gentoo: tried and failed to install firefox due to dependency issues and then gave up. Waste of time.

* Opensuse: tried and again got bogged down by the package manager crashing when trying to upgrade some pretty basic part of the system.

For me the decision comes down to comprehensive driver support out of the box and QA. Ubuntu still seems to be the best at those although Fedora isn't far behind. Arch has the most up to date packages which is nice but IMHO its instability caused me way too many headaches.

The Nix language is cute, very powerful, and as you say, is capable of cool tricks. I personally find it very easy to read too.

For every project I work on, I define a .nix file describing its build environment. It is then just a matter of cloning the repo, typing nix-shell, and then all build dependencies will be downloaded and I'm ready to go. These nix files also specify which emacs I want to use and with which modes: I don't use Emacs' package manager.

I use nix-shell for pretty much everything. My basic environment contains only core utilities. I launch firefox with "nix-shell -p firefox --run firefox" (bound to a shortcut defined in my xmonad config).

Nix is easy to customize. The override infrastructure makes it easy to modify package definitions from your user config file, and I find I am much happier doing this in a programming language rather than a bespoke config file format.

Other pros: you don't need to be root to install stuff. And there isn't much more satisfying than getting a new laptop, git cloning the repo containing your intended system configuration, and being back up with your old OS with one or two commands.

As you say, if Arch turns you off, Nix may horrify. Despite the vote, I'm pretty discriminating about who I recommend it to.

Of course, I still have Windows as my primary OS, if for no other reason than I'm too lazy to deal with the inevitable driver wrangling. (Caveat: PuTTY into an Arch VM is my dev environment.)

If you want a developer laptop you want modern hardware. If you want to run modern hardware you want a modern kernel.

In your case (since your hardware is a little old), you might not care about support from recent kernels but still want modern compilers, toolchains, etc available to you.

You also probably don't want it to break every 6 months when you have to system upgrade. Rolling release is the best.