I've been using Debian and later Ubuntu for the past 20 years and have always been pretty happy with them.
Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
81–90 of 329 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#82The best development OS is the production OS, so just use whatever you're going to deploy on. Ubuntu (Server) and RHEL and Centos are ubiquitous. I think the easiest to manage in prod is Ubuntu.
Container Linux. Oh wait, that won't work so well...
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#83Arch Linux 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.
Arch is worth it for the AUR for sure. If you don't want to deal with setting up Linux from scratch you can go with Antergos. It's basically just an installer for Arch.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#84Not a distro recommendation, but one thing I would highly recommend when setting up your Linux box is putting your /home directory in its own partition. I'm not sure if this is the default in most Linux distros, but you have to specifically configure it in Ubuntu.
The benefit is that you can easily switch to a new distro or reinstall a completely hosed one with much less migration effort. That way, if you don't like the first thing you tried, there's no harm done.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#85I tried several and these were my experiences: * 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…
What were your experiences Kubuntu and Xubuntu?
Good. Both worked out of the box, upgrades (seemingly the most fragile part of every distro) pretty much never broke anything in ~5 years. Clean UIs.
I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but the only problem I have that is actually fixed by another distro (Arch has more up to date packages) went hand in hand with more instability than I was willing to tolerate.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having recently broken my Arch Linux unbootable (needed USB stick rescue to fix) by not upgrading quite everything (needed some libs for new packages), I think it's a bit fragile. I would recommend having root FS on ZFS or other filesystem with snapshots. Take a snapshot before or after running a full system update with pacman. Another aspect I dislike about Arch is that package binaries get removed very soon - it's…
I don't know if it's just me, but I had this situation with pretty much any distro I've ever encountered (it also happened on Arch, of course): I'd try to update/install/configure something and after the next reboot I'm on the TTY or I need to fetch a USB stick with a live system. From that perspective, what works in Arch's favor is that fixing it is usually more straightforward than other distros. I remember spendin…
My last time was an issue (or oversight) with pacman, which allowed me to update libicu-x.y without updating all its reverse dependencies. Some important part of the system depended on libicu-x.z (earlier version) which was no longer present so I had to get to the rescue console.
So this was an Arch-specific issue that could have been mitigated with ZFS snapshots. E.g. Gentoo does consistency checks of dynamic libs, and other systems don't allow you to make such upgrades.
I had something critical happen to me twice in one year and both times it would have been avoidable with an earlier snapshot of the rootfs. I will definitely do that next time I re-format a disk.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#87Ubuntu, Arc and may be Fedora. No need to look past these 3 unless you feel a bit adventurous.
Yeah, I came here to say this. Ubuntu (esp LTS) if you want "mostly just works, I don't want to spend time maintaining/configuring it", Arch if you're more adventurous and nerdy. Fedora if you are a "just works" person but are doing it on a ThinkPad.
> if your doing it on a Thinkpad
What's so special about the fedora Thinkpad combo?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#88Arch Linux 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.
Setting up arch and installing apps on it is a PITA. Especially for those who don't know what to choose. Debian-based distros used to be ok for development.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#89The best development OS is the production OS, so just use whatever you're going to deploy on. Ubuntu (Server) and RHEL and Centos are ubiquitous. I think the easiest to manage in prod is Ubuntu.
> The best development OS is the production OS [...] Ubuntu (Server) and RHEL and Centos are ubiquitous.
As is SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE. People often forget about us.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#90Not a distro recommendation, but one thing I would highly recommend when setting up your Linux box is putting your /home directory in its own partition. I'm not sure if this is the default in most Linux distros, but you have to specifically configure it in Ubuntu. The benefit is that you can easily switch to a new distro or reinstall a completely hosed one with much less migration effort. That way, if you don't like…
Antergos. It's Arch without the initial pain of setting everything up. The "arch way" is that you set everything up yourself so that you know how to fix it if it ever breaks, but I find the Arch wiki to be so good, that you can usually figure it out. So if you have time and want to build a custom system, Arch. But if you just want a base image to start with, Antergos.