91–100 of 329 posts
Arch 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.
In 9 years running Arch, I have never ever experienced the need to downgrade my kernel after an upgrade, and only once had to downgrade a package (ghc). I key point was always to run hardware that needs no drivers aside from those coming with vanilla kernels.
Quite on the contrary, I love getting new versions of things quickly as this means new features and bugfixes come to me ASAP.
With that said, I am considering to migrate to NixOS or GuixSD (currently toying with 2 virtual machines). I find Arch to be a great imperative distro, but functional ones are simply superior. Declarative system configuration, declarative package recipes, and the ability to install multiple versions of the same package is key if you have a complex setup (e.g. doing deep learning).
I've recently started experimenting with NixOS on my secondary (testbed) laptop at home. (My main home laptop has Windows, while at work we use Ubuntu.) Based on that and posts on this thread, I'd say if you're willing to consider Arch, I'd seriously suggest it might be worth adding NixOS to your list too. In my experience, at some cost, it gives you one particular super -power, that I've never seen anywhere yet. Spe…
The IO monad, as in Haskell, can be viewed as an entirely pure construct. Its implementation is impure purely because of performance reasons. You can write your own completely pure IO type if you want, with unchanged semantics.
A basic example of this would be
data IOF r = PutStrLn String r
| GetLine (String -> r) deriving Functor
type IO = Free IOF
putStrLn s = liftF (PutStrLn s ())
getLine = liftF (GetLine id)
main :: IO ()
main = do
putStrLn "Enter your age"
age getLine
if age >= 18
then putStrLn "You can vote!"
else putStrLn $ unwords ["You can vote in", show (18-age), "years"]
interpret :: IO a -> Prelude.IO a
interpret (Free (PutStrLn s r)) = Prelude.putStrLn s >> interpret r
interpret (Free (GetLine s)) = Prelude.getLine >>= interpret . sEarlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not 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.
it also helps that Fedora is pushing the edge with newer tech like wayland, etc.
its polished, dont have to muck about with complex howto. just pop the bootable usb drive and you're done in 5 mins.
Brilliant experience.
Never had a problem.
Don't get caught up with setting up VMs and doing a lot of stuff for setting up a distro. Write a game. Work through a series of OpenGL tutorials, compilers, and a few other game-related topics and then build something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it comes to tooling, I found the packaging strategy of Arch to be pretty invaluable, too: - 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…
Can you honestly say you remember the exact pacman syntax of how to perform a system upgrade or how to install a package? :-) For me the UX was a problem, even if technically the package management is good.
$ pacman -Qs package
And yeah, this is exactly how it works. Once you learn a bit about how pacman works, it all connects, same thing as vim.
Fedora 25 without question. on newer laptops (including the xps) i have suffered through Ubuntu's inconsistencies in setting up bootloader with Uefi, firmware issues, nvme ssd, etc. it also helps that Fedora is pushing the edge with newer tech like wayland, etc. its polished, dont have to muck about with complex howto. just pop the bootable usb drive and you're done in 5 mins. Brilliant experience.