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

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

#101

Post by pimeys »

tbrock wrote: post #79

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.

I've been using Arch in my laptops and workstations almost 10 years already. I can't think of using any other distro, it's just something I need to install once and after that it just works.

For the first installation, there are way more things to do though than with your typical Ubuntu installation. People complaining about fonts should know, that in AUR there are font setups with the Ubuntu patches and the results are awesome. Why these are not in the mainline I don't know. I guess it has something to do with patents...

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

#102

Post by fbernier »

nhumrich wrote: post #83
tbrock wrote: post #79

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.

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.

I've found https://arch-anywhere.org to be perfect for that.

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

#103

Post by ogezi »

franciscop wrote: post #28

As a side note, I love how this question would be begging for a distro war anywhere but HN. Here everyone says things in the way of "There's no best distro " or really humbly say what they are using and why. This is the best way IMHO that HN shows how it is the opposite of any random internet website; In HN we can have civilized conversations about some topics that are not possible almost anywhere else on the interne…

True

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

#104

Post by keldaris »

Like many in this thread, I'm personally a proponent of Arch Linux, but I'm objective enough to admit that there is no such thing as a "best" Linux distro for general development work. The best choice for your needs will be dictated by a balance of priorities and it'll necessarily be a compromise. I'll try to give a short outline of the current state of affairs as I see it.

If you like or at least don't mind regularly tinkering with your system and have a preference for running the newest software, Arch is definitely your best bet. Depending on UX and ecosystem preferences, you could go with Antergos with a DE of your choice (personally, I prefer KDE, it's gotten much better over the last year or two), but there's a lot to be said for setting the whole thing up from scratch at least once. It really teaches you a lot, and will invariably be useful when something breaks. Battery management will be as good as you bother to make it, with some effort it's possible to come close to Win10 levels of battery life.

On the other hand, if you want something that just works out of the box and the last paragraph sounds annoying to you, don't get on the Arch bandwagon. Fedora (my preference) or Ubuntu are you best choices here, and I suggest trying both for a week.

And, of course, if all you care about is a thin base for VMs of your choice, all of this is completely off topic. If you want the newest kernels, Arch will be a bit more convenient, but ultimately distro choices don't matter much for this use case.

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

#105

Post by wilkystyle »

gravypod wrote: post #98

Any distro that provides video drives, a compiler, and a text editor. After you have those you can build a game. If you're not interested setting everything up get a distro like Ubuntu. If you want stability go with Debian, and if you want to mess around with everything in your OS then use Arch. 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 seri…

I think the real nugget of wisdom in this comment is to make sure you're solving the problems that matter.

If your goal is to build something, you want tools and an environment that make that task easier or more efficient, and then get out of your way. You don't want to get lost in a myriad of system config/tweaks, or to get overwhelmed and find yourself fighting the tools most of the time.

For some, that's part of the fun. For others, they want an environment that just works, and stays out of their way.

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

#106

Post by andrewshadura »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #77
fixxer wrote: post #64

The 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.

TBH I much prefer to keep that kind of stuff in a VM so I can tear down or rebuild them from scratch. 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.)

Driver wrangling, seriously? I haven't had driver issues for ages, save for a few bits exotic and obsolete hardware (an ancient Creative webcam and an ancient PCMCIA Wi-Fi card).

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

#107

Post by Koshkin »

yellowapple wrote: post #49

Pretty much any reasonably-mainstream distro will be about equivalent for the features you're prioritizing. Usually, when someone asks about which distro to use, my go-to answer is openSUSE. It's easy enough to give Ubuntu a run for its money, and I've found it to be much less prone to breakage. ---- I personally use Slackware. Some developer-friendly features I've found to be useful: * Ships with all sorts of editor…

> Arch and Gentoo, Slackware

Over years, I have tried all three and found Slackware to be the easiest one to install and get up and running as a development environment or as a server. It worked perfectly on a Dell laptop (including wifi) in 2003, and it is working perfectly now on an Asus UX305 (the best light-weight non-Apple laptop I know of).

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

#108

Post by AsyncAwait »

luka-birsa wrote: post #54
demonshreder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch (Or any rolling release) isn't just about cutting edge. OS upgrades tend to break stuff depending on your usage (something compiled against the specific kernel version). Updating your computer every few days means you can avoid it entirely.

Arch is a joke an should be considered only if you LIKE tinkering with your OS all the time. The preposition of always up to date would be great if that wouldn't mean that your PC doesn't work properly most of the time due to some new bug or incompatibility. We've run Arch on embedded PCs (arm) due to out of the box docker support, but after updating a year later we've literally were unable to deploy Docker container…

The Arch Linux ARM distro is not related to Arch.

> The preposition of always up to date would be great if that wouldn't mean that your PC doesn't work properly most of the time due to some new bug or incompatibility.

I haven't found this to be the case at all, quite the opposite, I've run stable Arch systems for years, even done large upgrades like the switch to systemd without an issue.

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

#109

Post by akavel »

Chattered wrote: post #75
akavel wrote: post #47

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…

NixOS gets my vote too. I started on Gentoo back in 04, played with Arch for a year or so, then went to Nix a few years ago. I have never had so much love for an operating system. 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…

Hm, I didn't intend to convey a message that "Nix is more horrifying than Arch". For me, it's actually the other way round. Never tried Arch; but at some point in the past tried Gentoo for a few seconds, as well as Slackware; compared to those, in NixOS I just feel this huge safety net, with which however* deep I'll dig, I won't be punished for that. And truth said, even in Ubuntu I have to hack the OS occasionally, so in some way NixOS feels safer than Ubuntu.

* -- again, standard disclaimer, any Linux distro can kill your puppy, eat your homework, and burn your laptop; but that's true even of Ubuntu :)

Not sure how to rephrase the original post to better express what I mean. That said, after reading your reply, I agree that I find it hard to push on NixOS to even fellow "regular" devs; I don't have balls yet to install it as my main OS either. Maybe it's that NixOS has somewhat harder initial curve than "your common Linux"; the install phase reminded me somewhat of Slackware of '90s for a sec (though it's still better); again, not sure how it compares to Arch; plus there's the new language (Nix). That said, personally I wouldn't even think about using Arch, knowing how even tweaking Ubuntu is risky. And exactly as you said, I found Nix (the language) truly cute quite quickly. Totally much simpler than Haskell (which I still can't break into, even after some initial successes with SML, OCaml, and growing interest in Idris, which is reportedly Haskell-inspired).

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

#110

Post by m45t3r »

luka-birsa wrote: post #54
demonshreder wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch (Or any rolling release) isn't just about cutting edge. OS upgrades tend to break stuff depending on your usage (something compiled against the specific kernel version). Updating your computer every few days means you can avoid it entirely.

Arch is a joke an should be considered only if you LIKE tinkering with your OS all the time. The preposition of always up to date would be great if that wouldn't mean that your PC doesn't work properly most of the time due to some new bug or incompatibility. We've run Arch on embedded PCs (arm) due to out of the box docker support, but after updating a year later we've literally were unable to deploy Docker container…

> We've run Arch on embedded PCs (arm) due to out of the box docker support, but after updating a year later we've literally were unable to deploy Docker containers. There was a bug in the kernel, and no amount of hacking, upgrading or downgrading made it work.

You are talking about a non official Arch project (Arch Linux ARM) as it was an official derivative of Arch. It is not.

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