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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?

#131

Post by djsumdog »

notalaser wrote: post #22

Your post seems to suggest that you won't be developing for Linux and just need something that's a good virtualization host and all-round desktop. In this case, any distribution that you can get along with will do. Especially if you don't have much experience with Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora are both excellent choices. I tend to recommend the latter over the former. If you do actually need to develop for Linux, I would…

I've been using Gentoo since 2002 I think.

It's a great distribution for developers, especially if you're developing Linux packages. It's very easy to create your own local overlay and test your package changes against a system, without needing your own custom repo or VM.

I'm glad you mentioned Void too. I'm currently using that on my router.

I like how Void is systemd free and Gentoo makes it optional.

If you try building a Linux From Scratch (LFS), think of Gentoo as LFS with package management.

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

#132

Post by leeoniya »

sputr wrote: post #14

I've recently moved to Manjaro (Arch) after trying to upgrade from Kubuntu 14.04 to Kubuntu 16.04 and finding out (you don't wanna know how much time I wasted) that Kubuntu is practically unsupported atm. So I tried Neon (the "new" Kubuntu) ... but they don't even have a working installer. I didn't want to go to Ubuntu directly for the obvious reasons. Now to me stability is everything. I have shit to do and don't ha…

I occasionally boot into Manjaro/XFCE, it's nice. But i find it a bit odd that you use the term "stability" in conjunction with any rolling distro.

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

#133

Post by awinter-py »

switched away from ubuntu because the unity desktop ate most of the ram on a 4G ram laptop -- some large builds would hang forever but worked fine when I logged in to console-only.

I use mint xfce now and the only complaints I have are palm detection (probably a driver issue) and wifi trickiness after sleep (probably a driver issue).

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

#134

Post by fixxer »

cyphar wrote: post #89
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.

> 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.

What is the value add for SUSE over Ubuntu? Sell me on it. I'm open minded. I use Ubuntu Server because I know it well, but honestly I don't have any other preference. I don't generally rely on package managers for prod deploys (I like source and it works well with my security restrictions).

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

#135

Post by iamcreasy »

nextos wrote: post #92
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 agree Arch and rolling release is great to avoid breaks. Paradoxically, people are afraid of it for the opposite reason. 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…

> I find Arch to be a great imperative distro, but functional ones are simply superior.

Can you tell me more about what an imperative and functional distro is?

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

#136

Post by ake1 »

btschaegg wrote: post #60
kennu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just remember the commands I use most, namely: ´sudo pacman -Syy´ to update the package db ´sudo pacman -Suy´ to update all packages ´sudo pacman -S package´ to install/update a specific pakage ´sudo pacman -U package.pkg.tar.xz´ to install a package from a local file (useful if you're using makepkg) Those are usually enough to maintain my system. I'll have to hit the wiki for the various query options though. But…

i too would recommend defining aliases. if not for UX reasons, for brevity and consistency. i use the same (short) commands for pacman as for apt or yaourt.

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

#137

Post by hedora »

It is a dark time for Linux distros. CADT is destabilizing everything: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

I suggest devuan -- debian without systemd -- or elementary os -- it feels like some MacOS refugees wanted a reasonable (usable/lightweight) desktop OS so they made an Ubuntu derivative.

Rationale:

Run elementary for the default gui (esc and alt work out of the box!) but be warned that it is systemd based. I have found that systemd distros are fragile, and not robust against customizations like switching desktop environments. (YMMV, but I have not tried to significantly customize my elementary os box, and don't plan to.) It is beta software, but unlike all contemporary distros I have tried, it has sane defaults out of the box. I had to dump my nvidia card and buy a radeon. This isn't Elementary's fault, but worth knowing if you have an nvidia laptop (I assume intel video is generally fine too).

Use devuan for something approximating what you'd expect from Ubuntu five years ago (before the current wave of usabilty and stability regressions from unity, systemd, etc...). This is probably my new goto for work boxes, where I just want emacs firefox and command line tools.

You asked for a Linux distro, but if it weren't for steam and hardware compatibility, I would have already switched to a BSD. That might a reasonable alternative, depending on exactly what your dev environment and laptop look like. They all have virtualization solutions at this point.

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

#138

Post by loudmax »

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 love my Arch laptop and desktop, but I would caution that Arch is a very Linux way of doing things. You're in full control and you take full responsibility. This is fantastic if you want to get an understanding of what your laptop is doing.

If you're looking for a MacOS replacement, Ubuntu might be a quicker path to just get things going. It mostly just works, and when it doesn't, there are lots of good resources to get you going again. There are a lot of developers on Ubuntu so a lot of package development happens there first.

In my experience, Arch has been more solid than Ubuntu, but I like to heavily customize my laptop. If a default Ubuntu (or Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc) desktop environment works for you, it might be more stable.

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

#139

Post by MarcScott »

brudgers wrote: post #112

I use Ubuntu because there is a StackExchange site, askubuntu.com, and because it's easy to set up and fairly reliable and I can always go to Archwiki if I want to dig deeper. And anyway, I run Xmonad so a lot of the gripes about Ubuntu's interface, Unity, don't really affect me. [1] In the end it comes down to Ubuntu provides me with a better abstraction layer for support and problem solving over the top of Linux th…

Yep. I tend to use Ubuntu Server and then dump i3 on it as my WM. The support from the community is second to none, so when I need answers they're always a Google search away.

Mind you, if I don't get answers I normally end up looking at the Arch documentation, which is phenomenal.

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

#140

Post by mmgutz »

Hard to beat Ubuntu LTS. It has plenty of documentation and community support, has mostly up-to-date drivers and runs VirtualBox. LTS offers stability over several years. I use Xubuntu variant with i3. Moreover, I prefer to develop on the same OS I deploy to.

ArchLinux: Great community but too many surprises when updating that sometimes break things or in one case left the OS unbootable. Fun to tinker with but if your livelihood depends on it, choose something more stable.

Fedora: good option but no LTS version

Debian: slow to upgrade and doesn't support newer hardware

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