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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?

#141

Post by whatnotests »

mmgutz wrote: post #140

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 you…

Solid points.

> Moreover, I prefer to develop on the same OS I deploy to.

Me too, but I use containers (Docker) or VMs to achieve this.

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

#142

Post by Fnoord »

striking wrote: post #125
nhumrich wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Antergos and friends are fine, but they're not the whole Arch experience. (Some say they're not Arch, full stop.) Installers are brittle. They don't always fit every case you give to them. That's why vanilla Arch lacks an installer, because chances are you're smarter than a shell script. No matter what crazy, inane setup you might be facing, Arch can tolerate it. Specifically because it doesn't have an installer. (I…

> (I once dual-booted Mac OS and Arch, with a shared /home partition. It totally worked and was a lot of fun.)

Interesting! What caveats did you experience? Did you end up symlinking stuff like ~/.firefox to ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox?

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

#144

Post by Certhas »

ergot wrote: post #130

Best giving them all a whirl and making up your own mind. A good starting point is The Live CD List[1] website. If you're switching from Windows to Linux for the first time, Linux Mint will certainly smooth the transition for you. Also for newbies, Ubuntu is a great first option. I usually test distros in a VM instead of installing them on bare metal. So far I have not found a distro specifically tailored to developm…

I will second Linux Mint as a very nice well done distro, with sane defaults, and that has been very robust for me.

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

#147

Post by nikanj »

mmgutz wrote: post #140

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 you…

Fedora LTS is Centos / RHEL

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

#148

Post by shmel »

ArchLinux is very decent distro. If you need something that you can tweak to be the continuation of your mind, environment designed exactly for you, it is Arch. If you have some time in the beginning to read archwiki, you will avoid a lot of problems in the future. After you understand how it works, it is easy to fix whatever breaks.

For me Arch breaks extremely rarely. I use it for 7 years and remember no more than a couple of times it made me confused after an update. Most issues are covered in the wiki or newsfeed (like breaking changes).

If you need something Windows-like, you can try Ubuntu, sure. But once you need fresh drivers or recent libraries for development, you add third-party PPAs and the shitshow begins. The very idea of keeping old stable versions with just a few new ones that you really need leads to problems surprisingly hard to fix.

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

#149

Post by mwambua »

sandGorgon wrote: post #96

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.

+1 I started with F22 and have never looked back since!

I also find dnf/yum a lot simpler to use than the apt-* ecosystem.

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

#150

Post by mwambua »

mmgutz wrote: post #140

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 you…

Fedora has really cleaned up the release upgrade process over the last couple versions. Transitioning from Fedora 24 to 25 was surprisingly painless!
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