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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?

#151

Post by mastax »

iamcreasy wrote: post #135
nextos wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Basically with most package managers you start from some base system and then execute commands which change the state of the system.

With a functional system you describe what kind of system you would like and it gets built for you. See https://nixos.org/nixos/about.html

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

#152

Post by pikzen »

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…

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

zzzzzzzz

This is said so often it's not even fun anymore. Debian stable is made for servers, for stuff that's not going to move for ten years and is supposed to be up 99.9999% of the time. Run testing and your problems are solved. Recent hardware is supported, relatively recent versions of all software are in the repositories, depending on the maintainer. Or run unstable if you're feeling adventurous

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

#153

Post by tajen »

tscs37 wrote: post #114

I personally use ArchLinux on my development laptop. Three major reasons: A) AUR B) custom installs are default C) rolling release + up-to-date Of course, Arch is not that easy to setup compared to other distros (Antergos might help), you're gonna have to manage the system yourself to some extent. If you don't like ArchLinux you could go for Fedora, NixOS or Ubuntu variants.

Would you explicitly put KDE last, or did you just forget it? As a Mac user and former Ubuntu, I wonder whether KDE is losing the race.

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

#154

Post by facorreia »

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 also recommend Linux Mint. It is friendly to proprietary software (e.g. drivers), comes with a very nice UI (Cinnamon), and is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

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

#155

Post by singletoon »

Arch Linux. 3 good reasons for that :

-builds upon a minimal stack of software, letting you create the environment of your own needs

-rolling distribution, meaning your system is always up to date

-the greatest package manager across linux distros : pacman!

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

#157

Post by jerf »

MarcScott wrote: post #139
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.

I used to do that with my XMonad setup, but at least with 16.04 and 16.10, I've found it more effective to go ahead and install Ubuntu normally, install Xmonad, and then use the session switcher to switch to XMonad. It seems to set up the NetworkManager and other similar such things more correctly, more easily.

I once went into an epic fight trying to make it so my normal user was able configure the network through network manager. Presumably someone out there must understand all that policykit and related project stuff really well, so well that nobody seems to feel the need to even remotely document it. (At least at the time.) I never did win; I just ran the nm-applet as root via sudo. With the way I'm doing now, it just works correctly, which seems to be the only way to get that stuff working at all.

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

#158

Post by jerf »

tdeck wrote: post #84

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…

Also leave yourself a 10-20GB partition sitting empty, so you can install that OS without having to choose which existing-and-working thing to nuke.

There can still be issues here or there when Package 3.0 upgrades Package 2.0's dot directory irreversibly, but I haven't had much trouble; it happens that most of what I personally deeply care about are things like .emacs or .vimrc type files that don't work that way.

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

#159

Post by mmgutz »

pikzen wrote: post #152
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…

>Debian: slow to upgrade and doesn't support newer hardware zzzzzzzz This is said so often it's not even fun anymore. Debian stable is made for servers, for stuff that's not going to move for ten years and is supposed to be up 99.9999% of the time. Run testing and your problems are solved. Recent hardware is supported, relatively recent versions of all software are in the repositories, depending on the maintainer. Or…

Agree it's made for servers. Great for older machines. Too often I've run into old libraries when I want to use a recent desktop app. I'm not knocking Debian but its kernel is older, dependencies are older. Great for stability. Ubuntu (based on Debian as you know) IMHO is a better laptop distro.

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

#160

Post by nol13 »

Kliment wrote: post #118
yellowapple wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Mint stay in-sync with the latest Ubuntu versions? It's literally Ubuntu with Cinnamon/MATE and different branding. Everything version-wise should be identical with Ubuntu, since it uses the same packages.

If you want that, there is an official mate version of ubuntu now which works extremely well. Not sure about cinnamon. Definitely much less update-related headaches than mint.

Another vote for Ubuntu MATE! (with redmond panel theme) Has just enough polish without trying to redesign a work flow that I'm perfectly happy with. Glad it's an official Ubuntu dist now.

I have moved fully to having my panel on the left side which used to be one of the things that kept me off Unity though. Resisted for a long time, but it turns out that this is the correct placement, ah well.

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