Linus Torvalds is using Fedora Linux, like many other major Linux developers.
Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
161–170 of 329 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#162You may want to consider how well each distro supports different profiling / tracing tools, especially in userspace.
For example, I've recently started to play with Systemtap, and found it to be the perfect tool for some of my work.
But after some frustrating attempts to use it on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I discovered that it's broken and Canonical won't fix it. I tried to build my own, nonbroken version of Systemtap on this distro, but ran into nontrivial problems with library versions.
Even on Ubuntu 16.04 / 16.10, Ubuntu seems to build Perf Tools (which is part of the kernel's code base) without support for Python scripting. It was pretty easy for me to fix, but it did require downloading the kernel source, and rebuilding "perf". I don't know if they have a good reason for doing things this way, but it's irritating.
In contrast, Oracle Enterprise Linux has DTrace, which arguably is the (aging) gold standard for dynamic tracing on Linux. But OREL is a distro I never seriously considered using before needing this kind of tool.
* NOTE: I'm not trying to state which tracing / profiling tools work well on specific distros. I haven't done enough research for that. My point was only to bring attention to this category of feature.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#163I'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.
I also vote for Arch Linux. Have been using it for a last few years and I like it. I started from pure Arch, but switched to the Manjaro about 6 months ago since I needed system to be more stable. I believe Manjaro provides a little more stability than pure Arch since Manjaro has a kind of release cycle (every week or two) - they do addition check that all core system components work well together before releasing updates for the users. I prefer Xfce Desktop over Gnome/KDE since it's simpler and therefore it potentially can cause less issues (I used Gnome/KDE/Lxde before, as well as Xubuntu/Lubuntu distros).
PS Manjaro in my case has been installed not using GUI installer since I needed to go with a kind of complex LUKS/dm-crypt encrypting scenario and GUI doesn't support a complex configurations.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#164Hard 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…
Running Ubuntu LTS on personal machine + cloud servers.
Pros:
- It's stable
- Easy to replicate same environment on home/cloud machines
- Handles millions of request daily, just fine
- Almost all popular s/w packages are easily available
Cons:
- Some advanced manufacturer specific laptop features/drivers don't work out of the box
- No real complaints. I'm getting great value for no money.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#165+1 for fedora here. Really very stable, "just works" experience.
I have had nothing but trouble with Debian and its derivatives on my machine. In a VM they're fine, but on bare hardware they are a pure nightmare of dysfunction. Fedora was the first linux OS I was able to get going on my PC out of the box.
Arch is good too - i hear a lot for that. I might look into that for a VM, but i'd lean more towards something like Fedora for the hardware, so you don't need to muck around to get the basics going.
YMMV though, hardware can make/break a distro.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#166ArchLinux 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…
Seconded. Arch has some nice properties from the developer's POV. For example, every library package comes with its headers by default, so source code often compiles without having to install additional -devel packages.
Also, you can try out the hot new stuff (e.g. Vulkan, or the recent stable Rust) without having to enable backports repos.
Edit: And you don't have to sacrifice stability. Arch is surprisingly stable. I run three servers on Arch without any issues.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#167ArchLinux 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…
Yup. I switched from Ubuntu to Arch after I realised I was trying to make Ubuntu work like a rolling release distro. This lead to frequent breakage. Arch definitely has a learning curve, but it also helps you realise that some things really are as simple as they appear (if that makes sense).
That said, if you're like me and prone to fits of 'mad science', you will find yourself breaking your OS from time to time. But I've yet to get myself into a situation I couldn't recover from, largely thanks the the excellent Arch wiki. The 'big jumps' (i.e. staged distro) leading to 'big breaks' can happen to Arch, mind you. It's not a distro you want to 'leave alone' for too long.
So I guess if you're going to use the machine daily, Arch should be fine. If we were talking about a server or something, or maybe a work laptop that would go unused for a few weeks from time to time, I'd probably suggest sticking with Ubuntu or the like. Trust me, I've attempted running Arch on my NAS and it was not very fun. Ubuntu/Debian is much better suited there.
I guess the other downside of Arch is that there's less official packaging for it (whereas there's an rpm and deb for everything, it seems). But I think the AUR more than makes up for that, and simplifies quite a lot of things that are complex to do on Ubuntu (e.g. compile FFmpeg with HW accel support, and with all the other fancy encoder dependencies etc.).
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#168Right now the situation with macos and Windows 10 has spawned a bit of a migration. There is a growing trend of people buying pc hardware and running Linux on it. I think you will find that the most common choice of os among these people is Ubuntu. This is because it's designed with user friendliness in mind and has a lot of support for new users. It wouldn't be a bad choice.
I personally am using elementary right now. It seems to take advantage of the macos/win10 exodus by offering the next closest experience. It takes the principles of user friendliness from Ubuntu and takes it a step further. As others have said here, it sets up quickly, has an awesome terminal, has a great default text editor, and looks sublime. It's great. It has the occasional bug but I still find myself using it. I really believe that elementary is the closest thing that there is to a universla, open source os that makes computing accessible to _everyone_. I have been doing a lot of rust stuff in visual studio code and everything works very well.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
That's what Debian backports (https://backports.debian.org/) are for. Best of both worlds - run stable as your base distribution, use backports whenever you need a more recent version of something.
E.g. Debian stable comes with kernel 3.16, but 4.8 is available as an official backport, should you need the (almost) latest and greatest. Just add backports to sources.list && apt update && apt -t jessie-backports install linux-image-amd64.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#170Best 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'm also a fan of Linux Mint, but prefer the KDE edition - I used to dislike KDE, but with plasma 5.6+ it's become quite polished and nice to use. I've also found LM to be much more stable than other KDE based desktop distro's, specifically KUbuntu and Neon (both of which were quite crashy).