Ubuntu LTS - if there's as proprietary driver not included in the kernel, this distro is most likely to be supported none the less by the bigger OEMs. Additionally, if the latest packages aren't included in the distro, the developer is very likely to distribute a .deb or PPA to let you get the latest and greatest for an LTS target.
Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
181–190 of 329 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#182Debian and I'm surprised more people aren't saying so. Ubuntu or Mint, which are built on Debian do not add much value these days, IMO and Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle is intolerable. If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get. I think a lot of people dismiss Debian as unmodern or some how less than the distros built on it but that's hardly the case. Debian…
100% agree with this. Debian is stable and highly supported.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#183Hard 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…
Unstable is hardly adventurous. I have ran unstable for 15+ years as my desktop/laptop. I have never had more than a couple hours of downtime and no data loss. Things rarely break in unstable anymore, that's what experimental is for. Moreover apt-listbugs prompts me about bugs in any package I am about to upgrade.
Seriously, install apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges. Unstable is not that adventurous.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#184Debian and I'm surprised more people aren't saying so. Ubuntu or Mint, which are built on Debian do not add much value these days, IMO and Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle is intolerable. If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get. I think a lot of people dismiss Debian as unmodern or some how less than the distros built on it but that's hardly the case. Debian…
Yum has been replaced by dnf in Fedora.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#185ArchLinux 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…
I am running ArchLinux right now on a my machine (webapp dev and network technician) and I don't recomment it. I don't blame ArchLinux per se, but rolling updates are no good for someone like me.
Updates break things. Often. Almost every time. And you don't notice until you need to use that broken thing. To install new things you may need to update whole system. And you break something completely different.
-PHP7 just released? Yes, we will replace your PHP5 and leave you in agony (compile from source, or wait for AUR and compile it too).
-Networkmanager GUI works with VLANS? Pfff, who uses VLANS, some bug will remove them for you. Use nmcli. Or roll back to older version. Oops, that depends on old library that can not be installed anymore, beacause everything now depends on newer version of that library.
-Wine drag&drop support works flawlessly in one version? Guess what won't work in next? And in next it's the clippoard.
-Prepare for the new world order, Chromium will now train you reading right to left by writing to input boxes backwards randomly.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#186Would you be open to trying non-Linux distros such as BSD distros?
There are various flavors of BSD that have the toolsets to do what you requested. Not very sure of laptop battery management though.
FreeBSD (Very stable)
OpenBSD (Stability + Security focused)
PCBSD (Linux like ease of setup for Desktop environments)
They all have access to large/comprehensive application/system/development software.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#187Debian and I'm surprised more people aren't saying so. Ubuntu or Mint, which are built on Debian do not add much value these days, IMO and Ubuntu's 6 month release cycle is intolerable. If you get behind with upgrades you are screwed. Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get. I think a lot of people dismiss Debian as unmodern or some how less than the distros built on it but that's hardly the case. Debian…
Yum has been replaced by dnf in Fedora.
Is it any better?
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#188Debian.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#189Your requirements are met by any distro so you'll get people recommending their distro of choice here. Mine is Fedora. Arguments for Fedora include:
* Best SElinux implementation if that sort of thing turns your clock.
* Latest gnome 3 and yearly new releases with even more recent desktop software.
* dnf, or yum as it was called, which from personal experience I think is very good. On par or better than apt/dpkg.
* Backing of RedHat, a huge Linux company that have proven their dedication to open source countless times and are one of the major contributors to the Linux kernel.
Re: Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development laptop?
#190ArchLinux 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…
If you want an Arch-based system with less worry about updates, have a look at Manjaro. The team do a pretty decent job of making sure each batch of updates work together - though if you use the 'stable' branch you'll be a week or two behind Arch stable (but not for security updates). If you want it more frequently, Manjaro's 'unstable' is synced to Arch stable.
Yes, Manjaro has a small team and occasionally mess up the website, but don't let that stop you from trying the distro.
(Retired Core team member)