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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?

#201

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

crdoconnor wrote: post #71

I tried several and these were my experiences: * Ubuntu. Works fine (I used kubuntu and xubuntu). * Mint. Tried it and it seemed to work okay until I upgraded it one day and ran into issues that I think were related to the system having an identity crisis over who it really was (ubuntu or mint?). * Fedora: had a few more driver issues than ubuntu but still worked okay for the most part. * Debian: pain to set up and a…

> Debian: pain to set up and a lot of issues - there wasn't a bootable ISO I could find that would let me boot into a USB and test run the latest version with all of the (nonfree) drivers I needed.

Does this help? https://fiendish.github.io/The-Debian-Gotham-Needs/

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

#202

Post by reitanqild »

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…

> So I tried Neon (the "new" Kubuntu) ... but they don't even have a working installer.

It worked flawlessly for me.

Now I wonder if I was lucky or you were unlucky.

Oh, and I live it: clean fresh KDE 5 built on a Ubuntu/debian base.

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

#204

Post by cozzyd »

I recommend Fedora, it has more up-to-date stuff and very developer friendly. I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants, so Fedora is naturally a good platform for it. I've always had more trouble compiling random things on debian-based stuff though (probably has something to do with default linker flags and poorly-written packages).

RH has a big virtualization focus, and Fedora is their development playgroond, so if you're planning on using KVM for virtualization, it's very easy to get going.

However, if you use VMWare, sometimes VMware won't support the newest kernels immediately which can cause problems since Fedora upgrades quite frequently.

Others have mentioned trouble updating with Fedora, but I upgraded from F16-F24 on my desktop fine. I finally decided to do a clean install to F25 on my desktop just to switch to a UEFI boot. F24->F25 worked perfectly fine on my laptop (and the upgrade experience has gotten better and better). Either way, as long as you put /home (and, maybe /opt, /usr/local and /var) on their own partitions, doing a clean install is no big deal.

It seems many people had bad experiences with yum/rpm in the past, but dnf is much faster and I think people usually run into problems when mixing non-compatible repositories.

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

#205

Post by jcoffland »

vurpo wrote: post #191
jcoffland wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it any better?

I never had problems using yum. dnf has the same interface but works faster, and does more things (e.g. Copr/repository management and `whatprovides`) and better.

I've found yum to be slow and prone to breaking. Part of the problem is that CentOS packages are often far behind. EPEL is a symptom of the problem more than it is a solution. Invariably, when building software which builds easily on Debian based systems, on CentOS, I end up compiling many packages from source because either they are not available or are horribly out of date.

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

#206

Post by josteink »

jcoffland wrote: post #179

Debian 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…

> Even after all these years it's hard to beat apt-get.

I would say Fedora's dnf has it beat quite objectively, but to each their own.

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

#208

Post by jcoffland »

cozzyd wrote: post #204

I recommend Fedora, it has more up-to-date stuff and very developer friendly. I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants, so Fedora is naturally a good platform for it. I've always had more trouble compiling random things on debian-based stuff though (probably has something to do with default linker flags and poorly-written packages). RH has a big virtua…

> I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants

This is due to university lock in. RedHat convinced a lot of institutions that they were better off paying for Linux. I think a lot of the establishment couldn't use free software because they had no procedure in place for doing so. Often buying a RedHat support agreement was the most palatable or even only way to get on the Linux bandwagon.

Around the time RedHat stopped supporting desktop RedHat and spawned Fedora they turned their focus towards selling contracts and creating so called enterprise features such as remote management which appealed to institutional IT teams, to the detriment of the desktop user.

RedHat has made a lot of money this way but they lost their position as the dominant Linux distro because the hackers whom RedHat originally catered to moved on to distros which paid then more attention.

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

#209

Post by jcoffland »

mwambua wrote: post #150
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!

The fact that you are celebrating one recent successful upgrade is telling.

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

#210

Post by m0llusk »

This is more of a tangent from the core question, but when doing development I have found having bootable KNOPPIX media to be invaluable. The KNOPPIX distribution has all of the utilities and tools needed for dealing with a wide range of network and media management issues.
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