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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?

#231

Post by Jerry2 »

nextos wrote: post #92
tbrock wrote: post #79

Arch Linux If you want a developer laptop you want modern hardware. If you want to run modern hardware you want a modern kernel. In your case (since your hardware is a little old), you might not care about support from recent kernels but still want modern compilers, toolchains, etc available to you. You also probably don't want it to break every 6 months when you have to system upgrade. Rolling release is the best.

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 agree Arch and rolling release is great to avoid breaks. Paradoxically, people are afraid of it for the opposite reason.

That made me laugh. Yesterday, when I updated Arch, it included new python 3.6 which not only broke half-a-dozen packages but it also disabled my DE.

Arch breaks way more often than any other distro I've ever used.

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

#234

Post by rmattes »

notalaser wrote: post #22

Your post seems to suggest that you won't be developing for Linux and just need something that's a good virtualization host and all-round desktop. In this case, any distribution that you can get along with will do. Especially if you don't have much experience with Linux, Ubuntu and Fedora are both excellent choices. I tend to recommend the latter over the former. If you do actually need to develop for Linux, I would…

> If you do actually need to develop for Linux, I would suggest something with a rolling release model, otherwise it won't be long before you'll need to start compiling things from source because you need a more recent version of than your distro is packaging.

It depends on your requirements. If you constantly find yourself needing the latest and greatest upstream software releases, then yes, use a rolling release. But if not, rolling releases can make your life much more painful. If you're not paying attention when you update your system, then each update is a roll of the dice as to whether your software will still build or run afterwards, as any update could introduce incompatible changes to packages your software depends on.

A distribution with a release model (usually) tries to maintain API and ABI compatibility for the duration of a release, so you can update with more confidence that it you won't have to re-build or port your code as a result.

There's trade-offs between stability and shininess across the spectrum of distributions with rolling releases, with frequent releases, and with long release cycles. As long as you're aware of that, you can decide for yourself how frequently you want updates, and therefore the type of distribution you should run.

> Red Hat Enterprise Beta, uh, I mean, Fedora

I really wish people would stop making comments like this. I volunteer a significant amount of my free time and effort to improve Fedora, and I see a lot of others in the Fedora community doing the same. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm doing it to make Fedora better, not to crowd-source Red Hat development for free. Fedora is a first-class distribution in its own right, with an open, inclusive, and independent community. Reducing it to a beta distribution for Red Hat glosses over that fact, which I find very unfortunate.

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

#237

Post by Jerry2 »

janci wrote: post #185
shmel wrote: post #148

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…

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 jus…

Your experience mirrors mine: Arch just breaks way too many things all the time. I feel like I'm a sysadmin. Yesterday, Python 3.6 broke so many things (including my DE). I fixed few things I needed but who knows what else is broken on my system... it's hard to tell since I don't test every single thing that depends on a specific package.

I still use Arch daily because I've set it up the way I like it and don't want to waste more time trying to setup Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu...

I just wish there's some more testing before something so critical, like Python, is unleashed.

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

#238

Post by heywire »

nextos wrote: post #92
tbrock wrote: post #79

Arch Linux If you want a developer laptop you want modern hardware. If you want to run modern hardware you want a modern kernel. In your case (since your hardware is a little old), you might not care about support from recent kernels but still want modern compilers, toolchains, etc available to you. You also probably don't want it to break every 6 months when you have to system upgrade. Rolling release is the best.

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 run arch on one of my laptops because I like to tinker (and have the latest of everything), but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to someone who wants to get work done. I run Ubuntu LTS on the laptop I rely on.

Just last month a kernel update rendered my arch laptop unbootable. I had to boot from a live USB drive, revert the kernel, and temporarily blacklist the package from upgrading. What I love about arch is the community, and that awesome wiki.

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

#239

Post by cellularmitosis »

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…

The issues I had whenever I strayed from Debian weren't technical deficiencies of yum, etc, but rather the choices made by other distros. Installing "vim" and unexpectedly getting some sort of "minimal" version of vim. Packages which symlink or install large binary files or log files into /etc (suddenly grepping /etc becomes problematic). In general, lots of little decisions which make me exclaim the distro equivalent of "Did anyone even play-test this?"

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

#240

Post by mschuster91 »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #239
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…

The issues I had whenever I strayed from Debian weren't technical deficiencies of yum, etc, but rather the choices made by other distros. Installing "vim" and unexpectedly getting some sort of "minimal" version of vim. Packages which symlink or install large binary files or log files into /etc (suddenly grepping /etc becomes problematic). In general, lots of little decisions which make me exclaim the distro equivalen…

> Packages which symlink or install large binary files or log files into /etc

wtf? who is actually incompetent enough to do something like this?

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