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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?

#251

Post by eikenberry »

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…

Ubuntu LTS follows almost the exact release cadence as Debian stable, so if it is slow to upgrade then so is Ubuntu. If you ignore LTS then you would have to compare that to Debian unstable to compare apples to apples in which case Debian would usually be faster to get updates.

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

#252

Post by tornadoboy55 »

Fnoord wrote: post #142
striking wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antergos and friends are fine, but they're not the whole Arch experience. (Some say they're not Arch, full stop.) Installers are brittle. They don't always fit every case you give to them. That's why vanilla Arch lacks an installer, because chances are you're smarter than a shell script. No matter what crazy, inane setup you might be facing, Arch can tolerate it. Specifically because it doesn't have an installer. (I…

> (I once dual-booted Mac OS and Arch, with a shared /home partition. It totally worked and was a lot of fun.) Interesting! What caveats did you experience? Did you end up symlinking stuff like ~/.firefox to ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox?

Remember that if you do it that way you can't have your /home encrypted by either Linux or macOS. Which is a very, very bad thing, for obvious reasons.

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

#253

Post by cozzyd »

tornadoboy55 wrote: post #247
hackuser wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the user just wants to get work done and doesn't care if they have the latest thing, why not CentOS?

CentOS is meant to be a server OS and misses a lot of the niceties that Desktop Linux variants have.

I use CentOS on my workstation at work, but I wouldn't recommend it for a laptop with new hardware.

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

#254

Post by jhasse »

jcoffland wrote: post #225
josteink wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

After almost 20 years Fedora is only just catching up with where apt-get was long ago.

DNF uses delta updates, apt-get still doesn't AFAIK.

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

#256

Post by _callcc »

vacri wrote: post #243
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…

I use debian but I'm not sure I'd recommend it for devs who don't want to fiddle with their desktop. Stable is great for servers and simple desktop computing, but is too stale for developers. Testing and Sid are both rolling updates, so if you don't keep updated, things can break (or more usually, change in workflow) sometimes when you do update. Ubuntu and Mint are snapshots of these rolling setups, so they stay mor…

Having spent years on debian, and having run stable and sid, the only really sustainable arrangement is to use stable+backports. Don't run sid! Gradually your system will become a mess and you'll end up doing a reinstall.

If you need a library that isn't in backports, just compile from source and install to /usr/local, it's not hard!

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

#257

Post by marcosdumay »

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…

My problems on rpm systems are always about some packager using different versions of dependencies than what ships with my OS.

Nobody has the QA force Debian has.

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

#258

Post by tornadoboy55 »

hackuser wrote: post #250
tornadoboy55 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CentOS is meant to be a server OS and misses a lot of the niceties that Desktop Linux variants have.

Thanks. What kinds of niceties? I spent awhile looking at it and the other RH distros, and didn't come across anything saying CentOS was a server OS (not that I doubt you, I just would be interested in more details if you happen to know them).

Packages are often kept at stable (but old) versions for a very long time. This is good for servers, but bad for users. Same goes for the kernel - again, good for servers, but not so much for new-ish hardware. In general its a very conservative distro.

As far as it being a server OS, well..

'In July 2010, CentOS overtook Debian to become the most popular Linux distribution for web servers, with almost 30% of all Linux web servers using it.[15] (Debian retook the lead in January 2012.)'

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

#259

Post by richmattes »

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…

> Don't get me started on Fedora/CentOS/RedHat. yum/rpm is just horrible if you've used nearly anything else.

Your experience may support such a statement, but without any context it doesn't really help the question at hand. Sharing specific criticisms of rpm-based distributions or rpm package managers would go a lot further towards arguing why they would be a poor choice for a development laptop.

> I think the only reason this OS family is still alive is because RedHat managed to sell so many copies to big corps and universities. I think people still use it mainly because they were exposed to it at school or work and don't know any better.

Do you really think there are no situations where running Red Hat/CentOS or Fedora would be a suitable choice?

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

#260

Post by eikenberry »

ianai wrote: post #70
kelnos wrote: post #36

Regarding your important points: - All modern distros can run virtualized systems. You just need to install your favorite virtualization software (VirtualBox, qemu, VMWare, etc.). - No distros have good battery management, at least not really on par with Windows, and certainly not on par with macOS. This is just the unfortunate state of affairs with the Linux kernel. Some of it is due to lack of focus on improving th…

Is there anything that watches powertop and throttles process accordingly?

TLP is the closest there is to this AFAIK. They have a FAQ section about powertop.

http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-faq.html#powertop

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