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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?

#291

Post by josteink »

kasabali wrote: post #264
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.

> dnf has it beat quite objectively You mean even though the slightest care was not given to reliability while coding it? https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

Depends on your definition of reliability I guess.

If I have two scripts running in parallel which both wants to install packages, using apt will cause one of the scripts to fail, because apt is already locked.

dnf however will be just fine, because instead of failing it will just queue and wait for the lock to be released.

There's small things like that all over which to me, as an end user, makes relying on dnf feel much safer.

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

#292

Post by cosatelo »

Antergos or manjaro. You get all the drivers that comes with an updated kernel, the AUR, the speed of it being a source-based distro, and all the latest software. Those who claim arch has breakage often draw from past experiences with vanilla arch. Vanilla arch his a complicated install process that results in an often unstable system. But antergos/manjaro is to arch as ubuntu is debian. Heres some reasons other distros are not as pleasant as Antergos/manjaro

Ubuntu: the 6-month release cycle highlights whats great with rolling release distros. Youre greeted every 6 months with a broken system you have to reinstall. Ubuntu LTS: Alot of the packages are extremely outdated and you'll most likely collect a huge amount of ppas(a method of installing 3rd party programs in debian based distros) that will slowly but surely give your computer a decrease in speed and stablilty

RPM based distros: Rpm package managers are the slowest you'll use. This will get to you eventually trust me.

Gentoo: so difficult and impractical to use its a joke in many linux inner circles

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

#294

Post by jcoffland »

beambot wrote: post #280
jcoffland wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reinstalling is a sorry solution. I haven't had to reinstall my dev machine in about a decade.

Where do you buy your HDDs? You're sitting a couple standard deviations beyond MTBF.

I have upgraded to an SSD but just copied the OS and boot sectors to the new device.

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

#295

Post by jcoffland »

josteink wrote: post #291
kasabali wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dnf has it beat quite objectively You mean even though the slightest care was not given to reliability while coding it? https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

Depends on your definition of reliability I guess. If I have two scripts running in parallel which both wants to install packages, using apt will cause one of the scripts to fail, because apt is already locked. dnf however will be just fine, because instead of failing it will just queue and wait for the lock to be released. There's small things like that all over which to me, as an end user, makes relying on dnf feel…

You can not safely install two packages concurrently. apt-get's choice to refuse to run is a much simpler solution that better adheres to the KISS principal and is therefore less prone to error. You could queue apt installs of you really wanted to with a simple for loop on the command line.

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

#296

Post by josteink »

richmattes wrote: post #259
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…

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

Fedora is IMO a great desktop distro, but for some reason consistently underrated in the wider community.

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

#297

Post by josteink »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #285
cellularmitosis wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was something like ~8 years ago, but here's an excerpt from my notes when using Redhat: # ls -l /etc/httpd/ conf conf.d logs -> ../../var/log/httpd modules -> ../../usr/lib/httpd/modules run -> ../../var/run Reactions: * Why is 'grep -r /etc' taking so long? * Why am I seeing log entries in the output? * Why am I seeing 'permission denied' on a bunch of socket files? Debian seems to have the most respect for the…

A few more, from my notes: These were the default permissions of the apache log dir: # ls -ld /var/log/httpd/ drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Jan 18 12:09 /var/log/httpd/ I guess their expectation is that only root should ever need to read a log file? Contrast this with Debian, which gives read access to admins: $ ls -ld /var/log/apache2 drwxr-x--- 2 root adm 4096 Jan 16 06:25 /var/log/apache2 Redhat also decided to stic…

> These were the default permissions of the apache log dir

Since systemd came along, you're supposed to use journalctl though.

That applies to Debian and Ubuntu too.

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

#298

Post by josteink »

jcoffland wrote: post #295
josteink wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of reliability I guess. If I have two scripts running in parallel which both wants to install packages, using apt will cause one of the scripts to fail, because apt is already locked. dnf however will be just fine, because instead of failing it will just queue and wait for the lock to be released. There's small things like that all over which to me, as an end user, makes relying on dnf feel…

You can not safely install two packages concurrently. apt-get's choice to refuse to run is a much simpler solution that better adheres to the KISS principal and is therefore less prone to error. You could queue apt installs of you really wanted to with a simple for loop on the command line.

Which is why dnf doesn't.

But dnf doesn't break your script or force every script in the universe to reimplement the same polling loop, because it's implemented one place, centrally, so everyone else can forget this problem even exists.

dnf clearly does the right thing here, while apt causes breakage. I don't see how anyone can argue anything else.

It's not KISS if everyone else has to work around your shortcomings. Then it's just inadequacy.

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

#299

Post by Fnoord »

striking wrote: post #287
Fnoord wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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?

I was really only interested in keeping my personal files (like pictures or my development directory) synced. However, this still opened up a great big can of worms. * Linux hfs drivers don't support journaling. Solution: turn it off, and suffer the inability of Mac OS to make a disk clean without booting into Recovery or Linux first if the computer powers off in a way that would dirty the disk. * Mac OS user/group n…

Did you consider or try ExtFS via FUSE? Did you consider to upgrade your FS to AFS (Apple's File System, the successor of HFS+)? What about disk encryption? Did you use e.g. VeraCrypt? Did you consider using the SD card or USB stick on your Mac?

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

#300

Post by agibsonccc »

jcoffland wrote: post #205
vurpo wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was solved long ago: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Develo...
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