Which Linux distro is better?

Hi fellow Lainons, what's the best Linux distro for dev? I don't care about updates, design, I just want something stable, lightweight and good for dev. Thx(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

Just pick one and go - writing the code is more important than finding the perfect distro

>>75357 whichever one has the tools you need conveniently provided in its repos I think arch is nice and simple

>>75357 >I don't care about updates, design, I just want something stable, lightweight and good for dev. Some debian/ubuntu ofshoot then. I personally use Xubuntu. They usually do well with packages and are really stable. Some people might recommend arch stuff, but in my experience these things are nice so long you don't download something that breaks your system and then you have to figure out what went wrong. Competely valid if you want to get latest releases and what not, but I wouldn't go there for stability. And truth is, most software doesn't change/improve so fast that you need to upgrade it all the time.

>>75360 Artix is better m8, no systemdshit

>>75357 Mint works out of the box. If you get bored and consider putting days into perfect config: void linux >>75359 image misses point of a minimalist OS - slow hardware & battery life are the motivators to put effort into reducing OS footprint. Obviously neither is gonna be a consideration for that dude

For dev? The answer is of course Gentoo.

arch will break sometimes on update and you'll have to find the fix or wait or the community to do it. debian stable literally stablest. so does freeBSD but its technically not linux so its more different from standard distros. OpenBSD is most stable and secure but only because it doesn't add anything until it is 100% secured. it doesnt even support ext4 filesystems, and last time I checked virtualisation only worked in terminal, I think they have GPU passthrough now though. Debian, short answer

>>75377 >OpenBSD is most secure Nice myth.

>>75378 >Nice myth. what is then? its not totally secure, sure. If anything is I'd love to know

Gentoo is stable by default but lets you optionally unmask unstable packages if you want the latest development version of emacs for example.

>>75378 OpenBSD is the most secure. This isn't disputable. Did you think "most secure" means "unhackable?" Because that is not possible. In fact, between pledge(), default configs, and default permissions makes OpenBSD the most secure. Everything else is just icing. >>75381 There is nothing, as of this post, that is the most secure. >>75382 Gentoo is great, but remember that Linux is extremely permissive and, for security, a lot of changes need to be done, from permissions to configurations alone is a lot of effort. I'm a very big fan of Gentoo and I use it just slightly more than OpenBSD. Just USE flags alone make this distro top-tier, but it's pretty nice.

>>75383 gentoo is cool and all but the update time, i.e having to recompile browsers and the kernel everytime there is an update makes it kinda awkward if they are intending to dev on it. maybe I am just using it wrong though? Also isn't there a full kernel/ utils written in rust now?

>>75385 I'm going to be honest with you, it's not for everyone. It's good for my use case. I don't really like to recommend it to anyone anymore lol

>>75357 How about DEVuan? Its reliablw, works with a wide range of hardware, and no gay systemd

mint, fedora, debian, doesn't really matter. vm one and see if you like.

>>75377 >Not mentioning NetBSD which is fast, stable and even arguably more secure than OpenBSD (even though it's still not a linux distro)

I am of the opinion of >>75359, I was never much of a distro hopper to begin with Arch on my desktop and music setup, Debian anywhere else. >Stable >Community backed, not corporate >Multiple DE choice in net-install So I'd honestly say Debian.

>>75359 given the soykaftyness of that photo, Ill say he does clearly have a pretty large screen and a full on ergonomic keyboard. Cant see mouse headphones or chair well enough to identify but all these things can be surprisingly expensive, common office chairs especially. >>75385 You dont need to update everything all the time buddy what are you, stupid? >>75388 y not just use debian but Dpoterrang'd? >>75382 you can also just install any thing like that ontop of any linux distro it just works, don't be a slave to your packagemanager mmkay? install gentoo

>>75357 just do like openSUSE its stable and nice to modify when the need comes>>75357

>>75357 Any. The best distro is the one that isnt windows.

>>75357 For general purposes (if you are a novice or regular user who only needs the basics), Debian and Fedora are good options. If you are a computer enthusiast or study cybersecurity, Kali Linux and Arch. If you are a gamer, Pop_Os or even the Steam system are good options (although I think the latter is proprietary software). There are distros for all needs, you just have to know what you are looking for.

>>75570 >If you are a gamer, Pop_Os or even the Steam system are good options (although I think the latter is proprietary software). I'm a hardcore vidya enthusiast and there's no way in hell I would ever use one of those. Pop_OS uses a useless desktop environment and is derived from Ubuntu (which is committed to killing Wine by dropping 32-bit library support), and Steam is the cancer killing PC games.

>>75571 Ubuntu = Trash Pop_Os has issues with Steam >Steam is the cancer killing PC games Yup. There are better distros for gaming, in fact, there's a new project called "Nobara Linux" that is basically Fedora modified for gaming, and it's very good. Manjaro is also a good option.

>>75571 Agreed, when i need to play something, its easier to just load the exe into your steam library in 2 clicks and run it in proton (often experiemental). Idk what else you use steam for as i refuse to buy non-phsyical but it takes 2 seconds to do on ubuntu or mint

Steam is fuarrrking annoying the way it makes you load their big, bloated spyware any time you want to launch a quick single player game. Learning to use Bottles and other launchers renders the Steam launcher pretty much useless. I'm finding the pirating option to be more viable once again, on Linux. Steam should be used for multiplayer games, that's it.

>>75359 Arch doesn't require babysitting. In fact, I find that Ubuntu-like distros get in your way more than Arch.

>>75357 guix is the best dev distro imo it's not stable but you can rollback it's not necessarily lightweight tho

>>75583 Shame it's maintained by wreckers. You can never be sure about the future of a distro with people like that at the helm.

>>75357 Gentoo, because of USE flags such as: source, examples, savedconfig

if you are able to use a fully free distro (basically if you don't have WiFi or a GPU, use Parabola otherwise, use Artix

>>75357 I love NixOS. There's absolutely nothing wrong with tuning, Arch-style, imho. The real sin is whenever this tuning causes you to redo work, or creates extra work beyond what you're actually doing on the computer. NixOS satisfies these constraints and has cured my distrohopping for 1+ years now. stat / | awk '/Birth: /{print $2 " " substr($3,1,5)}' 2023-01-24 20:35

>>75404 >You dont need to update everything all the time buddy Umm if you want to have a secure system you should be updating fairly regularly >what are you, stupid? A-Asuka-san, is that you???

It doesn't make a difference. But, Ubuntu has more tutorials and info on the internet, so if you're new that's my recomendation.

NixOS. Flexible and declarative, nice going, if you're ready to spend time to learn its architecture and lang, hard to get into, but if yr fond of reproducibility and need dev environment solutions it suits your needs. Then if not and you want all now, use Arch, Fedora, Void or Alpine (musl only, primarily for container. Gentoo is outdated, binary cache is ugly. Save yself months of time and send fuarrrk away all those fanatics complaining about systemd.

Artix, would normally recommend Debian for something stable but you likely need up-to-date software. Now the rest what I'm typing is to circumvent the annoying anti-filter. blah blah blah blah. you get the idea

>>75357 What are you Developing? Certain libraries, languages and frameworks move in a rolling manner. Typically these languages are more modern such as Rust, Go, Elixir, typescript and some JavaScript frameworks. But some languages and frameworks have more established LTS patterns and the concept of 'stable' releases that see 'backports'. Much older languages like C/C++, Java, PHP and so on are great with this model. With the more rolling model it is preferable to have a more up-to-date distro such as tumbleweed, arch, fedora. With the stable model, distros such as Debian, Ubuntu LTS, Leap, Rocky. Side note - I hate it when people ask for a distro that 'just werks'. They all 'just werk' but you expect us to be a mind reader and figure out what works best for you. Spend some time and think about what you need/want.

>>75404 > is worth hundreds of millions of dollars > office chairs can be expensive

>>75570 >kali linux lurk moar

>>75400 Wish Mint had a minimal/netinst version of their distro. I don't like any of the preinstalled software that comes with it.

I use Qubes because it makes it much easier to manage having dependencies, different environments for different projects and testing builds etc

>>77840 >Qubes I hated Qubes for dev. I used Qubes for ~5 years, after coming from arch. I found that Qubes offers unparalleled ease in spinning up new compartmentalized machines, and enforcing security policy but is actually quite soykafty for devel for a couple reasons: 1.) Its difficult to access expected developer workstation requirements on Qubes. For example, I took a number of employer paid for seminars that shipped virtual machines to *do* the seminar in. I found myself using a borrowed computer because Qubes doesn't make it pleasant to run VMs outside their framework. Similarly, I didn't have a great time trying to run containers either - the root fs is non-persistent per VM and so the docker cache doesn't stick - you can tweak this though. 2.) The environments are poorly maintained. Qubes routinely ships uber slow update to template VM images, so your dev environment is just kindof old. This isn't Qubes fault - they are a volunteer maintained project, but just isn't a great dev experience. You can manually install your toolchains, or maintain your dev environment. 3.) Cross Architecture Virtualization has to be nested. You don't and can't work in dom0. Xen doesn't do cross arch. If you want cross-arch, your nested. 4.) My own personal problem - Qubes is super-resource intensive - not for what it is, its insane that you can have a Fedora 38 vm take 350mb of memory, but don't have the hardware to run the setups I want. I was routinely getting Firefox OOM killed in disposable VMs that would die and take the history with them. All this can be taken cum grano salis because I wasn't using an employer provided beefy workstation for development, just a personal box for after hours fun. My hot take is that Ubuntu latest or Fedora would probably be a good dev workstation because everyone builds for those targets, and publishes instructions for how to build for those targets. Fedora tends to be a little more up to date. I am sure no one here wants to hear that - I don't, I am currently running FreeBSD, and doing dev in a jail - which requires way less resources than a VM.

Taking advantage of the thread, What Linux distro do you recommend for someone with an IQ lower than room temperature? I have used Ubuntu all my life, and I recently tried Manjaro but I didn't like it. Talking to people they ended up recommending EndeavorOS, Arch and Garuda, but what is your opinion about these?

>>75629 >Umm if you want to have a secure system you should be updating fairly regularly sure, because cp or ls has changed quite a fuarrrking lot in 30 years, go ahead. also ofc you need to update the image viever because muh security

>>77881 > What Linux distro do you recommend for someone with an IQ lower than room temperature? Not much point in putting yourself down preemptively. > I have used Ubuntu all my life, and I recently tried Manjaro but I didn't like it. So you have (some) experience with a Debian-based distribution. If you'd like to continue with Debian, look into Linux Mint. It's designed to be very stable by purposefully using older versions of packages and ensuring a good experience. If you want something a lot more minimal, Debian has an installer that lets you pick from a variety of desktop enviornments. Devuan (Debian without SystemD) does the same. If you want something different from Debian, but still more user-friendly, look into Red Hat Fedora. The package manager will be different (dnf instead of apt) but it uses Gnome and has a lot of the same default applications as Ubuntu so you should be fine. > Talking to people they ended up recommending EndeavorOS, Arch and Garuda, but what is your opinion about these? Arch has an auto installer via archinstall, though you may get more out of trying to install it manually. There are many tutorials online about this. Garuda is just Arch with a desktop enviornment and some ease-of-use configurations. I can't speak to how useful it is compared to base Arch as I have not used it. EndeavorOS is similar to Garuda. I can't speak to how useful it is compared to base Arch as I have not used it. In the end, the best distro is the one you choose to make it. In my mind that means installing a more minimal Linux distribution (Arch, Debian/Devuan, Gentoo) and customizing it to my liking. My advice would be to try various distros in a virtual machine, or on bare metal if you have a spare machine to use, and see how you like them. It will be hard, but I know you can do it.

if u buntu is what u no then y switch ? honest question easiest switches will be debianoids/debian true but others are fine too

>>77881 protip: despite people wanting to think otherwise, Linux is not a system for "high IQ" people.

>>77884 Figured I'd use my first post here on Lainchan to throw in some thoughts that expand off yours. I'm not super into Debian, but I generally agree with your recommendations. > Arch has an auto installer via archinstall, though you may get more out of trying to install it manually. There are many tutorials online about this. I do think manually installing Arch is a great learning experience, if you are interested in it. In terms of tutorials, I really like the video by DenshiVideo (don't know how links work around here, its "Arch Linux: A Comfy Install Guide" on YouTube). > Garuda is just Arch with a desktop enviornment and some ease-of-use configurations. In my brief experience with Garuda, I found that it was quite overkill and bogged down with a bunch of random software. If you are looking for a bare-bones system to build on top of, I'd definitely go with Arch or EndeavourOS over this. > EndeavorOS is similar to Garuda. I can't speak to how useful it is compared to base Arch as I have not used it. I liked EndeavourOS when I used to use it; I think it helped me ease me into a lot of deeper Linux concepts. I think EndeavourOS is great for an "Arch Linux with training wheels" type of experience, allowing you to learn about Pacman and the AUR before hopping into Arch proper. > In the end, the best distro is the one you choose to make it. In my mind that means installing a more minimal Linux distribution (Arch, Debian/Devuan, Gentoo) and customizing it to my liking. My advice would be to try various distros in a virtual machine, or on bare metal if you have a spare machine to use, and see how you like them. It will be hard, but I know you can do it. Love this advice. You can never be sure if you'll like something without trying it, and thankfully it can be very quick to spin up new VMs to try stuff. While it is hard, I think the rewards will out-weigh the cost.

Slackware is in my opinion one of the best linux distributions. it's simple and probably more stable than debian stable. use bsd style init scripts and command line scripts for everything

>>77903 >slackware - bsd style init scripts I had never heard of this. I think this is an interesting feature. Thanks for the rabbit hole, I may one day give Slackware a try. One thing I really enjoy about the BSDs is they feel like a small system that you can understand.

What does Lain think all the best features of different distros are? Particularly the unique features only seen in a single distro.

>>77919 >ubuntu having literally every piece of proprietary software designed to be run on your operating system is pretty nice >redhat your manager probably likes it >arch pacman is the best package manager in existence >gentoo you can feel superior to anyone >debian it just werks

>>77919 >Ubuntu having literally every piece of proprietary software designed to be run on your operating system is pretty nice ( >>77920 ) >Redhat Its the Job's in Linux Stack, your skills transfer. Fedora is up to date, and easy to use. > Arch Its lightweight, minimalist, up to date, and you don't have to compile >Gentoo Its lightweight, minimalist, up to date, and you have to make decisions on use flags/setup for every package, and you compile > Debian largest truly community run Linux project - its not a business, its not a niche. You can help sustain the independence of Linux.

>>77920 >pacman is the best package manager in existence It didn't even have encryption or signature verification to prevent MITM attacks until recently.

>having literally every piece of proprietary software designed to be run on your operating system is pretty nice and yet it still all runs like soykaf