I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?
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I feel like there’s just too many different programming workflows, to try to pre-install them.
Here on openSUSE, there’s ‘patterns’ you can install, which are basically just groups of packages, and they’ve got some pre-defined patterns for programming:
I feel like that kind of goes in a more useful direction, although it’s still partially questionable what those contain. For example, the Java development pattern comes with Ant as the build system, when Maven and Gradle are more popular, I believe.
I also have to say that I often prefer installing programming tooling in distro-independent ways, and ideally automated in the project repo, to avoid works-on-my-machine situations.
Of course, something like Git, Docker, VMs etc. tend to be stable across versions, and I might not care for having the newest versions, but even with those, I think it’s good to install them on demand, rather than having them pre-installed. If the distro simply makes it a breeze to install them, that’s ideal IMHO.Yes, all of them.
All of them? I’ve always liked (and preferred) Linux for dev work, as I’m just so comfortable around working with the commandline and installing packages that I might need. For that end, any of them would work, you’d just need to set them up with what you want. If you wanna be “cool” and “hacker” you could install Arch and install every last package manually handpicked, or you could go with the most bog standard Ubuntu or Fedora or OpenSUSE. All of them work, it’s only down to your tools. If you like Kali, stick with it.
When I see a job listing have “PowerShell” I’m like [x]
Probably Bluefin-DX.
The “DX” stands for developer experience. It’s a variant of uBlue/ Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) with a lot of added programming tools like Brew, Nix, IDEs, local LLMs, and more.
You can read more about it on the website.
There’s also Aurora, which is the same, but with KDE instead of Gnome.
The
dx-images are meant to be a plug-and-play solution for developers. You just install it, share your container config to your project colleagues, and go. Don’t worry about not being able to work because of a bad update or some misalignments in your package manager broke your OS. Most stuff is containerised, and if your host breaks, you can just roll back, because the system is basically powered by git.I’m no developer, but I use the regular variant for casual purposes (no specific tasks, mostly browser) on my laptop, and Bazzite (also very similar, but gaming focused) on my desktop, and both are wonderful! They’re the most boring distro/ OS I’ve used yet, and that’s great. They’re immutable/ image based and always work reliably.
I can really recommend them for a lot of people, from ranging from IT professionals to my mum.
Don’t worry about not being able to work because of a bad update
Never happened to me in 20+ years… I seriously wonder what some of y’all have been doing that this is a major concern.
I’ve done the horrible deed of updating Debian, for example.
Distros like Arch get a pass, but Debian screwed me over several times. For example a few years ago, some driver decided to make itself clinge onto old kernel versions. So the boot partition got full and left me in a weird start where I had to manually remove old kernels and track down the driver at fault.
Recoverable, but annoying, and on a system I use for work it would be really really expensive.
Fedora used to nuke itself sometimes if you upgraded an install from version n to n+1, n+2, … Like a config not being migrated properly, a package conflict because of renamed packages and versions, yada yada yada.
If you didn’t experience that, you either were very lucky, only used enterprise distros, or simply reinstalled often enough for it not to be an issue.
I’ve had bad tinkering break my system before, but never had an update break it irreversibly. The closest would actually be on Silverblue itself, when an update to the kernel was using different signing keys that cause the system not to boot. Fortunately it was simple, I selected the previous deployment and I was in (on a non versioned OS I would have selected the previous kernel which most are configured to retain the last few). A quick Google revealed Ublue had a whole kerfuffle and after verifying it was legit, I enrolled the new certs into my MOK.
Although one time on Arch I had installed an experimental version of Gnome from one of their repos, and was pleasantly surprised when that version finally released and I removed the experiment repo and did an update absolutely nothing at all broke. Nothing.
Not irreversibly, but it’s annoying to be forced to spend an hour searching for an answer in forums then fixing to get networking or GUI back before you can do productive work.
I’ve had this happen more often than I’d like to admit.
There were quite a few instances where I just couldn’t game in the evening after turning on my PC, mostly because of my power supply (outages while updating, unstable grid, damaged PSU and hard drive, etc.) and my ability to shoot myself in the foot in regards to my IT skills.
I imagined spending my friday evening differently than chrooting my install from another USB more often than I’d like to admit. At least Linux is repairable, good luck trying that with Windows…
Now, thankfully, I live in another house with a landlord that actually cares that I don’t get electrocuted in my shower, and I don’t have those problems anymore. I also don’t tinker as much with my OS anymore, at least not much.
Still, Fedora Atomic feels way more robust and less buggy than regular Fedora, especially KDE. And the QoL tweaks from uBlue are great too!
kali is for posers, professionals use hannah montana
The truly righteous use TempleOS.
Biebian is VASTLY superior to Hannah Montana Linux. You should consider switching.
God, this fucking debate has been going on for decades with you nerds. Bieb or Hannah there’s no right answer, use whichever works best for you!
Rebecca black Linux is for the real men though.
Most forward thinking distro. First to ship with Wayland by default and the only of the three still getting constant updates.
No competitor really. It’s always Friday Friday, gotta boot up on Friday with rbos my friends
dual boot them 😂
No
Not that I know of, but I kind of feel like Nixos could be. The way you can use nix flakes or shells so each project has its on version of nodejs, go, rust, or w/e you use. Instead of having them installed system wide. And you can put the flake.nix and flake.lock in your git repo so any other Dev with nix can use it to DL the exact same packages.
You could try Bluefin (Gnome) or Aurora (KDE). https://projectbluefin.io/ It’s an immutable OS based on Fedora. They have a developer version with certain developer tools pre-installed. The development environment is largely based around containers and virtual environments. eg. Using DevPod to run your software projects within developer containers instead of installing the tools directly on your host operating system.
I use Aurora at work as an IT technician and it’s great :)
I mean pretty much any distro that isn’t locked down will be good for programming. All you really need is a package manager with a selection of at least somewhat modern dev tools, which almost all of them have.
there are locked down distros?
No, but some are better suited for programming, because each distro has different packages in their repositories. I find Fedora to be very good when it comes to having basically every dev tool available in their repos. Arch is good too but too unstable for actual work. But keep in mind in most distros you can add separate repositories that contains the software you want. You can also use Homebrew that contains lots of dev tools as well
I enjoy arch on my work laptop.
Not that I know of. I do a lot of native development mostly on Mint and Endeavor. I use pretty much the same tools on both and get a nearly identical experience. I’d say just go with what feels good to you.
Not out of the box that I know of, no.
You’d have to be specific about programming to have a programming specific distro.
