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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Well, not exactly. Any distro COULD be used for development and excel at it, but there are a few intresting options out there. I personally use Fedora with KDE, but if you want to take it to a more advanced level, use arch or nixos. If you want to make your OS, use gentoo or linux from scratch, but very niche and not recommended.
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.UNIX was kinda designed to be an IDE (of its time) by itself. Desktop/Server Linux (whether GNU or non-GNU) mostly continues this tradition; you are provided with some powerful tools for text manipulation, development, debugging and deployment out of the box in most distros. As such, any modern Linux distro is pretty good for development even out of the box. However, you must learn to use this power, and I’m not claiming it’s easy (I still regularly look up various manpages despite doing development on Linux for 10+ years in various forms).
With that said, I myself prefer NixOS. It really feels more developer-oriented that other distros, as you get the power of Nix out of the box, and integrated into the system. With Nix you get easy access to the biggest software repository in the world. You get per-project development shells, so that you never have to worry about different toolchain versions for different projects, or your system being contaminated with bloat you no longer need. You get the power of reproducible packaging, to eliminate a lot of (but unfortunately not all of) “Works on my machine”-type of problems. It’s also got a hell of a learning curve, but I think it’s worth it.
Not out of the box that I know of, no.
You’d have to be specific about programming to have a programming specific distro.
In my view, you need a distro that has up-to-date packages. It also helps to have repos that have all the obscure tools you are going to want to ensure compatibility with everything.
Those two criteria eliminate a lot of distros. Arch or an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS are my picks for these reasons.
Distro packages don’t really matter much in my experience. You either use project-specific package management or install stuff with Homebrew or Nix package manager. Sometimes maybe even containers.
One problem with distro packages is that you can only install one version. And in practise a lot of software projects have outdated dependencies. Sometimes you have multiple projects with conflicting version dependencies.
Well, now you are hitting on my real recommendation which is to use Distrobox. Distrobox allows you to install multiple userlands that are all isolated from each other but all seem native on your system and give you full access to shared files and resources ( even the GUI desktop ).
It is very common to work on something not that just has outdated packages but that targets a specific distribution. If you are building something that will target an Alpine container in the cloud, it is handle to create an Alpine Distrobox to have all the same libraries. Similarly an app might target a specific version of Ubuntu. One of the products I worked on last year was based on Ubuntu 18.04. I could easily create an Ubuntu 18.04 Distrobox to work on that.
Distrobox also means I can prevent the build-up of cruft from all the little specialty tools and dependencies that projects require that I will not need long term. Remove the Distrobox and remove all the junk.
This is different than pure Docker to Podman though since Distrobox still gives you full access to your base system. You only have to install what you uniquely need in Distrobox. So i am not necessarily installing all my tools in Distrobox. Just the specialty ones.
Anyway, this is a more complicated answer and setup. In my view, the host environment still matters a lot and what I said above still stands.
Heh, Distrobox came to my mind when writing my comment. I haven’t used it enough to recommend it yet though.
I recall there are some other development container projects, but can’t remember the names right now.
Development containers are nice in theory. In practice, sometimes development environments are so complex that it might not be worth the trouble. But it’s good to have options.
One problem with distro packages is that you can only install one version.
This isn’t technically true for all distros—Gentoo has a mechanism that will allow multiple package versions to be installed in parallel. I have multiple distro-packaged Python and Lua interpreter versions on my system, for instance. But it does require some extra work by the packager, so it isn’t done universally for all packages.
Are these made similarly to how Debian handles python2 and python3 for instance?
I’m not sure that anything short of a package manager that would compile everything from sources would be able to provide capability to pick and mix specific package versions.
I don’t know how Debian’s solution works, so I couldn’t say for certain. Gentoo usually installs the different package versions to their own directories, and there are methods for selecting a “system python” (or lua, etc) which is the target of the
/usr/bin/pythonsymlink. Other versions have to be called with qualifiers (for instance,python3.10). Python libraries installed through the package manager may install to one or several versions depending on the content of a couple of environment variables, and applications that need python can request a specific version if they need to, or accept the system python if they don’t care. (Note that python2 is no longer eligible to be the system python—you need at least one python3, although 2.7.18 remains in the package repository and can be installed as well if you really need it.)Of course, if you’re not a programmer, you can leave the defaults for everything alone, and most of the time it should Just Work.
Sounds pretty close to Debian as far as I remember. In Debian those symlinks are called alternatives, and can be configured with update-alternatives. Not sure about the Python libraries though.
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’d say ArchLinux/ArtixLinux, because of the ease to publish/install packages to/from AUR (Arch’s User Repository).
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.
Short answer is no, I think because what tools you need for programming change so much based on the development you’re doing. C++ developers need compiler toolchain stuff that Javascript developers would never need to look at and vice versa.
Curveball answer is that modern extensible IDEs with the power of language servers and plugins have kind of become this. I’d massively recommend properly getting into one of the following and learning how to configure new languages and plugins:
- VScode
- Neovim
- Emacs
- Helix
(Sure I’ve probably missed some great options, feel free to flame me on why notepad++ should be OPs first choice)
I, for one, welcome our typography as flow control overlords.
Can’t wait for people to stop confusing " “ and «.
There’s nothing like it, nor will it ever be, for a couple of reasons.
Programming is a long running task
Distros like Kali are meant to be used for quick tasks where you don’t need data preservation (or when data preservation is a bad thing). Programming is the opposite of this, it’s only about data (the program) preservation. Programming something that will get erased on the next boot is pointless on the long run if you need to program that again, and if you don’t then what you’re doing is not programming but something else that requires some programming.
Programming is a wide term
There are multiple languages/IDEs/Workflows/etc, ranging from fully free and open source to paid closed source, whichever you will use depends entirely on you, having all of that pre installed would be 99% garbage since you will only care about 1 or 2 of them.
Programming requires setup
Even if you had whatever workflow you use pre installed, to work on something you would need to setup git keys, install dependencies, compile the first version, etc… and that’s all before you can start doing stuff. And you would have to do this again and again since distros like Kali are not meant to be installed (if they were they wouldn’t need to come with all those packages pre-installed because you could just install the ones you cared about)
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.
The last time I used arch it worked fine for 6 months then it needed to be scrapped because the network fully stopped working after an update. I’ve been on fedora ever since without a single issue. Arch is fine for personal devices where you can afford to spend half a day on troubleshooting a package that is too recent and straight up doesn’t work because there’s no real testing being done. I wouldn’t put it on a work device simply because it’s not a just works distro
This might be a totally subjective matter. I had debian on a work laptop before arch, but getting new software was a hassle and I was constantly fighting debian. Arch has been my daily driver on my work laptop for 5 years now and I am happy with the choice I made. 🙂
Yes, all of them.
Gentoo. Literally the entire system is a build environment. Imagine a single environment that’s capable of compiling thousands of different packages and managing dependencies etc.
No
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!
dual boot them 😂
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
