Originally published at deepu.tech.
There is a new version of this post where I wrote about my current setup. Check it out here.
One of the questions that I often get after a conference talk is weirdly not about what I presented but about my Linux desktop environment. People are more curious about that beautiful distro rather than the awesome presentation I just did 😂
Not that I'm complaining, I love my desktop setup. I love it so much that I was afraid of getting a new PC when I was due for one. I was afraid that I would mess things up(I have done that many times in the past, I think Linux users can relate to me)
So I decided to capture the most important aspects of my distro for anyone interested in using GNU/Linux as their primary OS for development.
This is not just my work laptop; it's my primary machine which I use for all of the below.
- Java, JS, TS, Go, Python & web development
- JHipster development
- Running multiple web applications locally
- Running Docker containers
- VirtualBox for Windows testing & other VM stuff
- Kubernetes, Terraform, CloudFormation development and deployments
- Azure, AWS & GCP deployments using required CLI tools
- Heavy browser usage
- Email, chat & video conferencing
- Plex media server
- Blogging
- Youtube & Social media
Machine configuration
The configuration of the machine is also quite important for any development setup. So my laptop is a Dell Precision 5530 Mobile Workstation. I had the exact same setup with my old Dell 5510 as well, which is quite a similar configuration to 5530. I still have it as a backup Laptop, its two years old now, but it can still give most of the top-end laptops today a run for its money.
I used the custom configuration option from Dell to get the best possible setup at that time. It's not cheap but my company, XebiaLabs, provided a handsome budget and I think it is worth every penny. This, in my opinion, is one of the best Laptops for developers. So here is what I have.
Processor: Intel® Core™ i9-8950HK CPU @ 2.90GHz × 12
Memory: 32GB, DDR4-2666MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMMS, Non-ECC
HDD: M.2 1TB NVMe PCIe SED class 40 SSD
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro P2000 with 4 GB GDDR5 memory & Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (Coffeelake 3x8 GT2)
Wireless: Intel Wifi Link 9260 2x2 802.11AC + BT 4.2 vPro wireless card
Keyboard: English QWERTY US, backlit
Display: 15.6" FHD 1920x1080 Anti-Glare LED-backlit Non-touch IPS UltraSharp™
Battery: 6-cell (97Wh) Lithium-Ion battery with ExpressCharge™
Operating system and desktop environment
The most important, of course, is the operating system. I'm running Fedora 30 at the moment with GNOME 3.32.2 as the Desktop, and I'm very happy with it. I find Fedora more suitable for development machines than other distros as it has a short release cycle and is fairly stable, so you get the latest & stable software all the time.
What good is a desktop without a nice theme, right? GNOME is great when it comes to themes, and I went with Arc-Flatabulous theme and never looked back. For icons, I use Paper as I like the material icon theme.
Of course, it won't be complete without some nice GNOME plugins. Below are the plugins that I use.
- Dash to Dock
- Always Zoom Workspaces
- Auto Move Windows
- Native Window Placement
- Launch new instance
- Steal My Focus
- AlternateTab
- Window List
- Applications Menu
- Caffeine
- Clipboard Indicator
- Gistnotes
- OpenWeather
- Places Status Indicator
- System-monitor
- Todo.txt
- TopIcons Plus
- User Themes
Development tools
Now, these are mostly objective choices and really don't matter as long as you are comfortable with the tools you choose. Below are my choices for some of the important categories for development. I'm not including obvious things like Vim, Git, NodeJS, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
Shell: This is one of the most important for a developer. I use ZSH along with the awesome Oh My ZSH as my shell. Now, this won't be complete without some nice plugins and themes. I use powerlevel9k theme with some customizations. I also use zsh-autosuggestions, git, docker, docker-compose, autojump, zsh-syntax-highlighting, dnf, and npm plugins for Oh My ZSH. Here is my .zshrc with all the customizations. Update: A comment on this post suggested powerlevel10k as an alternative theme, and I tried it, and it turns out it is really way faster than powerlevel9k. So I think I'm gonna use powerlevel10k as my shell theme.
Terminal: What good is a nice shell without a good terminal. Fortunately, we have Tilix, one of the best terminal applications out there. It has workspaces, tabs, split windows, Quake mode, and so on.
Integrated development environment(IDE): IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate - I use this for Java & other JVM language Development
Code Editors: Visual Studio Code - My go-to editor. I love it. I use VSCode for web development, Go, Python, JS development, DevOps, and everything other than JVM languages. A VSCode setup is never complete without some good plugins. Here are the plugins that I'm using. You can run the script to install those.
Other notable development tools I use are GitKraken for Git repo management, Beyond Compare for code comparisons, VirtualBox, NVM for NodeJS version management and SDKMan for JDK version management.
Productivity tools
Productivity tools are also quite important, and below are my choices.
Browser: Google Chrome is my primary browser. I also use Firefox & Opera sometimes. I do love Opera in terms of its UX, I would love to use it as my primary browser, but I miss everything I have synchronized with my Google account in Chrome.
Email: I use Mailspring as my e-mail client. It's a fairly decent mail client with nice themes and a simple UI.
Office suite: I mostly use Google Docs & Microsoft office online, but when I have to work on something on my Desktop I use LibreOffice which is a good office suite and even handles Microsoft Office & Keynote formats.
Communication: Of course I use Slack and for video conference I use BlueJeans.
Screen capture: I use this nifty tool called Peek for screen recording and Shutter for screenshots.
Conclusion
There are many other small and nifty utilities that I use; most are command-line utilities. There are some notable mentions like Timeshift, which is nice for backing up your machine.
Of course, not everything is perfect in the Linux world, but it is the same with every OS. I was a long-time Windows user before switching to Linux. So like every Linux user, I have from time to time messed things up(With great power comes great responsibility, Peter). There are many quirks in the Linux world, but there is nothing that bothers me much. Some of the most annoying issues I had in the past are below, and for now, I don't have any noticeable issues.
- Scroll position jumping when switching apps - Fixed after upgrading to Fedora 30
- Hibernation was broken - Fixed after upgrading to Fedora 30
- Audio output selection was broken when plugging in headphones- Fixed after Fedora 28 for me
I hope you find this useful. If you have any questions or if you think I missed something, please add a comment.
If you like this article, please leave a like or a comment.
Oldest comments (135)
wonderful write up thank you for sharing your setup 😄
Thank you
May be you are not using it for the right purpose. Anyway everyone has the right to choose and use what they like. Also I don't understand the Windows relationship here
I was delighted to see another power user with VScode. I think OP is just speaking out of his something and assuming it's just for .net
Windows doesn't have relationship with VSCode. maybe using VSCode on fedora or debian do not make any problem.
But, individually, I dislike text editors that you have to work with them by mouse.
That's personal preference, I would prefer these to VIM/Emacs for example.
Each view has its own value and respect.
Have you try Webstorm, so so nice...
I don't any difference between webstorm and IntelliJ with JS plugins. I still prefer VSCode for front end dev
I have tried it briefly once. I don't see any difference between webstorm and IntelliJ with JS plugins. I still prefer VSCode for front end dev
I'm currently interested in trying to automate my environments. In the past, especially on OS X, I have spent days getting my environment perfected. I probably couldn't do it again if I had to rebuild the precise environment, so I am working on scripting out my configuration, keeping configurations in source control, and fun stuff like that so that my environment is more disposable in the future and I can experiment freely knowing everything can easily be rebuilt.
Nixos
A great first step, if you haven't done it yet, is to save your configuration files in your home directory in a dotfiles git repo (here's mine for example). While you may need to do a couple of steps to get ready to pull it down, it can shave a bunch of time getting things like common tool and editor configs set up quickly.
I do the same. Also, have a separate repo for my IDE (PHPStorm) settings.
I did just start doing that, also handy for keeping my org mode files in sync. I am trying to learn Puppet as well, but that's going to take some time!
Yes that's something I'm trying to do as well. A fully automated setup for Fedora is the dream. This article is kind of a first step for me
Hey great article! this maybe can serve as inpiration. I have for both Fedora and Ubuntu (it is also possible that it doesn't work, I remember there were a few bugs :). Cheers!
Workstation auto-conf
Workstation ansible playbooks
Need ansible installed in your local machine.
Command line
Testing:
Thank you
You should check this out: github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-pla...
It uses Ansible and home brew to help automate Mac setup.
For Linux, check out the ansible playbooks I wrote github.com/fazlearefin/ubuntu-dev-...
That's a great idea for a write-up I would totally read the shit out of. Would love to hear about your progress and conclusions.
I do the same as well as make use of a utility called GNU Stow to manage said configs
If you like Fedora (I do too) maybe you should give a try to Manjaro.
I'll check it out
My coworker uses Manjaro. Looks like a compromise between Arch and Fedora. It is definitely the next distro I'll try.
I love my Linux dev environment but ran into a ton of problems witth permissions when setting up Docker. Did you run into roadblocks with Docker on Linux? Any tips on setting it up? I eventually gave up on it for the time being but really want to learn the workflow soon and begin using for dev and prod. Great write-up, definitely bookmarking this!
I had some permissions-related issues with Docker on Linux too.
This is what solved them for me: docs.docker.com/install/linux/linu... (first section)
Give it a try if you haven't yet
It's funny because they are flagged as optonial but they are totally necessary for it to be properly working (yeah I know it's because of the root privileges)
I setup docker with the user group suggested and everything was fine. I also changed the default docker directory to avoid eating space on root disk.
Does mailspring do calendaring as well?
Unfortunately not yet. I use the default Linux calendar for that. Works fine for my needs.
Good read. Have you looked at those System76 machines before? Seems like they have a custom Linux distro just for devs.
Yes, I even considered them a few years ago when I was deciding a Laptop. They are great in terms of power and quality but they are bit bulky IMO. I travel a lot and I wanted something lightweight and powerful which was only met by Dell XPS and Precision series. So far really happy with the choice and that's why bought Dell again when I was due for an upgrade.
This isn't a computer. This is a monster, quantum computer etc :/)
Nice!
I personally prefer XFCE desktop environment (Xubuntu LTS to be specific) as performance is more important to me than theming and UI enhancements. And besides, I like its minimal RAM consumption (yeah, 32GB is lots of RAM but even that gets scarce when you get into web development!).
For emails, I like thunderbird which is a wonderful email client. I don't like Mailspring for two reasons:
LibreOffice is great for office work, yeah. And I also use GIMP for image editing and meld for file/folder comparison (which is similar to BeyondCompare).
Apart from that, I use a whole lot of other linux tools like geany, synaptic, tmux, dict, etc..
If you don't care about UI/UX then, of course, there are distros and DEs that are better. But I'm a sucker for nice UI/UX and Gnome has one of the best in Linux world. Also, I have not encountered any performance issue with this setup so far. I believe you would notice it only in a less powerful laptop.
I tried Thunderbird and Evolution, but they were too cluttered for my taste. I like the minimal UX of Mailspring. I don't notice resource hog. It's not closed source see this github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring
And of course, GIMP is a given, though I miss Photoshop. I'll try Meld.
I think this is very misleading. UX is user experience and that experience depends on a lot of things. My experience on a slower laptop with a heavyweight DE is going to be worse than my experience with a lightweight DE on the same hardware. Simply correlating UX with things looking pretty is not helpful in the real world. My experience using a different desktop paradigm is also going to be very subjective.
Agree I should have been clearer. I was talking about a nice UI and yes UX is subjective
From the link you gave:
Ya, the sync engine is not oss. I was referring to the client itself. Anyway I don't consider that as a negative. Being a OSS developer myself IMO, being closed source doesn't make something bad.
Nice write up! Thank you!
I noticed we go opposite paths. I use Windows as host and Linux in Virtual Box VM's. And as I have to install these VM's quite frequently, I decided to make a script. It's still a wip, so take that with a grain of salt. Here:
github.com/marcelocg/scripts
Everyone please feel free to fork, comment and suggest if you like it.
I'm preparing a series of posts where I will list all things shell script I've been learning while putting this down.
Looks cool. I might steal(fork :P) it to automate my setup in future :)
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