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What do you think would be nice in a developer centric Linux distro?

Pandademic on September 07, 2021

inspired by Mike Bybee's Mike BybeeFollow Strong opinions, loosely typed. Post ...
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gidrek profile image
Giovanni Cortés

For me is not necessary, because with Arch you can get that and is very customizable.

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pandademic profile image
Pandademic • Edited

Great! Thanks for the feedback ! Personally , I feel Arch is hard to install & that makes it harder to get setup.

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Pandademic

My main problems with arch are as follows:
1) the difficulty of the installation, Which could be fixed with a gui installer
2) Forgive me if I am wrong The compile it yourself aspect of AUR

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gidrek profile image
Giovanni Cortés

If you a developer, the instalation should be relative easy following some videos, or there are Calamares installers for Arch Linux, or you could use ArcoLinux, that is like an Arch with installer.

AUR use just scripts to install no official packages in your Arch System, sometimes you need to compile something because it gets from source, but you only need to type makepkg -si or you can use some AUR helper

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pandademic profile image
Pandademic • Edited

Thanks , Archcraft is good too. Could you tell me a Calamares installer to arch? Thanks for the info on AUR too. I will update the list with AUR.

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Heiker

An installation process that is automated. I really don't mind if it's text based or has a graphical interface. As long as the tedious steps are all automated, it's all good.

Semi-rolling release model would be nice. I mean, give me small security updates for many months then maybe 2 or 3 big updates a year. No clean re-install for big updates, I hate those.

Offer a minimal image, for those who already know how to assemble their own desktop environment.

Offer scripts to setup dedicated tools for a language or workflow. I don't work on java, but I have been told that is a pain to setup on linux, so it would be nice if there was some script that does everything for you. So instead of having a lot of programs installed what you could do is create scripts that can install those tools for you.

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Pandademic

Great Idea(s)! Will update this list! I agree about the huge updates , by the way

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brandon_wallace

Any Linux distribution that allows you to install the development tools that you need.

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Pandademic

Great ! So you don't need anything specifically?

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brandon_wallace

No.
You have a lot of distributions to choose from. A majority of them will work well for doing development. I recommend using one of the major Linux distributions that have been around for a while.

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Pandademic

Could you give me some examples?

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Pandademic

Also , Is their anything in particular that makes these less optimal to use for development. Eg: no support for a certian format ?

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brandon_wallace

Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, LinuxMint, MX Linux, Pop!_OS, etc should be okay.

None are less optimal for development. You just need to select the distribution and desktop (KDE, Xfce, Gnome, etc) you like best.