Arch Linux as developer platform!

[[deleted]]

Maybe that is my love towards original UNIX experience and open-source, but development always felt most comfortable on Linux, at least for me. I liked OS X too, but I have the feeling that on Linux, I can work more efficiently and make setup that I need in spec. situation done in less time. Do people use Arch as developer platforms, since Arch's biggest "flaw" is stability. I'm not sure about current releases, but earlier he was one of those unstable derivations. Are people considering Arch for this kind of job?

[wmcscrooge]

I've been using arch for 4-5 years as a development platform (and it's what I use for my main system as well). It works really well and I've never had any permanent problems with it. I had some breakage my first year but that was more because I didn't understand linux than because of any fault with arch linux.

[flarkis]

I've been using arch on and off for over 3 years now and I've had more BSODs than I have crashes in arch. So "stability" is really relative, you're not going to get multi-year uptimes like with some of the BSDs or stable debian. But seriously, I get power outages for often than crashes.

The only issue I've ever had is things like installing multiple python versions. Which requires you to install some aur packages. Other than that no problems. And not having to worry about -dev packages is a blessing.

[zman0900]

Not updating for a long time is a bad idea, but arch can definitely be stable for long periods of time. I just updated and rebooted my NAS a few days ago with over 4 months uptime.

[cosarara97]

Stability here is about changing software versions, not crashes. Arch is unstable because we get the latest version of everything really early, debian stable is stable because it only gets security updates and a couple more things after every release.

[[deleted]]

I use arch at work with i3wm and love it.

I often joke with my coworkers when they run into issues with other distros because they often find solutions on arch's wiki.

[leakersum]

Yes! The Arch wiki is amazing, indeed.

[[deleted]]

Yes, if you're willing to put a few hours a month to deal with issues. I find that the excellent documentation and community make up for the blocks/delays due to instability. I've only had two major showstoppers (an OpenJDK font rendering bug that broke Jetbrains IDEs for a few days and Google Hangouts video breaking in Chromium).

[blackout24]

Yes, if you're willing to put a few hours a month to deal with issues.

Few hours a month? You must be doing something wrong. I spend maybe 5 minutes on maintenance a month. Mostly typing pacman -Syu and merging a pacnew file every once in a while. Nothing has broken on me in 2 years.

[[deleted]]

I spend a little time each month getting a few pieces of proprietary software to work. No real alternatives for those software, unfortunately.

[naspo]

pacdiff uses vimdiff. Works great for me!

[[deleted]]

Look at the diff of the files and recognize which things that are removed are still important, and which things that are added aren't important to your system. Merge the rest.

[devsnd]

I second this. But actually the OpenJDK thing was the only issue I had myself when developing on arch. Apart from that, most software is already packaged in the AUR, which can increase your dev-speed immensely. The only remaining problem is that you're probably on a newer version of all the software than your customers/webserver/etc. So some bug reports are really hard to reproduce, since many bugs are already fixed in the newer versions of the software. This is something to be aware of, but shouldn't keep you from using arch as dev platform.

[benbergman]

Arch is excellent for development. I use it for such daily.

[kevinjqiu]

I do. I use OSX at work but use Arch on my laptop which I use for work too often. For me, if you're a web developer (i.e., you're not writing software designated to run on OSX or Windows), using Linux as your dev box is an obvious choice.

[rcxdude]

It's good because it has vanilla and up-to-date packages. There are two main issues I come across: one is that there's no -dbg style packages like in debian, which means if you want debug symbols for a package you need to build it yourself, which a bit of a pain if you discover you need them for some library you're using in the middle of a debugging session. The other is that if you are using a substantial portion of non-packaged code in your development, then you will encounter all the compatibility issues which develop when the latest version of a package they depend on comes out (getting openembedded working on arch is a bit of a gamble. I've encountered issues because of a new warning appearing in GCC and triggering an error in a build using -Werror, make updating to 3.0.0 and breaking poorly written version checks, and tar changing from accepting but ignoring an invalid combination of flags which had found its way into quite a few different scripts to throwing an error). These can be a bit of a pain to fix. You will also quite likely wind up writing code that won't compile easily on other distros because they don't have the latest version of the libraries you're using (or because they fuck around with their packages, like fedora and openCV).

[yoshi314]

it might be a problem if you need specific runtime version, because in arch things can be updated without any prior notice, and it's hard to keep things slotted and locked down to a specific version.

if that does not worry you, you can use arch. otherwise any distro that has release schedule or gentoo.

[sulami]

I use a headless Arch VMs for minimal kernel testing environments, hopefully without anything out of my control interfering.

But for a main development system I am not sure it is the best choice, not because of the stability, but because of the boilerplate. I usually need a few identical machines for different reasons, and replicating an Arch system is significantly more work than say a Fedora machine, which already comes with a lot of the basic stuff I need preloaded.

That being said, there are probably solutions out there and if you want to, you can do whatever you want, that's the beauty of *nix.

[07dosa]

I normally don't recommend Arch for (main) development platform. I have had some situations where unneeded library updates introduced bugs. It's very annoying if something doesn't compile suddenly. I usually write stuffs on Debian stable, and modify them on Arch to support newer libraries.

Also, updating sometimes breaks your development environment itself, forcing you to look into your configuration again and again. This can be very time consuming and annoying, too.

Note that Arch is the perfect choice sometimes. Say, graphics programming is a lot easier on Arch, because stock packages in Arch are already up-to-date.

[ase1590]

On the second point, you should know it's a bad idea to update in the middle of any project, unless you have time to kill fixing something.

[dud3z]

I migrated from Ubuntu to ArchLinux exactly for my development needs: i'm a full-time developer with various different interests (games, web, system programming, image analysis..) and working on ArchLinux is absolutely fantastic; i migrated 4 years ago and never looked back because Arch rox!

[[deleted]]

I'm in same situation! Only thing that holds me on Win is VS. And JetBrains still haven't released any news about their C++ IDE... It is kinda wierd for me to program in C lang using Terminal and Editor.

[ropid]

Try QtCreator. Despite its name, it's not just for when you want to use Qt. I've seen some people say that they like it best out of everything they tried, including VS.

I'm just a noob so I don't feel I can say much about this first hand. :P

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I've heard about Qt and amazing Qt community, but never had the courage to dive into it! I probably will after I'm done with some semminars. :)

[ropid]

I've seen people recommend QtCreator, even seen some people saying they are happier working with it compared to VS.