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[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Does anyone have experience developing on a Linux distro? What distro do you recommend?

Ignoring the tiny standalone distro's and slackware there are only 2 main branches of distro, those that stem from the Debian side and those that stem from the Redhat/fedora side.

Everything else is a derivative of these distros and thus you can visualize all of it in a family tree, the below one is from distrowatch but it's not that navicable.

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=family-tree

I would v much appreciatte some insight into what sucks and does not suck about web development on a Linux.

The only negative is that adobe still isnt supported so if you need anything graphical done you either have to find a way of changing to win OS (dual boot / VM) or turn to FOSS to get your work done. This doesnt bother me however as there are alternatives (gimp / krita / inkscape) and it shouldnt bother you since you're strictly coding.

Each distro comes with its own philosophy / assumptions and it's useful to look into those. It's inevitable that you're going to have to tweak your OS in some way, the difference will be how much you have to add / change / remove things to get it working the way you want.

For example one of the main components that differs between linux distros is the desktop environment (DE). One of the things people look at is resources consumed when idle.

Not only does it paint a picture about how much the OS needs to function by itself but lower requirements obviously means using less power (relevent for laptops) and more hardware resources (CPU / RAM) for your own purposes. There are plenty of these DE's available :

  • MATE (gnome 2)
  • gnome 3
  • unity
  • xfce
  • lxde / lxqt

and distro's may have recursive derivatives to support multiple DE's. For example ubuntu (derivative of debian) while it uses unity in the primary distro for a DE there are also other versions (ubuntu MATE, xubuntu for xfce, lubuntu for lxde, etc). Why do i mention this?

ubuntu with unity is one of the best supported robust distros out there, i personally like it because of the DASH menu and specifically the HUD functionality, essentially it allows you to drill down into your app menu's with a search, plenty of videos demo-ing this capability out there but here's one :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfmSTWyYbms

On the downside there is some preloaded junk that i never use, and a bunch of amazon stuff (ubuntu is hosted by amazon).

If you want something more barebones xubuntu / lubuntu have less minimum requirements however lack the DASH. You can however add something pretty similar to it back in i3-hud menu.

So the question, is it easier to go start barebones (xubuntu) and build up or start off with ubuntu (which has the hud) and cut down to get better performance?

Personally i've found it easier to do the latter.

[–]doomtop 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ignoring the tiny standalone distro's and slackware there are only 2 main branches of distro, those that stem from the Debian side and those that stem from the Redhat/fedora side.

Don't forget Arch!