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Best giving them all a whirl and making up your own mind. A good starting point is The Live CD List[1] website. If you're switching from Windows to Linux for th

by ergot 10y ago

Best giving them all a whirl and making up your own mind. A good starting point is The Live CD List[1] website. If you're switching from Windows to Linux for the first time, Linux Mint will certainly smooth the transition for you. Also for newbies, Ubuntu is a great first option. I usually test distros in a VM instead of installing them on bare metal. So far I have not found a distro specifically tailored to development though, and the question really should be what tools are best for development? In that case, Emacs/Vim[2] would be a good start, and being able to develop without an Internet connection helps harden your coding ability too as you're not so reliant on the solutions of others. Go for one day of coding without Stack Overflow/Google and see how you fare. [1]: http://livecdlist.com/ http://livecdlist.com/ [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1430164/differences-between-emacs-and-vim https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1430164/differences-betw...

facorreia 10y ago
I also recommend Linux Mint. It is friendly to proprietary software (e.g. drivers), comes with a very nice UI (Cinnamon), and is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Certhas 10y ago
I will second Linux Mint as a very nice well done distro, with sane defaults, and that has been very robust for me.
blitzd 10y ago
I'm also a fan of Linux Mint, but prefer the KDE edition - I used to dislike KDE, but with plasma 5.6+ it's become quite polished and nice to use. I've also found LM to be much more stable than other KDE based desktop distro's, specifically KUbuntu and Neon (both of which were quite crashy).
saghm 10y ago
A lot of the things on on Live CD list seem to be outdated; to pick an example, it lists the last release of DragonflyBSD as being over two years ago[1], when they released 4.6.1 less than three months ago[2]. Another place to check out different OS's is distrowatch[3]. Its interface is a definitely a bit too busy, which can make navigation a pain, but it's constantly kept up to date and has fairly detailed information about each OS. [1]: http://livecdlist.com/dragonfly-bsd/ http://livecdlist.com/dragonfly-bsd/ [2]: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release46/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release46/ [3]: https://distrowatch.org/ https://distrowatch.org/

by ergot 10y ago

facorreia 10y ago

I also recommend Linux Mint. It is friendly to proprietary software (e.g. drivers), comes with a very nice UI (Cinnamon), and is based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Certhas 10y ago

I will second Linux Mint as a very nice well done distro, with sane defaults, and that has been very robust for me.

blitzd 10y ago

I'm also a fan of Linux Mint, but prefer the KDE edition - I used to dislike KDE, but with plasma 5.6+ it's become quite polished and nice to use. I've also found LM to be much more stable than other KDE based desktop distro's, specifically KUbuntu and Neon (both of which were quite crashy).

saghm 10y ago

A lot of the things on on Live CD list seem to be outdated; to pick an example, it lists the last release of DragonflyBSD as being over two years ago[1], when they released 4.6.1 less than three months ago[2]. Another place to check out different OS's is distrowatch[3]. Its interface is a definitely a bit too busy, which can make navigation a pain, but it's constantly kept up to date and has fairly detailed information about each OS. [1]: http://livecdlist.com/dragonfly-bsd/ http://livecdlist.com/dragonfly-bsd/ [2]: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release46/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release46/ [3]: https://distrowatch.org/ https://distrowatch.org/