Best Distro

Larry_o_C

No no, I'm not looking to start a flame war! Was wondering what ye guys think is the best distro for programming?

Yes I realise that's a bit vague, I have a fairly old lappie coming into my possesion. Will just be used for playing around on, I'd really like to get properly into Linux (and learn a few new languages along with shell scripting). Really want to get a feel for it. I've played around with Ubuntu (Wubi) and feel comfortable with that, should I go for a full install of Ubuntu or should I try something else?

karlr42

Well, I'm a CS student running Ubuntu, and I can do perl with a text editor and the perl interpreter, c and c++ the same way, python, same deal,(all installed by default), and have Eclipse for Java. So it's good for programming, I would say.

corkie

The Best distro is the one that suits your needs must.

You have an old laptop, try a few of the live distros and see which one supports all or most of your hardware.

If you want to learn about Linux. Installing and trying to get a vanilla distro (Slackware or gento) and then configure it to have all your hardware working.


The next thing that people will choose or stick with a distro is package manager.

I prefer debian (and apt) over an rpm based package manager.

If i was going to be compiling or doing allot of development work, i would more than likely use a very stable distro like slackware.

Regards,
John.

Khannie

Gentoo is great for c/c++ coding because all the header files for more or less everything are installed by default when you build the OS.

Ubuntu's good too. The apt repositories are useful for installing headers and what not.

What language do you intend coding in?

An Fear Aniar

I've seen loads of people saying Arch is amazing.

You need to know what you're doing though.


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Jackz

An Fear Aniar wrote: »

I've seen loads of people saying Arch is amazing.

You need to know what you're doing though.


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:pac: is the package management tool.

Naikon

+1 for Arch, it rocks:)