Hello,
what Linux distributions are you using and recommending for your professional work? I wanted to try Ubuntu, but am open to alternatives if I don’t get along with Ubuntu.
Thanks!
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Ubuntu seems to be a standard amongst many people. I imagine it has a lot of support online.
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I am not using Linux yet.
The most frequent warning I saw about Linux - it is not always easy to find solutions if something goes wrong with it.
Because of the above I am planning to go for the most popular distributions if/when I will need Linux.
Also interested in feedback which will be provided here.
I’m hesitant to change to Linux as well, but I read that you can’t get around it since the web is based on Linux and most professionals are using it, you get the drift.
The Odin Project for example build their classes on either macOS or Linux and advice against Windows . On the other hand FCC just works fine on any OS. That honestly was reason I chose FCC over TOP.
You may be interested to know that FCC’s own contributor guide suggests Ubuntu for the development environment (ie for people who are fixing the actual FCC site)
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I am not necessarily hesitant about Linux, I agree that it is almost for sure I will need it at some point.
I just don’t feel I need to start using it now.
I am learning bunch of tools already at the moment, don’t want to add one more thing to that list without some specific reason.
When it will be necessary -I will spend time and effort for linux stuff.
And I am using bash kind of every day - so I am getting at least some experience somewhat relevant to Linux already(I think?).
Linux is such an important part of software development that every introductory university-level computer science course I know of teaches using it and as a result every student must learn the basics of it (cd/ls/etc.) However, you can go a long time without ever having to install it or maintain it yourself (by just using cloud resources for eg).
Oh, this stuff I am already using. From time to time I am trying to learn new bash commands. This process is kinda goes together with learning more git commands.
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I particularly like the variants of Mint for Linux beginners.
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I’ve gone through a number of distros and different flavors in the past. I ended-up landing on 2 sensible options for those that want a Linux environment to do development on.
- Ubuntu/Debian based
Ubuntu falls under here, along with all the sub-versions like Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, etc. Whats “on-top” of the actual distro doesn’t matter and is more up to personal flavor, its the package availability and release model.
Going with Ubuntu has the main advantage of being one of the most popular distros out there, you will be able to find help relevant to what you’re doing. If you see a problem odds are you are not the only person to have seen it, and thus can find help via googling around.
- Manjaro Arch
Arch based distros could go from absolutely nothing given to you out of the box, to something more full fledged like Majaro, which comes out of the box ready to do whatever you want.
Arch has the nice advantage of being a rolling release distro, so you can upgrade stuff as things move along. Depending on your setup, things can be more unstable than Ubuntu, but you’ll be able to access newer things faster/earlier.
Getting help for Arch related questions is also easy, but it isn’t as easy as Ubuntu due to Arch’s natural target audience tilting toward more those that want and like to tweak with their own system.
Both of these have their pros and cons, and generally I’d recommend Ubuntu to be the perfect start for anyone wanting to start. At the end of the day there aren’t many major differences between the underlying distro to end users. Most of the differences are at a “higher” level, usually with the desktop manager and actual programs installed. These could be moved around between distros resulting in similar end user behavior.
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For work, you need something like Debian, that’s mature, actively maintained, has an active community, has regular security updates, and has a package management system that helps you keep things up to date in a nearly automatic fashion. Bonus points for multiple architecture support (most have this anyway). I use Debian on development machines, production servers, and even customize it for Raspberry Pi appliances. Finding one that works helps streamline your automation as you can use similar scripts, ansible recipes, etc. on multiple machines. Several distributions fit this description, as well as the major *BSD variants.
If you want to tinker, that’s another story. Download, install, and tinker until you find one you like or even go the old linux-from-scratch route. I used to try to work and tinker on the same machine, customizing and rebuilding Gentoo installations on my development machine until I realized I was doing more package installation than work and switched all “work” machines to Debian and a cron task keeps everything up to date.
I fail to see how you could go wrong picking from any of the more popular distributions in either the Debian, Red Hat, or SUSE families (or even FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD).
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It depends on what kind of work or process you are looking at and the balance you want to strike between stability and getting the latest updates.
For a good balance and new users, I would refer Ubuntu, it has a great community support. For servers I would choose Debian which is amazingly stable and solid, for networking I would choose centOS or RHEL. If you like tinkering around and get the latest features go with PopOS and Aarch variants like endeavourOS with KDE.
Thanks for the replies, everyone.
Debian looks like the way to go for me. Debian also has a big German community that I can turn to for support.
I will add it as soon as my learning schedule clears up a bit.
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Great choice!
Join https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/
Thanks for creating useful thread. It ended up in my bookmarks - I will look all this up when it will come to dealing with Linux.
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If you have never used Linux before, I think a nice distro to start is Linux Mint or any version of Ubuntu.
Debian is very robust and nice but is a bit more complicated than the previous distros.
Yes, I already ran into a wall, I would have to install some extra files just to get the notebooks wifi running.
This is a new experience for someone who has been in the big arms of Mama Microsoft his whole life.
I will try Mint first on an old pc before moving to Debian and before putting Linux on my root computer.
Ubuntu is great , if you like gnome desktop (more mac-like) I highly recommend Pop OS, it’s based on ubuntu and has all the advantages of Ubuntu + amazing tiling manager.
If you want more windows-like experience Mint is good option or something like Manjaro.
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