Let's make this a fun topic tonight, and see if I get any volunteers. I'm going to be installing Backtrack tonight, which I find an amazing small distro. I was wondering what distros programmers have liked/disliked and why? I'm searching for the most portable, fastest, least resourceful distro that will provide me with all the programming IDE's I'll need as an independent programmer.

Never heard of that distro.
Only one's I've tried are Redhat,Suse,Ubuntu mainly.
I liked Suse the best since it comes with everything and the kitchen sink so if you do full install you can get started programming right away.
Redhat/Fedora is okay and is first one I tried out so other than that there really isn't anything special about it.
I hate Ubuntu the most since it's very plain and you can't even start programming if you do a default install since gcc not to mention tons of other programming stuff is missing. You have to apt this and apt that,etc before you can get anywhere with it. Only reason I even bother with it is because it's gaining popularity among the masses.

Out of curiosity, are you installing backtrack to wardrive? That's all I've really heard of using that distro for.

For the past 5 years I've had 2 Gentoo machines, and then I've got one machine that I test out other distros on... (k)ubuntu was the most recent. It was nice, but I guess I'm spoiled by gentoo because I know exactly what every part of my machine can do in gentoo, and I don't have tons of extra bloat, whereas with debian or rpm based distros I always feel like I'm stuck with either not having what I need, or having it come along with everything and the kitchen sink.

That said, any distro will run the way you want it to if you put enough time into it. And any idea should work on any distro with minimal effort.

Since I'm a KDE guy (and xfce on slower machines) I mainly use kdevelop and vim. Obviously vim isn't an IDE but I feel it's worth mentioning that I use it alongside kdevelop since it is a main part of my development habits when I'm on linux.

BTW getting a "developers environment" in an ubuntu based distro is as simple as # apt-get install build-essentials

As to your specific needs, they're sort of mutually exclusive... IDEs are typically big and clunky beasts, so even if the distro is fast and uses few resources your IDE will sure as hell make up for it. But, you may want to look into xfce4... It's truly a very nice lightweight DE that seems very feature rich to me. As for distros, I don't know who uses xfce by default (xubuntu?), but if you want a tiny/fast linux distro you could use DSL (damn small linux)... of course once you get everything you want on there it won't be so "damn small" anymore, but it's a good starting place I think.

Good luck.

Quote: Original post by aleisterbukowski
I was wondering what distros programmers have liked/disliked and why?

In my previous job I was responsible for a number of servers running Gentoo. I only considered this on a few occasions when I needed to install - emerge - some new software and it was a PITA. I prefer systems with package managers. So what if there's "bloat"? If the "bloat" is not currently executing, then it only takes up a few MB of disk space, and storage is ridiculously cheap now.

I've basically settled on Ubuntu, because its growing pervasiveness makes it easy to find secondary sources for information on the system. Also, I don't code in Linux, so I don't need most of the development toolchain. Give me the PHP, Ruby and Python interpreters hooked into Apache and MySQL (and maybe Subversion extension modules) and I'm golden.

personally I run gentoo for my servers and desktops. I enjoy it because it's a meta-distribution, you choose what you install, how you install it, which package manager you use (if you don't like portage, which i do, you can even install apt or RPM), absolutely everything. For the servers, I set up a custom binhost and portage tree, so after fully testing patches/updates, they automatically update from pre-compiled binaries. It does take a long time to initially set your system up but IMHO, if you're up to the task, it's worth it in the end.

but take into account that I'm weird and actually enjoy compiling everything.

I switched to Ubuntu over a year ago and use it for pretty much all of my work related activities, except for testing Windows- or IE-specific code.

Code::Blocks is my favorite IDE for C++ so far, but there are plenty of alternatives (KDevelop, Eclipse, Geany, Anjuta, etc..).

Since I prefer ease of use and don't need compactness or any sort of power, I started with Mandrake/Mandriva and now use Kubuntu. They were and continue to be crap, in that updates regularly crash and/or trash both the video drivers and the sound configuration, copy and paste is inconsistent across apps, the menu layout is full of redundancy, GUI support for managing your hardware is anaemic, and the configuration files and utilities change from version to version so half of the help you can find online is out of date. But hey, it's free! </slight sarcasm>

On the computer in my research office (I'm a postgrad student) I use Ubuntu. I used to use Debian, and before that SuSE. I never really needed to do much fiddling around with them myself or with the help of IT as I just needed basic services; internet, LaTeX and a basic selection of programming tools and languages.

I tried to get different Linux installations to work on my Wintel box in a spare partition, but I never managed to get them to work. Every distro I tried would hang on install. The computer was something I bought in a rush from the local store when I blew up its predecessor so I don't know which bit of hardware it was having a problem with, but after a few attempts I just gave up and stuck to Windows XP. Now I use an iMac, and Mac OS X does all the Unixey stuff I need it do.

I'm planning on going full-time indie next year and am debating whether I'll support Linux as a third OS choice (Windows and Mac OS are a given). If so, I'll put a couple of the more popular distros on a test machine, but I'm still debating if the small market share is worth the extra development time and support effort.

I use Xandros and Red Hat Enterprise 4 and 5 at work -- I find I prefer DEB-based distros over RPM-based distros, and KDE over Gnome. I used to use Slackware exclusively but was forced to switch by my employer (which just happens to be a Linux distro, so you can see thier reasoning).

At home I have a bunch of Eee PCs running their native Xandros. I run an X server under Cygwin on Windows XP on a desktop and ssh to them to do Linux development at home. With distcc and a wireless network of those little beggars I can do amazing things, at least until one of my kids grabs one to play Frozen Bubble or Tux Racer again.

Gentoo for tinkering about or small back-office servers such as fileservers or firewall, OpenSuSE for development.

Gentoo is the 'most portable, least resourceful' distro, because you make it yourself - it can be as slimlined or as bloated as you wish. The same goes for thinks like Linux From Scratch, although I've not built one yet.

KDE is desktop of choice, with all the bells and whistles and 3D of XGL/Compiz Fusion.

KDevelop used to be IDE of choice, absolutely loved the thing, it's perfect for QT development. I've recently switched to Code::Blocks because I found KDevelop a nightmare when I switched to using wxWidgets.