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Best linux distro for programming?

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Posted

Windows 10 is not my preferred operating system for many reasons I beg not to get into. 

In turn I come to you to ask what is the best FREE Linux distribution for programming? 

 

I am going to school for a programming based CS degree and we will mainly learn Java. 

I have some experience using Unity the game engine (not whatever unity Ubuntu has)preferring the included mono-develop; Microsoft Visual Studio 2015; and "Robot C"

 

I don't really know what to expect trying to develop with Java since I hear it never really had a standard.

The school also teaches C (Not C++) and Assembly. 

What would you recommend? 

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5 minutes ago, hislittlecuzin said:

I have monodevelop with ubuntu on my dual boot but it seems mono-develop only does C#. Is there a programming environment that does Java assembly and/or C? 

Code blocks? Eclipse?

 

Vim and gcc?

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18 minutes ago, hislittlecuzin said:

FREE Linux distribution

they're all free ;)

 

and the thing about linux distro's is that there's one for everyone. some people may just prefer hannah montana linux, others may prefer justin bieber linux.

 

in all seriousness tho, here's a short roundup of my experiences (leaving out that i somehow manage to corrupt every install i do from anything out of the debian tree...)

- debian: one of the granddaddies, and it kinda feels like that as well. dont expect to be on cutting edge updates. they do have their things figured out very well tho, and stability is a strong point.

- ubuntu: like debian, but tries to be "for human beings" if that works for you, great.

- fedora: more lightweight, tight and professional looking, i cant figure out for the life of me how the hell yum works.

- arch linux: if you have 5 days to install your distro, sure. it's cutting edge, sadly flaky at times, but pretty much infinite customizability, and pacman and yaourt are amazing :P

 

EDIT: for programming java, try intelliJ

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1 minute ago, HarryNyquist said:

They're not actually all free, RedHat Enterprise Linux, for instance (though most of it is also in CentOS, which IS free).

well, the "non-free" ones are a catchy one.

 

you are allowed to have a non-free linux distro, but only if there's an alternative distro available that has all the same stuff in it, aside from the packages you own and/or license which make you require it to be a paid OS.

 

red hat for example, basicly charges you money for their service, instead of really charging for the OS itself.

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The distro does not really matter and ubuntu is great to start with. But for java development I recommend the intellij ide. Standard edition is free and professional edition is free for students. Jetbrains, the company that makes the ide also makes ide's for C (Clion), python (pycharm) and many more.

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Our developers at work seem to prefer CentOS.

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On 8/13/2016 at 10:06 AM, Dat Guy said:

Why do you require Linux instead of a different OS?

I was assuming that there were only 3 OS; 1 being windows, 1 being OSX (Apple mac), and Linux (including its distributions). 

If there are more I'd like to hear about them. 

On 8/14/2016 at 4:00 AM, iBurley said:

I assume when you capitalize "FREE" that you're meaning free as in speech, not as in beer? If so, Fedora would be the obvious choice.

I meant free as in RedHat costs money I believe so I didn't want to buy yet another operating system. 

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7 hours ago, hislittlecuzin said:

I was assuming that there were only 3 OS; 1 being windows, 1 being OSX (Apple mac), and Linux (including its distributions). 

If there are more I'd like to hear about them.

 

OK, that makes things harder... let me put it this way: Linux alone is basically a clone of a clone, namely MINIX, of BSD Unix (which happened to be not freely available in 1991 yet), which itself dates back to the mid-70s Unix versions (after Unix had been rewritten from Assembly to C). Here's a (slightly outdated) overview of the Unix history. While the most "real" Unices today (with AIX being the last really popular one) are commercial because they still use licensed AT&T code and the original Bell Labs Unix (now called "Plan 9" and/or "Inferno") has mostly disappeared, BSD itself has already grown its own ecosystem with a number of actually free spin-offs, probably starting with 386BSD in 1992. The Wikipedia has a notable table of (most of) them. (Some of this could become handy for your Computer Science stuff.)

 

Note that Unix was never alone on its market (in fact, IBM's mainframe computers already had "regular" operating systems - of course quite different from what we call an "operating system" today and always tied to exactly one platform - in the mid-50s, over ten years before the first Unix releases. (Please note that Mainframe operating systems never tried to be "consumer-friendly", they were and are made for the industry. They speak Rexx and COBOL instead of Perl and Python and their user interface is rather rudimentary. - Sorry, I'm drifting away. Back to topic...) It had - regardless of its unbeaten market share in the 80s when even Microsoft was a Unix vendor (their Xenix was later sold to SCO) - various competitors all the time, one of which (VMS, see OpenVMS) was highly influential for the development of Windows NT. However, your only obvious prerequisites are "it's free and you should be able to write software on it", but the most interesting part should be the latter, more or less excluding experimental operating systems like TempleOS, KolibriOS and RISC OS which was the original ARM OS and highly popular in the late 80s, as the available compilers for these platforms are limited.

 

Reading your prerequisites again, you're primarily interested in C and Assembly development which is great because both languages are addicting once you've understood them. Did you know that there is a C-based Web Application stack built into OpenBSD?

 

The main advantage of Fedora Linux, Ubuntu Linux et al. is that they are "install and forget" desktops. But that's not actually important for development tasks (as you'll live in your editor and not in a shiny GUI most of the time, right?). I, personally, recommend OpenBSD for its general reliability (and it even has ASM compilers in its packages ;)), but it's entirely up to you.

Write in C.

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Woah... That's a lot of information... Unfortunately my computer is now getting the same issues in Ubuntu as I had with Windows 10. 

 

I kinda understand what you're trying to say. You explained how there are different operating systems and what some different kinds were. Even stating how Microsoft distributed Unix. 

 

I am checking out "Open BSD" or "OpenBSD" but I'm not understanding the link you sent me. It has a link to download the OpenBSD and then links to programming languages and stuff. Is that a list of things installed with Open BSD? 

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On 8/11/2016 at 11:50 AM, hislittlecuzin said:

I have monodevelop with ubuntu on my dual boot but it seems mono-develop only does C#. Is there a programming environment that does Java assembly and/or C? 

OpenJDK (there are other options too), and any notepad. If you want to build fancier apps and need the tools, just install eclipse and openJDK. 

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7 hours ago, hislittlecuzin said:

My main problem with the tutorials is I don't know where to download the ISO. I have the software to load an iso onto a flashdrive to make it a bootable drive. (Rufus) 

The ISO is on the distribution's website. Examples:

Debian - https://www.debian.org/distrib/ large/small image links.

Arch linux - https://www.archlinux.org/download/ various links for ISOs. 

 

Etc. 

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