Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

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I have been using Linux since the late 90s and tried most of the bigger ones for development over the years. In my practical experience distros which use aptitude are far easier to work with than distros with yum (awful, how can people use that?) or other package managers I tried. Stuff just works. I myself use Ubuntu; I have not reinstalled my laptop for years, I just run dist-upgrade and it works well on both client and server (I like to have things set up the same way on both).

For battery life, I get Windows like battery life out of my laptops using powertop/tlp but mostly by swapping out the window manager for i3. I3 is very efficient. Not only to work with but also for the battery; it literally makes hours of difference on my Thinkpad X2x0 systems.

I read about Archlinux here a lot and I will try it some time in the future, but if you don't need the latest, cutting edge linux related software, you are fine with Ubuntu (which, compared to Debian, is already quite cutting edge). I say Linux related, because many tools web devs etc use have no apt-get package or have a package you don't want anyway. So that's not related to the OS installation then anyway.

Arch (Or any rolling release) isn't just about cutting edge. OS upgrades tend to break stuff depending on your usage (something compiled against the specific kernel version). Updating your computer every few days means you can avoid it entirely.

Arch is a joke an should be considered only if you LIKE tinkering with your OS all the time.

The preposition of always up to date would be great if that wouldn't mean that your PC doesn't work properly most of the time due to some new bug or incompatibility.

We've run Arch on embedded PCs (arm) due to out of the box docker support, but after updating a year later we've literally were unable to deploy Docker containers. There was a bug in the kernel, and no amount of hacking, upgrading or downgrading made it work.

Luckily we had a sdcard snapshot a year old.

I suggest Ubuntu or Debian, they got good docs, good support and generally a positive community.

As far as windows managers go - pick what you like. Gnome looks slick, xbuntu is my go-to for Chromebooks and default isn't too bad.

A lot of devs in our company go for tiling desktop managers - i3, awm....

> We've run Arch on embedded PCs (arm) due to out of the box docker support, but after updating a year later we've literally were unable to deploy Docker containers. There was a bug in the kernel, and no amount of hacking, upgrading or downgrading made it work.

You are talking about a non official Arch project (Arch Linux ARM) as it was an official derivative of Arch. It is not.

For others:That would be Arch Linux ARM[0] a derivative of Arch Linux(it runs only on x86-64). I am surprised to find that it doesn't have a linux-lts package. What made you use Arch in the first place? [0] https://archlinuxarm.org/

The Arch Linux ARM distro is not related to Arch.

> The preposition of always up to date would be great if that wouldn't mean that your PC doesn't work properly most of the time due to some new bug or incompatibility.

I haven't found this to be the case at all, quite the opposite, I've run stable Arch systems for years, even done large upgrades like the switch to systemd without an issue.

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