Ask HN: Can you recommend a path to developing on linux?

Install ubuntu or mint.

Once you have that set up, it really is just a question of what stack you want to work with.

If you don't want to start using vim or emacs right away, which is understandable, there are a lot of text editors out there. You will just have to do a bit of looking around to find something you like.

The best thing you can do right now is to get a linux box up and running and then write a simple hello world in rails or django.

For bonus points, get a github account and commit your first steps to a github repository.

Doing that will give you a good bit of exposure to the shell and finding your way around the OS.

I'll have a quick gander at Mint but at the moment i'm favouring Ubuntu, purely because i've had some experience with it.

Excuse the elementary questions that follow, but i really am this ignorant to the whole Linux ecosystem!

What stacks are available? Are there relative merits which may influence my decision, or does it amount to simply picking the one i like the look of and stick with it?

What are the most popular text editors? I'm used to running Visual Studio as my IDE, is Eclipse the only editor that will offer similar depth of functionality? for example, integrated debugging, code completion, refactoring tools

I've actually got a GitHub repo already! What happens if i get bonus points before i get any normal points?! Some kind of exception thrown presumably ha. But then that was on Windows, and whilst i did set it up through the command line (GitBash) i later relied on a GUI tool in my IDE for further interaction.

Well, there's a ton of technologies you could play around with, from lisp to haskell, ruby to python to any jvm language.

If you go with Java or Scala, Eclipse, IntelliJ or NetBeans are good choices. Personally I prefer IntelliJ where you can check out the community edition.

For scripting languages such as php, ruby or python, vim and emacs are the goto editors (i use emacs myself). On the other hand IntelliJ and Eclipse have plugins or alternate builds for these languages as well.

If you come from .NET and your main goal is to broaden your horizon, I'd definitely try to go with a plain text editor like jEdit or SciTE and pick a scripting language.

Since you said you're into webdev, the rails or django frameworks will probably get you the most bang for your buck.

I'm not keen on Java as it's just another language with a C-style syntax, i want to have my mind blown and eyes opened. Plus after using .NET for so long, I don't think i can ever go back to the awkward namespaces and classes of the Java framework. I wrote my dissertation using the then new OO features of PHP5, so PHP is out of the running as I wouldn't be treading the new ground that i sorely seek.

I concur with you that IntelliJ is great, JetBrains consistently produce superb tools. I use the WebStorm for all my front-end coding (mainly for JS code completion, linting and refactoring), and ReSharper for serious productivity and refactoring when i'm doing back-end stuff in Visual Studio. ReSharper is possibly the greatest IDE enhancement of all time.

Funny you mention jEdit, it was my text editor of choice when i was at university - we were encouraged not to use tools that hold your hand like Eclipse or NetBeans. My only fear is that if i try to build something big in jEdit (i'm thinking thousands of lines of code) it'll become a maintenance nightmare working with nothing but text files - i think i'll eventually need something that has a concept of projects etc. or am i missing something here?

I'm starting to gravitate towards Python and Ruby as primary choices of language as they're both popular and seem to have well-established web frameworks.

Agreed, Intellij is the way to go

Probably the most important thing to know coming from the Windows world is that in Unix (which includes Linux) is that the OS is the IDE. From the way the OS is set up, where and how libraries are stored on disk, how you install things, to using various editors, tools, the command line and compilers, it is an IDE.

When you work with a 'stack' or a runtime like Mono, Python, a JVM, many of these details are partially hidden from view. The same if you use an IDE like Eclipse or MonoDevelop.

The better you understand this, the more shallow the learning curve will be with any tool you use, even emacs or vi.

As for getting started, here's a few pointers. It doesn't matter which distro you use, it's 2011, they all work pretty well. Instead pick the one you're most comfortable with. Mint and Ubuntu are good contenders because they are both easy to use, and Mint is based on Ubuntu. Fedora is better if you absolutely must use cutting edge tech. Suse is great for giving you a shiny frontend, close to cutting edge tools and an integrated environment that's also developer friendly. Just pick one, if you like it, stick with it for six months.

The same goes for runtimes and frameworks. Pick one you like, because a friend recommended it. Try the tutorials. If you like it, and get along with the community behind it, play around with it for 3-6 months before moving on.

Most importantly, find a friend who's using Linux already. Don't pester that person too much with questions, but just chat at least once a week about it. Focus on what you did, what you like, what was difficult. Chances are, your friend will be able to tell you, 'oh, sure, you could just do Foo and get this result'. Part of the learning experience is a week of pain you don't forget, solving it on your own, and then learning that other people solved the same problem.

That's an interesting perspective that had never occurred to me. I'll be sure to take note of the subtleties of installation, the file system etc to see how this OS-as-IDE thing is manifested. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even familiar with how the file system works in Unix. I almost feel embarrassed saying that as a computer science graduate with many years of professional programming experience!

Are you recommending avoiding IDEs completely(in the traditional definition of the IDE, not the OS-as-IDE paradigm you described) to expose myself to Unix as much as possible, or just to have an awareness of what's going on behind the curtain?

Cool, i'm already 95% decided on Ubuntu, so that's no longer a concern. Good to hear someone weighing in with other distros though, you rarely hear of anything beyond Ubuntu these days, so thanks for that.

I only really know one Linux aficionado/proponent, so i will definitely be leaning on him when i need to, though as you say i want to put myself through the pain for the purpose of learning and rather than seeking help at every opportunity. Saying that, last time i discussed Unix with him he ended up recommended that i just skip GUIs completely and go for FreeBSD. He must think i'm either a sadist or incredibly brave! Hopefully he won't shun me because of my need for a GUI :)

IDE's are a bit of a closed off garden, to use a bad metaphor. They provide all the components you need, editors, terminals, shortcuts to run commands, but when you learn that you can choose between using an IDE or building up a toolset on your own, then you can make a better choice for the job at hand. There are some really good IDEs out there and once you learn both, it's personal preference. I certainly use both depending on the task.

/bin and /sbin - binary files go here, namely programs /lib - all the shared libraries and other code that gets executed by programs /libexec - other kinds of executables that are not shared libraries or command line programs /src - source code /src/include - all your C headers /share - shared resources, data, game data, pictures, wallpaper, icons etc... /share/doc - documentation /var - runtime data, log files

So what's /usr? These resources get split between / and /usr for historical reasons. There's a push to put everything in /usr and get rid of the split. Go look it up if you want to know why it's this way.

The thing to notice here is there are no program specific directories at the top level. This is because all programs are thought of as small tools or cogs that you can build larger tools upon. It's a system, not a way to run a couple of different apps in their own sandbox.

There's value in "easing into" it, namely you won't have to try very hard, but let me play devil's advocate, based on my experience learning to program in in Linux over the past 3-4 years.

Don't waste (much) time with the slick GUIs of Ubuntu/Mint/Gnome/KDE. The reason to learn Linux, which you may or may not already realize, is UNIX. That's where the power is.

ArchLinux plus a decent window manager is the best way to meet your new friends cat, diff, patch, rsync, wget, curl, git, du, top, free, ssh, man, bash, and of course, the one and only emacs.

Gonna be a fun, challenging year for you. Good luck.

Almost sounds like you're daring me to dive in head first! I expect I'll go with Ubuntu initially if only because I'm kind of familiar with it. That and I won't go into future shock by ditching my shiny GUI's straight away - my fear is if i do this I'll be so overwhelmed it'll just put me off the whole idea. A gradual descent into the darkness is what i desire!

I'm definitely down with learning Unix in the long run, but my it's not my primary goal. I want to learn new programming languages in particular, but I'm sure to get where i want with those it'll be impossible to avoid dabbling with Unix, in which case i expect I'll learn it by proxy

A year?! I was hoping for around two weeks! I jest, I expect this to be ongoing for years just as your adventures have. I'm also being realistic that between work, my girlfriend and learning guitar i don't expect to be making rapid progress, but I'm content with that :)

I could spend a lot of time explaining why python, eclipse and pydev make a good development platform etc., - but I think you need to explore your own thoughts a bit more. It seems you're unstatisfied with something and think that Linux is the answer, but you don't know why. Tell us more about your goals first.

Haha no i'm perfectly content, i just wish to broaden my horizons. Basically it feels like i've only ever seen one side of the coin having been a windows developer since graduating (I had some experience with Linux during university), so i'm just looking for some direction to take me to new and interesting places.

So with that in mind my goals are a little vague beyond what i've said above - I literally just to get exposure to some new languages, new tools, new ways of doing things. Maybe when i do try all these things I'll feel unsatisfied with my old tools (kind of a "never know what you're missing type scenario"); but for now it's purely just as a learning exercise.

Onto your recommendations: Do you know any excellent resources for learning python? Are there any good interactive online tutorials to my learning if Python was where i started? What are the web frameworks available for me to work with? I'm kind of interested in Ruby as it seems there are many great resources and tools to help you learn (i've just stumbled acorss Why's Poignant Guide and it's got me very curious, though maybe because of the haphazard, quirky style of authoring)

I expect Eclipse will be my IDE of choice since i have used it before and the paradigm is recognisable. Are there any alternatives IDEs that I should dip my toes into before i settle on Eclipse out of familiarity?

OK well I'll give you my personal perspective. For learning python, python.org actually has a very good tutorial. Then there is also http://www.diveintopython.net/ which is excellent. For web frameworks I use cherrypy which is very minimal. Seeing as you want to learn, I'd recommend you start with that as you'll get a better overview of what's really going on in the guts of a web framework. Emacs is excellent but I switched to Eclipse for its subversion integration.

This is going to be an unpopular answer but you could take your .NET skillset and start developing applications running on Mono - http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page - now and then see where the path takes you.

Best of luck!

haha, didn't expect someone to drop the M-bomb!

I really want to try new things, rather than just taking my skillset to a new OS, so i'll politely decline your suggestion. Thanks anyway

There are a few different things that fall into "Linux Development".

1) Comfort/facility with something like the bash or zsh shells, including scripting (as a kid I wrote complex .bat files for DOS, and bash scripting was a revelation). If your'e on Windows you can acquire this knowledge efficiently by installing Cygwin (which provides a bash-like shell).

2) Knowledge of the common GNU tools, and common piping idioms (e.g. "grep pattern myfile | sort | uniq" to find all the distinct matches for some regular expression in a file). Piping in general is something that you don't often use in other environments. Again, this is knowledge you can acquire efficiently in Cygwin without Linux.

3) Understanding the various pieces that come together to make a (non-graphical) Linux environment work. For this I strongly recommend starting with an emulator like qemu ("Q" is the OS X port) to emulate a vanilla x86 machine and then get Tiny Core Linux running on it. Tiny Core starts from the absolute minimum, but gives you a convenient graphical "app browser" for installing the things you need piece-by-piece (read about and install coreutils, openssh, "compiletc" (gcc + glibc), make, and optionally python or ruby).

4) Becoming proficient in one or both of the holy traditions (vi or emacs). Tiny Core will have vi already installed (to get an idea of what the holy war is about, consider the fact that vi is included in Tiny Core but the emacs source download is about four times as large as all of Tiny Core).

I'll elaborate a bit on the qemu aspect. One of my biggest frustrations getting started with Linux was getting my hardware to work "right". While that was more than a decade ago, and most hardware will be autodetected on a modern distribution, there are still many tiny annoyances (power management, GPU acceleration, trackpad gestures, bluetooth, whatever). Qemu makes all these problems go away because your host OS handles the hardware. Learning Linux coming from Windows is hard enough without chafing from hardware problems.

For someone from a Windows background, 80% of the important ideas about Linux can be acquired incrementally by using Cygwin to learn about bash, and a virtualized Tiny Core to understand the Linux tools ecosystem. At some point you'll know these things well enough and you may want to run a for-real linux machine (though I personally have converged on OS X with a virtualized Tiny Core for development work).

If you do all of that, you will know what you need to be a Linux application developer (though you may need to learn something like GTK to build graphical applications).

If you decide to go the Qemu/Tiny Core route, feel free to email me with any questions (email in profile). It's actually easy, but not super-intuitive if you don't have experience with Qemu.

Wow, that's a thoroughly comprehensive response. I've never investigated tools like Cygwin or Tiny Core, but they sound like a great starting point. Incrementally is definitely how i want to learn Unix as there are so many radical paradigm shifts for me to get to grips with i risk overwhelming myself if i get too immersed. It seems, as i get more replied here, that the command line is so integral to Unix that my original plan to avoid that as much as possible (i.e. just get on with web development) is not realistic. Your recommendations will help immensely now that i've come to that realisation.

To be honest, some of the hardware compatibility issues you mention aren't of much concern to me (providing i don't encounter any serious issues, i can deal with bluetooth not working for instance) as i plan to dual-boot windows/linux and still use windows as my primary OS, but linux for dev.

I should perhaps edit my question title to be more clear, as i'm specifically interested in web development via Linux (at least for the moment), but thanks for the advice on native app development.

I'll be sure to get in touch if/when i go down the Qemu/Tiny Core route. Though consider this prior warning that you're opening yourself up to a constant stream of emails from a frustrated linux noob ;-)

Thanks again for the detailed answer

Ah, web development. I see. Well, that's actually 90+% the same on Windows for most use-cases. For example, if I were starting a small web app in Linux I'd probably use Python and Bottle. I'd do the same on Windows. To be clear: I'm not recommending that you use Windows to deploy web applications in Python. I'm just saying that you can develop the applications on Windows and deploy on Linux with very little hassle.

Unless you actually care about native Linux applications, or specific performance-related features like Linux's epoll (or BSD's kqueue), then you can definitely jump into "the Linux way" of web development with Cygwin and either Python or Ruby. I haven't used Ruby since 2005, but in Python most of the difference between Windows development and Linux development is details of the os and sys modules (anything else has to do with stupid details of threading performance).

On a second reading, it sounds like you might be conflating getting beyond .NET with Linux development. It's entirely possible to learn Python or Ruby web development on Windows, though I'd strongly suggest either using a full Cygwin installation or at least Unix Tools for Windows (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/).

Linux is worth learning, but it's not the same thing as (for example) Python web development. They're mostly independent. Things like Node.js are still mostly *nix-only (last time I looked), but I'm sure that will change over time. On the positive side, you can get Haskell/GHC for Windows ;-)