19 replies to this topic

[Iridium]

I would suggest Linux Mint KDE 13. Unlike the other major windows managers like gnome and unity, KDE still focuses on being a productive environment.

[Max Norris]

Iridium, on 03 August 2012 - 12:02, said:

I would suggest Linux Mint KDE 13. Unlike the other major windows managers like gnome and unity, KDE still focuses on being a productive environment.

It is a good enviroment, but he's looking for lightweight, and KDE 4 is anything but.

[simplezz]

To be honest, any GNU/Linux distro is good for programming, but my personal preference is Arch Linux. Mostly for the same reasons as you, it's lightweight because you get to choose exactly what runs on it (/etc/rc.conf), and the repositories (AUR) are second to none, except perhaps Gentoo, which is also very good.

I code in C, Java (Android), and Python mostly, and GNU/Linux is a programmer's dream. However, I also like to experiment with bash, perl, vala, and pretty much any new toy that catches my eye

[threetonesun]

LiveCD them all and see which one annoys you the least. That's how I always picked a distro. Or VM them, or for some (Ubuntu), run them straight from Windows.

That's the nice thing about Linux, it's almost always free, and it plays nicely with other operating systems, even if they don't always want to play nice with Linux.

[simplezz]

Another thing that might be of interest (to everyone really) is how easy it is to compile repository software so that it's optimised for your system's CPU architecture. Gentoo (almost everything is compiled) and Arch (/etc/makepkg.conf) have that really sewn up. For most applications, it's not a problem, but there are a few that really benefit from targeted compilation.

As far as a DE goes, there are a few good lightweight ones. It all depends where on the scale you want to be. Tiling window managers are much more barebones for instance, but XFCE is a full desktop environment that's also quite frugal with resources. MATE (Gnome 2 Fork) is also a good choice.

Sometimes I like to do all my stuff just from the raw terminal. Using the framebuffer for playing video and games, and ncurses for webbrowsing and music player. GCC/GDB is already cli, so that's not a problem.