Hi, I'm currently taking a software dev course and curious to try using linux for software development. There's tons of linux distros and my question is, what's the best or ideal linux distro for it?

whichever makes you comfortable and productive

Potentially pick one that oriented to what you want to do. Do a little research into what each distro is geared too.

@balheru wut? can you clarify what do you.mean with that.. every distro has compliers, runtimes, libraries and dev dependencies

@mrtn !ubuntu or fedora

ftfy

@dev-nope for example CentOS is oriented towards a secure environment for servers amongst other things. A lot less flexibility and support for third party packages. Some that are focused on long term support and stability. Some that are experimental and bleeding edge. Etc etc

I'd say take Antergos and once you are comfortable with it do an Arch install 🙂

The same question all over again.

Google "Linux Distros" and take a look at all of it. Pick one that looks cool and install.

It really doesn't matter which distro you should use at the first time. Just pick one and enjoy the freedom :)

Note: Have a separate partition for your /home folder, you will thank me later.

The best Linux distro for noobs is one for noobs. They typically have mainstream support for various IDEs and software packages. I would say most Ubuntu based Distros are quite well supported. (Ironically its parent Debian is less supported even though tons of Debian based distros.)

If I were you I would ask about software that you need to run (IDEs and tools) and then go look at the install pages and see if they have an official version of Linux that they support.

I develop for redhat platorms so a lot of the tools work everywhere but CentOS RHEL is a good option for me.