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Which ever works for you. Ubuntu is known to be easy install and to use so thatd be my vote I guess
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endor57586y++ for Ubuntu: easy to use and set up, widely supported, and a good starting point if you later wanna go deep down the rabbit hole and experiment with more exotic distros.
And do yourself a favour: ignore all the Arch evangelists, unless you wanna spend days figuring shit out for a one-time install.
As for 'best for development': they're all mostly equivalent, the main difference between distros is the package repositories available and maybe some details under the hood.
But the tools you use are the same, and you can use whatever suits you best -
@endor I would like to moderate the "all the tools you will use are the same" thing a bit. While technically true, in practice it can be confusing. Few distributions name their packages the same way, and configurations differ enough that things like running software on startup can be an interesting challenge. (I'm currently working on a personal project on Alpine Linux, which uses OpenRC, an init system I've never used before and which is not documented clearly enough to make what I want to use it for obvious. I'm confident that I can figure it out, but I have much less to go on than I'd like. Experimentation to the rescue.) Things like libraries can be confusing at times (do I use my distro's packages or download using pip, npm, source, or whatever else? Each distro is different here.) but usually things can be made to work relatively easily.
This is not intended to discourage anyone. I simply hope to create more reasonable expectations than "all Linux is basically the same." -
endor57586y@powerfulparadox sure, that's true (I was kinda hinting at this with the 'some differences under the hood' bit). But I think it might be too much information for someone new to the ecosystem and cause more headaches than necessary ("What's an init system? Do I want that? Which one is better? How should I choose?"), so the choice should simply go for the more popular (and least masochistic) distros available.
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@endor Absolutely. Just expect say, moving from Ubuntu to CentOS to feel like visiting a different house by the same architect rather than an exact clone of your previous house. Subtle differences which take a bit of learning rather than exact drop-in compatibility. Ubuntu is definitely a good starting point, and it's what I started with.
Eventually everyone comes up against wanting to do something that their main distro (or distro configurator) makes more difficult than necessary, and recognizing that changes might not be completely smooth up front can be useful. (Everyone is different, though, and it's difficult to tell, especially over the internet, if someone should have only the basics to get started or some of what is to be expected a bit later down the road/when trying to parse advice on how to do something slightly complex. I like to err on the side of more information.)
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Help me please.. I'm going to install linux on my desktop pc, which distro is the best for development and easy to install?
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