Hi, Long time Mac user here, recently switching my personal devices to Linux. My work unfortunately does not support this, mandating work be done on the provisioned device and it has to be Mac or Windows. So, I’m finding it a bit hard to get up to speed when coding on Linux. I’ve tried GNOME, KDE, Hyprland and find no obvious heaven in any of them. I have two external 27" monitors fwiw. My personal PC has Arch and KDE for gaming reasons, but I’m also looking to code more on open source tools to avoid personal vendor lock-ins.
In other companies I’ve visited I’ve seen varied policies, one runs stock Ubuntu, one mandates Fedora with user choice for DE/WM, many use Macs but allow for Linux if desired. So, I’d want to run a small survey. Keeping in mind all the aspects of using a device at varied software work, so coding, email, chat, managing servers, having online meetings, sharing screens, making presentations: if you use Linux for work,
What DE or WM (and distro if relevant) do you use for your actual, professional work?
Was this a choice by you or pre-selected by the employer? Do they allow you to work on your own device if desired? (Excluding freelancers obv.)
Do you need to balance stability vs. customisability? Or is that a no-brainer for you? (=“Have you ever had to cancel a meeting because an Arch update broke your screen sharing?”)
How much time do you find reasonable to put into maintaining/developing your setup?
Did distro choice (or lack thereof) impact your choices for DE/WM?
Do you feel like your code editor, language stack, or job profile has an impact on the choices? For example, is your profile very specific (“I go to dailies and turn tickets into code / I work alone for weeks at a time researching stuff”), allowing you to optimise the setup further?
Anything else you’d want to highlight about this?
Edit: Takeaways so far
- Immutable setups ftw
- Arch is stable enough though
- Type of work affects distro choice more so than DE choice (I do backend webdev, my deliverables are very platform independent, so I didn’t think about this much)
- Plenty of XFCE users out there!
- Zero mentions for Hyprland!
NixOS, plasma rn but sometimes jump to sway. I’d say distro is more relevant. for the most part I just have an editor and a browser open, DE doesn’t change much about my workflow. NixOS definitely does though
chosen by my team, company at large doesn’t care but it’s nice for everyone to be on something consistent. company devices
NixOS is a nice balance of the two
I generally just copy my personal setup, which I’ve spent a decent amount of time on, but because I enjoy it
not particularly, but nix supports all of the big ones
language and stack a little bit, it’s all stuff that has good integration with nix. we deploy nix containers and then have consistent environment everywhere without having to work in a container. my team is a pretty standard team maintaining some full stack web stuff
This!