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!
ARCH is nor really unstable. Debian is not really more stable than other distros. People just repeat stupid stuff. Both (all big) distros are reliable. Still don’t use arch for work. DE is distor independent. The days are far over from choosing a distro based on DE.
For work an atomic distro that is always working like fedora is really nice.
Gaming is also DE independent.
I spend very few minutes on maintenance and let fedora do all that. I use my system, I don’t baby sit it.
Thanks!
Regarding gaming, I had big trouble trying to play some steam games on gnome. After switching to KDE stuff just works.
Also you can’t (feasibly) run Hyprland on Debian stable, nor can you (easily) run GNOME on MX Linux, etc. So there are a few points where distro choice does have an effect. But I think I got the point across enough with the question