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!
  • towerful@programming.dev
    3·
    1 day ago

    I use EndeavourOS (which is arch).

    Most of my programming is web stuff. So it builds to containers and using VS Codes dev containers takes care of all issues relating to arch’s rolling release (IE needing a specific version of a language).
    Ie, I work in containers and I build to container and I run containers for all my code (except ESP32 platformio. Unfortunately I haven’t migrated that away from windows. So I dual boot)

    If I was doing GUI desktop apps, I imagine I would need something other than dev containers.
    But that’s not what I do. Considering all I do is docker, k8s, linux admin, web frontend/backend that is platform agnostic (but ultimately runs on Linux)… I’m not tied to any OS.
    Windows is annoying, I am not a fan of osx nor Apple, I use Linux everyday… So my OS might as well be Linux.
    And Arch & EndeavourOS are nice and just work.
    For a VPS/server, I use Debian (or Talos OS for k8s). But that’s all headless.

    I’m lucky in that I freelance and the companies I work for are good companies.
    I’ve never had to cancel anything because of EndeavourOS, it’s never broken on me (I’ve only had windows break the EFI partition, which it can do to any distro - until you disable fast boot and stuff), it’s never gotten in my way (or if it has, it’s lead to a better solution - like VS Code dev containers). It’s been really really enjoyable.

    I’m sure that I could use any distro in my position, tbh.
    So, probably not helpful overall.