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?
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Fedora with XFCE on a Thinkpad T14, which has official fedora-support.
We develop our own php-based CRM and host on redhat-based OS’s so having a similar local environment helps.
The jetbrains-IDE’s work flawlessly on Linux here and I think they cover almost all languages by now.
There’s no guidance on the DE in our company, I simply preferred XFCE when I installed my system. I think I’ll be trying out KDE on my next system.
I have a System76 laptop with Pop-OS LTS that I’ve been using for about 2 years now. It’s very stable. It’s gnome based with customizations by System76.
I was allowed to choose any laptop I wished with a budget of $3k. I chose this system because I knew I’d heavily be working with many docker containers. It allowed me to purchase a system with support that had more ram and nvme storage than what a mac offered.
I use it mostly for writing backend golang and python services. I used emacs for many years to do this kind of work, but have switched to vscode for code navigation convenience and parity with others on my team if we have to pair program.
What DE or WM (and distro if relevant) do you use for your actual, professional work?
KDE/Arch
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.)
Choice was made by me (everyone except one person at the time was running arch with kde as well 🙃). Yeah, bringing your own device was allowed as long as disk was encrypted.
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?”)
No, this never happened to me with work machine, arch is extremely simple to maintain as long as you follow simple procedure of reading news and keeping out-of-repos packages to minimum.
How much time do you find reasonable to put into maintaining/developing your setup?
Maintaining - up to an hour a week. Developing - dunno, I haven’t changed things since kde 5 - 6 transition and it was a small change as well.
Did distro choice (or lack thereof) impact your choices for DE/WM?
Who knows, probably not.
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?
Well, emacs has some impact on my
psycheworldview probably. 😄What DE or WM (and distro if relevant) do you use for your actual, professional work?
I use both a MacBook and a Linux desktop running NixOS + Sway. I use the tmux + Helix editor on both. It’s not uncommon that I will use my MacBook as a thin client for coding over SSH on my desktop. But the MacBook is actually quite snappy for building Rust code.
Do you need to balance stability vs. customisability?
While NixOS can be bleeding edge, I also quickly notice breaking issues and I can easily revert to a previous working boot image (there is a history of boot images saved in the boot loader).
How much time do you find reasonable to put into maintaining/developing your setup?
I think it’s reasonable to spend a few days just getting to a working state, assuming you are starting from scratch. The long tail of maintenance should thin out quickly to the point where you are never really touching your config anymore.
Did distro choice (or lack thereof) impact your choices for DE/WM?
No.
Do you feel like your code editor, language stack, or job profile has an impact on the choices?
Not really. One time I did need to get a Windows VM running just to test out one of our Windows builds. A bit painful, but now that it’s done, I don’t really have to worry about it anymore.
I use Arch and i3. It’s old but it’s set up the way I like it. I’ve spent maybe an hour in the past year poking at os stuff. Seems plenty stable to me.
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.
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.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!
Fedora Silverblue (GNOME), absolute stability with modern software. Distrobox for non-flatpaks or Dev environments. My choice.
KDE on Debian. Takes me about an hour to set up a fresh Debian installation.
I run Xubuntu, default settings. I very much prefer stability and conceptual simplicity.
I do prefer my meetings rare and in person. Not every job allows for that, so I don’t take those jobs.
VScodium as code editor. Email in firefox. Everything else in tmux-ed terminal.
I do the same with Debian XFCE for work.
There’s really not much else to say: shit just works and stays out of the way. Boring but extremely effective.
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.
I used KDE plasma, GNOME or sway ans I would say chat unless you have a config set up on a private device. Windows is like KDE but without any customization, Gnome is MacOS like. In the end, I have VSCodium, Pycharm or Helix as text editor, Firefox as a web browser and my dependencies usually run in docker so this setup could be applied to windows or MacOS but I would not be able to troubleshoot anything in case of desktop issue.
I3 on Ubuntu.
Dont update unless required. Still using an 20.04 machine. As long as I can do my job, I dont need to chase the latest updates.
Maintenance and security support has ended for Ubuntu 20.04. Are you or is your employer paying for Extended Support?
If not, your setup is about to enable a whole lot of other people to do their job too 😉
No need to get on the latest, hopping over to a just over 3 years old version of Ubuntu is enough to get security patches again.
Its a VM, that has a working toolchain. I am very comfortable that its safe within my environment, but in general, you’re all correct, it ideally would be upgraded.
you are becoming a security risk…
becomingThey are already, unless they have an expanded security maintenance agreement.
It’s absolutely not a given that an OS that’s been battle-tested in prod for five years is less secure than one receiving hot supply chain injections every week.
The only major RCE I can think of since EOL in May is the recursive git clone one.
I’ll happily spin up a public 20.04 box if you wanna prove me wrong.
Yes and no. Yes, it’s old and should be upgraded ideally. No in that the Linux market share is so miniscule that targeting 20.04 or other out of support linuxes isnt as favourable as targeting Windows.
Also, the support/security update critique also applies to the community run distros as well, given they may not have the resources to keep up with security updates.
So yeah, my risk is increasing, but I dont feel anywhere near at risk as one of the 0.43% win XP machines still floating around…
Stats from here, no idea how accurate they are: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/worldwide
