What is the best OS for web developers?

Because of its popularity, Debian has a lot of applications available which range from productivity programs to business software, games and development tools. It comes with over 37,500 packages (software that is precompiled and ready to be installed on a local machine) -- all of them for free. See More

score 25 · Answer 2

Debian GNU/Linux

Top Pro

Comes with over 37,500 packages

Top Con

Old software is not useful, but is stable

Certainly for the stable and old stable versions. But the testing version has quite up to date software. See More

IntellectualNechtan's Experience

its less system failure than other operating system See More

Specs

Release Schedule:approximately every 24 months

Package Manager:dpkg (Debian Package Manager)

OS Family:GNU/Linux

Official Supported Architectures:amd64 (x86_64), arm64 (aarch64), armel, armhf, i386, mipsel, mips64el, ppc64el, s390x

Debian has the widest choice of hardware platforms, including: amd64, armel, armhf, i386, ia64, kfreebsd-i386, kfreebsd-amd64, mips, mipsel, powerpc, sparc, s390, s390x, source, multi-arch. See More

Top Pro

Wide choice of hardware platforms

Top Con

Buggy and non-user friendly

cosmo's Experience

Debian is one of the longest-running operating systems out there and for good reason! Nothing is more stable than Debian. Considering that the majority of web servers around the world run Debian, it is by far the best choice for web development and development in general. You can write, test, and deploy application all on the same system! I highly recommend using Debian or another Linux-based operating system for web development. See More

Top Pro

Extremely easy to find help with any problem

Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distros out there. Debian's popularity means that you will always be able to find a solution for your problem just by searching on Google, or if by chance nobody has had the problem you are having it's very easy to ask the community and quickly get a solution. See More

Top Con

Internal quarrels harm the project

Instead of working all together to provide the best Operating System, some maintainers are just ignorant and aggressive to new ideas or new maintainers. That led to many crises and controversy in Debian's history. See More

dg4511's Experience

Debian installs as a basic LAMP system and has installs for many of the popular development environments and specialized editors. See More

Top Pro

Standard vanilla Linux desktop

Debian runs standard Gnome, XFCE, KDE - it doesn't use its own special desktop environment, which means that users benefit from the work of the whole Linux community, Debian developers can focus on the distribution itself, and any support for your desktop environment on other distributions should work on Debian as well. See More

Top Con

Slow boot

Debian boots very slowly. See More

Top Pro

Very stable

Debian has a Stable branch, where packages are thoroughly tested before release. Furthermore Debian is know to be the definition of stable when it comes to production systems. See More

Top Con

Ridiculous package splitting

Even though it makes sense to split devel and the actual binary of an application, the splitting has become as mess in debian and its derivates: for example the nvidia driver is splitted into over 40 different packages: https://packages.debian.org/en/source/sid/nvidia-graphics-drivers See More

Top Pro

Highly secure system

Known for being consistent in maintaining a highly secure system. Several other popular distros use Debian as a base or core for their own Linux OS, the security being one of the main factors why it's so commonly used. See More

Top Con

No choices

Debian basically doesn't give you any choices: for example it is very hard to use a different Sound system than ALSA like OSS4, and the same goes for different init systems. See More

Top Pro

Install and forget

Once installed you can almost forget about it and start to use your desktop for your daily tasks See More

Top Con

Not designed for general desktop usage

By default, Debian is not that great of a distro for general desktop usage, since the packages are very outdated. You'll have to spend a while configuring the system in order to make it work. See More

Top Pro

Wide choice in desktop environments

Debian offers stable and testing CD images specifically built for GNOME (the default), KDE Plasma Workspaces, Xfce and LXDE. Less common window managers such as Enlightenment, Openbox, Fluxbox, GNUstep, IceWM, Window Maker and others can also be installed. See More

Top Con

Not great interoperability with key business systems

If you are in business environments that require certain core business software products, there are often times when those software packages are not available for Linux distros. Wine is only viable as an option in some of them. See More

Top Pro

A lot of ways to install software

You can either use aptitude, apt or apt-build to install software from the Debian package archives. See More

Top Con

Breaks if you suspend/resume

Breaks when you resume the activity on the system if you use nvidia cards. See More

Top Pro

Well-working team

The developer works very well so the the code is one of the best written out there. See More

Top Con

No good choices of fresh desktop environments

GNOME is quite outdated and buggy; KDE is too old, even in Sid it is at 5.14 branch (at Jun 13 2019 Plasma 5.16 is available in many rolling/fresh distros); XFCE behaves like crooked, visual artifacts at the taskbar and so on; Cinnamon as far as I know works better in Linux Mint compared to (almost) any other distro; For other desktop environments (e.g. MATE) can't say - these are too new (as projects) and possibly incomplete, thus might have many bugs. See More

Top Pro

Live install images for CDs, DVDs, and USB thumb drives

Debian releases live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives, for the i386 and amd64 architectures, and with a choice of desktop environments. These Debian Live images allow the user to boot from a removable media and run Debian without affecting the contents of their computer. See More

Top Con

Outdated kernel of the live system

Since the LiveCD is based on Debian stable the kernel is old, outdated but stable. See More

Top Pro

Great for gaming

As Debian is the base for SteamOS and because Ubuntu is based on it, it's almost certain that all Linux games will run properly and require no hacks like creating symbolic links because of some hardcoded paths. See More

Top Con

No default support for unfree drivers

Debian does not official support unfree software so if you have a wifi card or anything elese that requires an unfree driver you will need to download the unofficial/non-advertised non-free iso image which contains all unfree driver packages. See More

Top Pro

The Debian Social Contract

Guaranteed commitment to adherence to values, principles, priorities, requirements and guidelines by the Debian project. See More

Top Con

Stable release contains extremely outdated packages

If you want the newest packages, you'll have to do a minimal installation of Debian stable then upgrade to testing or you need to install testing directly: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting. See More

Top Pro

Apt-build

It is possible to rebuild the entire system and optimize it for your hardware (of course, it is not as detailed as Gentoo's USE flags). See More

Top Pro

Inconsistent init systems

While Linux uses systemd, non-Linux ports use the traditional sysvinit. See More

Top Pro

Has small amount of today's bugs (e.g. no duplicate web cameras in Skype - likely not Skype's fault)

But has quite a few bugs from 2016-2017, apparently for long term. See More

Top Pro

A real installer

Unlike other distributions that just extract their Live image, Debian offers a real traditional and modular installer to customize the installation. See More

Top Pro

TUI installer

The Debian installer can still be launched as text/curses-like installer which is more compatible and keyboard-friendly than the graphical version. See More

Top Pro

Great choice for returning Linux users

If you haven't use Linux for a long time, say 5-10 years, it's a great distro in which you can quickly get in the boat again. You don't have to worry about falling back. Everything is in its place. See More

Top Pro

Unique release cycle

The most Linux distros have one or two stages before a release, but Debian has five before a new stable version is released (experimental > unstable > testing > code-freeze/bug hunting > stable). See More

Top Pro

Many ports

Debian supports almost any Kernel maintained CPU instructions set. It has also a few non Linux Ports. See More

Top Pro

Big open-source project

The Debian project is one of the biggest open source projects with over 5000 active contributors. See More

Top Pro

Comes with over 55.500 packages

Because of its popularity, Debian has a lot of applications available which range from productivity programs to business software, games and development tools. It comes with over 55.500 packages (software that is precompiled and ready to be installed on a local machine) -- all of them for free. See More

Top Pro

Live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives

Debian releases live install images for CDs, DVDs and USB thumb drives, for the i386 and amd64 architectures, and with a choice of desktop environments. These Debian Live images allow the user to boot from a removable media and run Debian without affecting the contents of their computer. See More

Top Pro

Strict seperation of non-free software

Debian is one of the few distros that let the user choose if he wants a free system or not. See More

Top Pro

Debconf

Depending how it is configured debconf does the most of the hard work for you and only asks you with configuration /file conflicts. See More

Top Pro

Easy to find help with any problem

Debian is one of the oldest and most popular distros out there. Debian's popularity means that you will always be able to find a solution for your problem just by searching on Google, or if by chance nobody has had the problem you are having it's very easy to ask the community and quickly get a solution. See More

Top Pro

Standard archives

Debs are normal ar and tar archives with shell scripting and additional gz, bz, lzma or xz compression. See More

Top Pro

Widely supported

Almost any software that is available for Linux provides a Debian package. See More

Top Pro

Supports SecureBoot

You don't have to disable SecureBoot if you use it, which is useful for LiveUSB or dualboot setups. See More

Fedora has a lot of disadvantages that other distros have, without all the benefits of the others unless you work as a sysad on Red Hat maybe (but honestly, once you know the Linux, you can quickly adapt to any distro so not really a reason to use Fedora). The biggest two disadvantages are 1) still needing to update your release versions of the OS itself (which makes more sense to newbies but its much nicer to never worry about that and use a rolling distro) & 2) that awful package management system and those awful .rpm package archives which are like an even more awful derivative of the debian family apt family package managers. Plus how it got its name is honestly creepy to me. See More

score 7 · Answer 3

Fedora

Top Con

Still forced to update to new releases, awful package manager

Top Pro

Frequent updates to latest versions of software, so quick security and other bug fixes

Latest version software often means quick bug fixes, more useful features. For example, for a daily user of TeX, the latest TeX distro is a must. It's also useful to be able to use recent external hardware such as USB Wi-Fi dongles or printers. See More

Specs

Based On:Independent

Release Schedule:Point (6 Months)

Package Manager:RPM Package Manager, DNF package manager

Linux should be Linux, but Fedora is constantly introducing breakage and changes which move things in the wrong direction and make things worse for everyone. See More

Top Con

Too many changes to upstream packages leading to a "Fedora way" of doing things

Top Con

Controlled by big corpos

Top Con

Not for beginners

It is not a user-friendly distro like ubuntu, PCLos. You will be required to learn a lot of commands even for simple activities. See More

Top Con

Unstable

Some packages may break, because there isn't an option to test them before rolling them out. See More

Top Con

Slow

It is quite slow on some computers. See More

Top Con

Optimus support is straight terrible

Running on a laptop with optimus gpu or the driver for your powerful gpu is not gonna happen. See More

Top Con

Proprietary drivers are unsupported

Fedora does not support proprietary drivers, meaning that users may have problems with a lot of hardware when using Fedora. The software to make that kind of hardware work can be installed, but it can be done only through third-parties and it's not easy for the average user. See More

Top Con

Dnfdragora needs work

As the default package installer, this piece of software needs a lot more polish. It's not explicit in saying things are installed, more granularity in package selection is needed, and the ability to move columns around to see if you're installing the correct version. See More

Top Con

Updating to a new release can be problematic

While there are a few tools on offer that will upgrade an old Fedora release to the newest, there can often be problems with these methods. Some that may not even crop up at first but will show later down the road. Being that upgrading can be an issue, it can be exacerbated by the fact that Fedora updates every six month, which means twice a year there is a risk of completely borking ones install. See More

Using this as my daily driver as drupal developer, and very happy with its well done stability and recent packages See More

score 8 · Answer 4

openSUSE Tumbleweed

Top Pro

Easy installation and cutting edge apps

Top Con

Slow and painful unfortunately, especially compared to other modern distros

metalbote's Experience

Specs

Based On:Jurix>SUSE

Release Schedule:Rolling

Origin:Germany

Like it or not, most third parties don't want to deal with less-popular distros. So most of them only support Ubuntu LTS and those versions of RHEL/CentOS that are still supported. See More

Top Pro

Tumbleweed + OpenSUSE Build Service

Top Con

Little / no third-party support

Top Pro

Stable

Tumbleweed is stable enough to use every day. Updates are OpenQA tested to ensure stability before being released for Tumbleweed. Bleeding edge untested software can be tried using OpenSUSE factory. See More

Top Con

Complex multimedia codecs and plugins installation

Top Pro

Good selection of preinstalled applications

Top Pro

A large amount of software

You build the package from a source you can see and read. You decide which features you want to build in and which aren't needed. You can choose build options, optimisation and whatever else fancy stuff you want modified. With a binary distribution this simply isn't possible. See More

score 8 · Answer 5

Gentoo Linux

Top Pro

Full control of the software

Top Con

Rolling your own packages consumes time, lots of it

Gentoo offers you the ability to have all your software compiled for your particular system, which is great. How it does this, is by having you compile all your own software as part of the installation process. This makes a typically hour long reinstallation an all day affair with tons of frustrations as things hardly ever work right the first time. See More

Top Pro

Great for anyone who is serious about learning the intricacies of Linux

It's useful for both beginners and professionals. For the installation, Gentoo offers various types, which are referred to as stages. Basically meaning how in depth you would want to go into the process of installation. For beginners it's useful to choose for a starting distro due to its various stages that can be very time consuming but beneficial as you learn the composition in general of Linux. See More

Top Con

Customized package installation can take a long time and cause installation failures

The Gentoo package management system allows you to configure what compilation flags packages should support - i.e. specific processor flag support (SSE, SSE2, etc.), -O1, -O2, -O3 optimization, etc. If you accept one of the default flags, Gentoo downloads binaries from the server. However, if you decide to optimise, it can and will download all source packages and start compiling allthe programs and libraries on your system. If your chosen flags don't work with a particular library, installation will fail. See More

Top Pro

Can be officially systemd-free

Gentoo's default init system is OpenRC. Gentoo also officially supports systemd-free Gnome and udev. Users are free to choose any init system they want. See More

If you need something, you should install it. It has nothing as default and you can build your system from zero. See More

score 6 · Answer 6

Arch Linux

Top Pro

Minimal

PoisedLahamu's Experience

Best distro ever See More

Specs

Based On:Independent

Release Schedule:Rolling

Package Manager:Pacman

Always works. No matter if you upgrade 7 or 700 packages. See More

Top Pro

Highly reliable upgrades

Winnie Brockett's Experience

Al ightweight and flexible Linux® distribution that tries to Keep It Simple See More

Top Pro

Supports various desktop environments and window managers

Doesn't limit you in terms of desktop environments or graphical servers (X, Wayland). See More

Top Pro

Flexible upgrades

Upgrade once a day, once a week, once a month,... three times a day... automate it, upgrade manually, add packages to the ignore list. See More

Top Pro

Great security out of the box

Even a default Arch setup offers great security with the minimum number of open ports and very little information on the system for outsiders. See More

Top Pro

Vast variety of use and purpose

With its vast repos, Arch offers tons of applications for all kinds of use. See More

Top Pro

Low maintenance

To basically keep your Arch setup up and running, it takes very little to barely any maintenance. See More

Top Pro

Helpful 3rd-party installers

There are extremely helpful 3rd-party installers such as Anarchy Linux (Formerly Arch Anywhere). See More

Top Pro

Vanilla

Learn about Arch, learn about Linux. What works for Arch, works for many other distros too. See More

Top Pro

Helpful for understanding how Linux is installed

Arch does not come with an automatic installation process. The user is expected to walk through the installation steps published on the Arch wiki. This is very useful if, later, something happens to the installation as the user will be more familiar with the foundational steps required to get a full blown Arch installation working. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Tailor the system to your needs. See More

Top Pro

Incredible educational value

Arch gives great insight in the inner workings of operating systems, computers and data manipulation. See More

Top Pro

Rolling updates

Updating will keep the whole OS up to date (unlike Ubuntu/Debian/etc. where occasionally you will need to perform major version updates). See More

Top Pro

No need for external repos

The default and community repo of Arch Linux are so vast, that there is barely any need for additional software sources. And if there is, the additional software can be added to AUR, which results in the need actually growing the Arch repos. See More

Top Pro

Helpful community

If searching through the wiki or the forums for any problems turns nothing, any question on the official forums, Arch subreddit or the IRC channel will be answered within minutes. There will probably be no hand-holding however, Arch users prefer to point anyone to a resource that may help them instead of trying to outright solve their problem in a forum thread. This is quite helpful for people who want to really learn how their system works but also for other people who may stumble in that thread considering how most problems don’t have a universal solution. See More

Top Pro

An opportunity to improve

The process of learning to setup and use Arch will improve your skills with Linux and computers in general. See More

Top Pro

It is Linux at the core

This distro is barebones enough to make a new distro from. See More

Top Pro

Fast and simple package management

Pacman has performance advantages over apt-get and yum in both database operations (thanks to being written for speed) and download times (by virtue of using better mirrors than other distributions tend to select by default). There are also fewer default repositories to download from, and all package management is combined into one tool instead of being split into dpkg, apt-get, and apt-cache like on Debian distros. See More

Top Pro

No restrictive handholding, pure control over everything

Arch is mainly aimed at experienced Linux users, there is no hand-holding and not much in a way of UI elements when trying to install or tweak settings. See More

Top Pro

As slim or copious as you want it

Arch keeps its core repositories slim and free of unnecessary dependencies. At first installation only a bare system is set up. You can easily get the other applications through the package manager. The repositories are nearly as full as those of Ubuntu, while they are often more up to date. That way you don't have to waste time with software you don't need or want. See More

Top Pro

Arch Linux Wiki

The Arch Linux Wiki is very useful not just for Arch Linux users, but for anyone who uses Linux. See More

Top Pro

Cutting edge rolling release

Arch Linux follows a rolling release model, which allows users to stay on the most up-to-date versions of the software they are using. See More

Top Pro

A package for almost everything

If you need to install something, chances are someone in the Arch community has already made a package for it. This makes it incredibly easy for you to install and maintain all of the non-media content on your computer. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

Arch's goal of simplicity means there's usually one preferred way to get things done - through organized and well documented configuration files. This focus, combined with the community's recognition that configuration files can be intimidating, has resulted in excellent documentation that's accessible to newcomers, and very instructive about how Linux actually works. The documentation is often so thorough that, when searching for solutions to problems while using other distributions, such as with video card drivers, oftentimes you'll find the most effective solution in the Arch Linux wiki or on the forums. See More

Top Pro

You actually learn a LOT of the inner workings of your OS.

Since you do everything by hand and a LOT of it, you actually learn very useful things even for other distros. See More

Top Pro

Good for ricing for r/unixporn

Top Pro

Multilib support is just around the corner

Just uncomment the according entries in the pacman.conf. See More

Top Pro

Easier to review the distributions packages

Unlike other some distributions, it's super simple to review the packages you download on the official arch repos or arch user repository. See More

Top Pro

Great hardware support

Out of the box Arch comes with great hardware support. See More

Top Pro

Great for low performance hardware

Arch Linux works quite well with low performance hardware like netbooks. See More

Top Pro

Experts working on the packages

Providers only provide the basic system and do a great job doing so. While with AUR people who actually use the packages, provide and maintain them. They CARE about making them work. See More

Top Pro

On average only 1 manual intervention needed a year now

The comments about issues with upgrades are over-exaggerated. Those comments assume that : A) They happen often, B) you are using a specific package with an issue, C) that package maintainers can't release a patch to the package that will work around the issue for you, and that D) Manual intervention or system recovery from such issues is hard to fix. On average once or twice a year a user may have to cut and paste some commands in the terminal to fix an issue, but that's about it. Additionally any system recovery required from such missed interventions is easy, just follow the wiki and make a live USB if your using a desktop or laptop. See More

Top Pro

Stripped down to the bone

Since its stripped down, it is fast and you don't have to deal with bloatware. See More

Top Pro

Highly reliable and stable build

See experts working on the packages and upgrades. Given Arch splits the load among people who care and have the experience, the overall setup is very stable and reliable, even though very broad too. See More

Top Pro

Incredibly easy to manage

Arch is very simple to maintain, backup and in rare cases repair and recover. For example, the manual to recover your boot manager is already in the install guide! See More

Top Pro

Ultimate mid-range OS for Tinkering

If you like to tinker with things and see how they work you don't get much better than arch linux unless you commit to building your own kernel and using flags manually when installing your packages. See More

Top Pro

Simple by design

Arch Linux is actually incredibly simple. It's really just a partition scheme, package manager, Linux kernel, file system, systemd and the bare minimum of utilities needed to easily set up your hardware. This makes it super simple to build your desired system using binary packages because there no bloat getting in your way when installing or configuring packages. See More

Top Pro

Support for a large variety of hardware

From latest wacom pads to obscure wireless cards in laptops Arch's hw support has been and continues to be good. It has worked on laptops where other leading distro's like debian/ mint/ ubuntu failed to detect and work with all hardware. See More

Top Pro

Huge Repositories

Although Arch Linux only comes with around 10,000 packages, you can use the Arch User Repositories (AUR) which will add over 50,000 more packages. See More

Top Pro

Good overall system quality

QoL of Arch is generally good. You get something more consistent and doable in Arch then you would get with most other OSes. See More

Top Pro

Excellent package management with the AUR

The AUR is a repository with a very extensive catalogue of build/install scripts that are contributed by users. While these scripts are inherently less secure than conventional packages maintained by a distro's authors, it's still way easier to verify the security of install scripts than it would be to write them yourself. It's very usefull. See More

Top Pro

Simplicity is absolutely the principal objective behind Arch development

The design approach of the development team focuses on elegance, code correctness, minimalism, and simplicity, and expects the user to be willing to make some effort to understand the system's operation. See More

As the most popular Linux distribution, there's a wide range of sources for support online if you ever need help, including the Ubuntu Wiki, Ubuntu Forums and the Ask Ubuntu Stack Exchange site. See More

score 17 · Answer 7

Ubuntu

Top Pro

Lots of support

Top Con

Software can be outdated, if not severely outdated

If you try to download "unpopular" software, so you may find you're downloading a version that's several years old. See More

Specs

Based On:Debian Stable(core) Testing/Unstable(universe/multiverse)

Release Schedule:Point (5 Year LTS / 6 Month Releases)

Package Manager:Debian Package Manager, Snap Store

This allows for users to always have a new supported release available without long unkown wait times in between. See More

Top Pro

Great long term support release schedule (2 years)

Top Con

Splits the Debian community

The most packages are imported from Debian but Ubuntu uses own bug trackers and develops its own patches. See More

Top Pro

Wide range of software out of the box

The default apps available in Ubuntu cover the gamut of most anyone's needs. From music, video or office applications Ubuntu has an app that will cover the users needs. See More

Top Con

Includes adware

Advertisers pay to have their links or software preinstalled. Like the links to Amazon installed by default in the dock. See More

Top Pro

Company behind it

This means that the system must run well, otherwise they will lose money. There is no better incentive! See More

Top Con

A tweaked Gnome version

Instead of original Gnome desktop with Ubuntu you get a tweaked Gnome and most of the tweaks makes user experience worse. See More

Top Pro

Looks good

Ubuntu looks clean even when running from a LiveCD. See More

Top Con

No rolling release

New Ubuntu versions are released two times a year, during this period almost all software receives only security updates and minor bug fixes. See More

Top Pro

Use it on almost any device

Not just for laptops - Ubuntu was designed with tablets and touchscreen devices in mind, and with phone support on the way. Ubuntu also has Long Term Support releases, as well as a version oriented toward servers, so you can use the same OS at work or on mobile as you do on your desktop. See More

Top Con

Canonical (author) is proprietary

Canonical is focused on making money so you can see many proprietary offers by them and the OS has built-in trackers (Amazon). See More

Top Pro

Perfect for collaboration on open source projects

This is probably the best option when collaborating on open source projects in hardware. This is mostly because packages and tools are readily available via software center. See More

Top Con

Business software Interoperability

If you are in business environments that require certain core business software products, there is often times when those software packages are not available for Linux distros. Wine is only viable as an option in some of them. See More

Top Pro

Unified search

Type any query into the Dash Home, and search will look through files, stores and web-pages to find what you are looking for. See More

Top Con

Relatively high system requirements

The default GNOME desktop environment is a resource hog which requires hardware accelerated graphics rendering in order to run smoothly, making out of the box Ubuntu unsuitable for low end systems and older hardware. Even mildly aged hardware, you'll get far better performance out of a lighter desktop environment like LXDE or XFCE. See More

Top Pro

Stable

It‘s one of the most stable Linux Distros. See More

Top Con

Custom PPAs required for most software

To get the most software available, user must add several PPAs to the system. That has major problems: 1) Terminal recommended for adding a PPA, which can scare away users 2) A PPA can potentially distribute malware by creating a "newer" version of a package than available in other PPAs, such as the Linux kernel. 3) PPAs must be recreated and re-added with every major system update See More

Top Pro

One of the most used operating systems in servers

Ubuntu is one of the most used OSes in production servers. Using it in a development machine will ensure that the same development is used both in production and development which greatly decreases bugs and any chance of incompatibility of the software with the environment in which it will be deployed. See More

Top Pro

Dedicated software center

The Ubuntu Software Center offers a GUI interface for installing new apps which is extremely easy and welcoming for beginners to Linux. But it should not be used by more advanced users since the method of installing through the terminal is much faster and easier after one is used to it. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

The setup for personal use is simple enough for anyone to achieve, and can easily be modified to act as a server. Programs and all features are easy to find and use, and first-timers can easily pick up on how to use it. See More

Top Pro

Good PPA repositories available

PPA repositories allow you to install the latest version of your preferred software while keeping the rest of the operating system "stable". See More

Top Pro

Cares about stable drivers

Top Pro

Simplicity

Ubuntu is designed to be used by everyday people. Because of that, Ubuntu has tried hard to make a user interface that's intuitive and looks pleasant and clean. See More

Top Pro

UTF-8 is the default character encoding

Beginning with Ubuntu 5.04, UTF-8 became the default character encoding, which allows for support of a variety of non-Roman scripts. See More

Top Pro

Just works out of the box

Lots of support for hardware, lots of pre-installed software, and a smooth install process means less time downloading drivers, less time digging through configuration files, and less time deciding on software to use just to get up and running. It also means less time digging through forums looking for support. See More

Top Pro

Has a clean Gnome interface

Gnome has lot of extensions available and can be custmoized rather easily. See More

Top Pro

Good UI for small monitors

Because the menu usually is in the title bar and the launcher auto-hides, the whole screen can be used by an application. See More

You can generally never run "Linux" binaries without patching them or starting up an FHS sandbox. Some build scripts just won't work. See More

score 1 · Answer 8

NixOS

Top Pro

No package dependecy hell

Top Con

Difficulty running software that's not packaged

LovelyAristaeus's Experience

nixOS is great if you want to seem trendy, have a drive you intend to store nothing but the system on (because its read only on rootfs, not obvious until I spent the whole weekend around Thanksgiving working on setting it up). There is the systemd issue, which is central to how nixOS operates and comes with the overhead and implications of systemd, which you may love or hate but I find to be slow compared to any alternatives I use. Then there is trying to make sense of commonly thrown around terminology that while somewhat explained in the docs in some variant of English I can hardly make sense of due to being so laden in techie buzzwords. Save yourself the hours, you want to use NixFlakes. I won't say its without merit, it would be a great way to programmatically craft servers one could dynamically spin up in a much faster process than many alternatives in that process and full control over all package versions without the hours of overhead one needs with Gentoo, are all great features. The configuration language isn't really that hardly to master even if a tad tedious in its syntax but no worse than emacs lisp really. See More

Specs

Based On:Independent

Release Schedule:Fixed

Init-System:SystemD

Package Manager:Nix

Nix builds allow you to make sure your builds use only the packages you intend. See More

Top Pro

Fully reproducible dev shells

Top Con

Beginners Linux users may not want to learn Nix Expression Language to customize more advanced installs

Top Pro

No package conflicts

Top Pro

Stable

The UI of Mac OS is rather unrivaled. The smooth, responsive, and cohesive UI makes the system quite joyous to use. See More

score 10 · Answer 9

macOS

Top Pro

Polished UI

Top Con

Limited hardware

Usually, the hardware that can run this can't be upgraded. See More

PoisedLahamu's Experience

Arch is the best. See More

Specs

Based On:Research UNIX>BSD>NeXTSTEP

OS Family:UNIX (BSD/Darwin)

License:EULA

Top Pro

Based on Unix

macOS being a UNIX certified system means that you can install a lot more stuff with a lot fewer headaches than if you were on Windows. See More

Top Con

No native package management

A comparison of package managers available for OSX can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Ideal setup, out of the box

Next to no custom configuration is necessary. See More

Top Con

Most software is closed source

For people who like to use open source tools for their development work, this may be a problem. There's plenty of advantages to open source software, one of which is the ability to tinker with and customize the tools themselves that you are using. Although there's plenty of FOSS tools available for Mac, especially through Homebrew, the number of packages available is much lower than the number of packages available for any Linux distribution. See More

Top Pro

Powerful terminal

It's very similar to a Linux terminal. See More

Top Con

Expensive

OSX is tied Apple hardware and Apple hardware tends to be expensive. See More

Top Pro

Lots of open-source software available

Because it's Unix under the fancy GUI, most open source ports easily to it. See More

Top Con

Bash version is obsolete

macOS comes with an obsolete version of Bash, due to licensing issues. See More

Top Pro

Streamlined workflow between devices

Because this is an Apple product, there is a streamlined workflow between your computer and all mobile devices. For example, if you type an a Pages document, once you save, you can open the updated document just moments later on your iPad, and vice versa. The same goes for iMessage, (yes, you can text people with your phone number from your computer. Actually, you can text other people with apple devices with just your Apple ID, with or without a phone number, for free!) Numbers, Notes, Reminders, Contacts, and just about any other Apple workflow application. See More

Top Con

Closed source

Mac OS is closed source itself, which means that it is developed more slowly and has more problems See More

Top Pro

Great modifier key layout

Top Con

Poor application support

Fewer apps run on Mac OS than on Windows or Linux. See More

Top Pro

Has software that only runs on Mac

For example, Sketch. See More

Top Con

Vendor-Lock-in

You are now forced to use the Apple services. See More

Top Pro

Has many special tools for developers

Has support for multiple IDEs. See More

Top Con

Poor X11 integration

The most open source software does work but is very poorly integrated due apples ancient version of the X-server. See More

Top Pro

Easy access to lots of great dev tools

There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free. See More

Top Con

Lacks software

There are plenty of apps (esp. freeware) that exist for Windows but not for Mac OS. See More

Top Pro

More commercial software and gaming support compared to other Unix systems

Adobe CC, MS Office, Steam games. See More

Top Con

Not very user-friendly

Top Pro

Great Git GUI tools

Tower, Kaleidoscope, SourceTree See More

Top Con

Touchbar on Macbook Pro's

Top Con

Too little customization options

Top Con

Very few options for running hosted, on the cloud

Top Con

Silly modifier keys layout

The Command key is strange, Alt is where Super should be. See More

Top Con

Arch is the best