kali is for posers, professionals use hannah montana

Yes, all of them.

All of them? I've always liked (and preferred) Linux for dev work, as I'm just so comfortable around working with the commandline and installing packages that I might need. For that end, any of them would work, you'd just need to set them up with what you want. If you wanna be "cool" and "hacker" you could install Arch and install every last package manually handpicked, or you could go with the most bog standard Ubuntu or Fedora or OpenSUSE. All of them work, it's only down to your tools. If you like Kali, stick with it.

No

Not that I know of, but I kind of feel like Nixos could be. The way you can use nix flakes or shells so each project has its on version of nodejs, go, rust, or w/e you use. Instead of having them installed system wide. And you can put the flake.nix and flake.lock in your git repo so any other Dev with nix can use it to DL the exact same packages.

Probably Bluefin-DX.

The "DX" stands for developer experience. It's a variant of uBlue/ Fedora Atomic (Silverblue) with a lot of added programming tools like Brew, Nix, IDEs, local LLMs, and more.

You can read more about it on the website.

There's also Aurora, which is the same, but with KDE instead of Gnome.

The dx-images are meant to be a plug-and-play solution for developers. You just install it, share your container config to your project colleagues, and go. Don't worry about not being able to work because of a bad update or some misalignments in your package manager broke your OS. Most stuff is containerised, and if your host breaks, you can just roll back, because the system is basically powered by git.

I'm no developer, but I use the regular variant for casual purposes (no specific tasks, mostly browser) on my laptop, and Bazzite (also very similar, but gaming focused) on my desktop, and both are wonderful! They're the most boring distro/ OS I've used yet, and that's great. They're immutable/ image based and always work reliably.

I can really recommend them for a lot of people, from ranging from IT professionals to my mum.

UNIX was kinda designed to be an IDE (of its time) by itself. Desktop/Server Linux (whether GNU or non-GNU) mostly continues this tradition; you are provided with some powerful tools for text manipulation, development, debugging and deployment out of the box in most distros. As such, any modern Linux distro is pretty good for development even out of the box. However, you must learn to use this power, and I'm not claiming it's easy (I still regularly look up various manpages despite doing development on Linux for 10+ years in various forms).

With that said, I myself prefer NixOS. It really feels more developer-oriented that other distros, as you get the power of Nix out of the box, and integrated into the system. With Nix you get easy access to the biggest software repository in the world. You get per-project development shells, so that you never have to worry about different toolchain versions for different projects, or your system being contaminated with bloat you no longer need. You get the power of reproducible packaging, to eliminate a lot of (but unfortunately not all of) "Works on my machine"-type of problems. It's also got a hell of a learning curve, but I think it's worth it.

Short answer is no, I think because what tools you need for programming change so much based on the development you're doing. C++ developers need compiler toolchain stuff that Javascript developers would never need to look at and vice versa.

Curveball answer is that modern extensible IDEs with the power of language servers and plugins have kind of become this. I'd massively recommend properly getting into one of the following and learning how to configure new languages and plugins:

• VScode
• Neovim
• Emacs
• Helix

(Sure I've probably missed some great options, feel free to flame me on why notepad++ should be OPs first choice)

I feel like there's just too many different programming workflows, to try to pre-install them.

Here on openSUSE, there's 'patterns' you can install, which are basically just groups of packages, and they've got some pre-defined patterns for programming:

I feel like that kind of goes in a more useful direction, although it's still partially questionable what those contain. For example, the Java development pattern comes with Ant as the build system, when Maven and Gradle are more popular, I believe.

I also have to say that I often prefer installing programming tooling in distro-independent ways, and ideally automated in the project repo, to avoid works-on-my-machine situations.
Of course, something like Git, Docker, VMs etc. tend to be stable across versions, and I might not care for having the newest versions, but even with those, I think it's good to install them on demand, rather than having them pre-installed. If the distro simply makes it a breeze to install them, that's ideal IMHO.

You could try Bluefin (Gnome) or Aurora (KDE). https://projectbluefin.io/ It's an immutable OS based on Fedora. They have a developer version with certain developer tools pre-installed. The development environment is largely based around containers and virtual environments. eg. Using DevPod to run your software projects within developer containers instead of installing the tools directly on your host operating system.

What does a programmer need?

• a text editor or IDE
• language specific tool chains for building, running and testing your code

This doesn't seem to be something a distro can solve beyond making it possible to install this stuff.

Maybe the closest is nixos, because it allows a lot of flexibility in setting up different development environments that are fully reproducible. Gentoo is also close, as it allows the same but in a different way (without the extent of reproducible guarantees).

I mean pretty much any distro that isn't locked down will be good for programming. All you really need is a package manager with a selection of at least somewhat modern dev tools, which almost all of them have.

In my view, you need a distro that has up-to-date packages. It also helps to have repos that have all the obscure tools you are going to want to ensure compatibility with everything.

Those two criteria eliminate a lot of distros. Arch or an Arch derivative like EndeavourOS are my picks for these reasons.

NixOS. It's really good for building multiple discrete environments specific to a development project, and it's done via a functional declarative language that's right up a programmer's alley. You can specify everything precisely to what you want for that environment including all dependencies and not have them pollute each other when you switch builds.

But it's a steep learning curve and the documentation could be better, but it's probably fine if you're used to learning new languages.

https://dev.to/dinex-dev/getting-started-with-nixos-flakes-a-modern-approach-to-configuration-management-39p7

I'd argue... Alpine?

Why? Well, because it's small. So Alpine isn't the programming distribution itself but rather the distribution for the container your run whatever you build inside of just because it's very VERY small (like... 5MB?!).

Obviously that makes sense only in some cases. For example for a frontend Web developer or a game developer (or a WebXR dev like me) it might not help much but otherwise,... maybe?

Anyway if you are into this kind of things check also Gitpod, it's about wrapping your dev environment inside a container then having it anytime, anywhere, including for other developers and facilitate their onboarding.

What I've learned is that using distro packages for dev always bites me in the ass at some point. Absolutely need v4.0.1 of something but your distro only has v4.0.0 ? Congrats you've entered upgrade dependency hell.

The best dev distro should be just be a kernel and sh. ;)

Gentoo. Literally the entire system is a build environment. Imagine a single environment that's capable of compiling thousands of different packages and managing dependencies etc.

No, but some are better suited for programming, because each distro has different packages in their repositories. I find Fedora to be very good when it comes to having basically every dev tool available in their repos. Arch is good too but too unstable for actual work. But keep in mind in most distros you can add separate repositories that contains the software you want. You can also use Homebrew that contains lots of dev tools as well

Not that I know of. I do a lot of native development mostly on Mint and Endeavor. I use pretty much the same tools on both and get a nearly identical experience. I'd say just go with what feels good to you.

I'd say ArchLinux/ArtixLinux, because of the ease to publish/install packages to/from AUR (Arch's User Repository).

Well, not exactly. Any distro COULD be used for development and excel at it, but there are a few intresting options out there. I personally use Fedora with KDE, but if you want to take it to a more advanced level, use arch or nixos. If you want to make your OS, use gentoo or linux from scratch, but very niche and not recommended.

There's nothing like it, nor will it ever be, for a couple of reasons.

Programming is a long running task

Distros like Kali are meant to be used for quick tasks where you don't need data preservation (or when data preservation is a bad thing). Programming is the opposite of this, it's only about data (the program) preservation. Programming something that will get erased on the next boot is pointless on the long run if you need to program that again, and if you don't then what you're doing is not programming but something else that requires some programming.

Programming is a wide term

There are multiple languages/IDEs/Workflows/etc, ranging from fully free and open source to paid closed source, whichever you will use depends entirely on you, having all of that pre installed would be 99% garbage since you will only care about 1 or 2 of them.

Programming requires setup

Even if you had whatever workflow you use pre installed, to work on something you would need to setup git keys, install dependencies, compile the first version, etc... and that's all before you can start doing stuff. And you would have to do this again and again since distros like Kali are not meant to be installed (if they were they wouldn't need to come with all those packages pre-installed because you could just install the ones you cared about)