Linux Distros for a Windows Software Developer?

Omega1045 asks: "I am a software developer, writing client/GUI software in C# (.NET) on Windows and server software in a UNIX environment. I have used Linux in the past as a firewall, server and more but have never used it seriously as a desktop. What Linux distro and tools should I look to for a switch? I definitely still need to run Win2k (in a VM would be preferable) for testing and other purposes, but want to live as much of my monitor facing life as I can in Linux. I also need the best laptop and Wireless PC Card support (D-Link in my case) from the distro I choose. Have any Slashdot readers gone this route? What are your recommendations?"

Comments

Forgot to include...

[TheWanderingHermit]

I think the fact that I forgot this is pretty telling. It's been years (literally) since I've had problems with Mandrake recognizing ANY kind of hardware. So long, in fact, that I forgot to mention that Mandrake is just about the best in recognizing just about any kind of hardware you can throw at it and auto-installing it.

With Mandrake, I don't even think about hardware as a problem. With other distros, I find I still have to worry about it.

Slow progress up

[Apreche]

I always have to reccomend to anyone to follow the path I followed.

I used Redhat About 5 or 6 years ago. I moved to Mandrake because it supported my hardware better, and I used it up until a year ago. Then I moved to Gentoo where I am today.

Start with Fedora or Mandrake. You will learn things there, but only so much. They will probably suit your needs for quite awhile. But invariably you will find things you don't like. And the user friendly guis wont have an interface in place for you to make things the way you want them to be. And the rpm packages available wont always be the way you want them to be. When you start feeling like you want more control over your pc and it starts getting frustrating to do things its time t move.

This is when you move up the scale to gentoo, debian or one of the distros based on those two. Gobolinux, knoppix, libranet, etc. Also there is the lesser known lunar linux which is quite good. You will find one of these that suits you and that is where you will end up. Through the process of setting up this distro you will learn all the things you didn't know while using the easier distro. Rays of enlightenment will shine upon you from the heavens. Well, not quite, but it feels good.

It is possible you will be eternally satisfied with Fedora/Mandrake. If this is the case, good, don't move up. The only reason to move up the scale is if you are the kind of person who is dissatisfied with the user-friendly offerings. However, there are also people who are still dissatsified with gentoo/debian level distributions. These people do something called linux from scratch. I like to call this unemployed linux for obvious reasons.

Yeah, someone should really make a heirarchy of distributions in a nice graph. LFS could be at the top with lindows and xandros at the bottom. I'd do it, but I have a job. By the way, I'm all gentoo in this house, and yes I am a ricer and proud of it. Insert an emerge joke here.

Debian+KDE

[Cranx]

Debian+KDE might be right for you. You could probably get set up easier with Mandrake+KDE, but since you're a programmer, there's a good chance the *slightly* more difficult Debian install procedures are doable for you. Debian has a really, really nice network update system.

Suse 9.1

[blunte]

I just recently did this same thing, and I finally landed on Suse 9.1.

I tried the following, listed in order of preference:

Libranet 2.8.1 - very nice commercial Debian system, but apt-get doesn't work like magic 100% of the time.

Fedora Core 2 - very nice, but some immediate stability problems with Gnome Nautilus (crashes while trying to do Samba client things). Samba Active Directory features do not work as the pretty GUI tools would suggest. I'm sure with ample configuration of smb.conf and other conf files it may work.

Knoppix 3.4 - very slick, but actually using it off CDROM is painfully slow. HD install not flawless, but once you mkswap manually you fix the one problem. Installs too much crap.

Debian Sarge - same as Libranet, without the handy Adminmenu and other Libranet goodies. Same apt-get issues.

FreeBSD 4.10 - nice, but building non-bin-supported products from ports gets old quickly. Firefox took ages to build on a 2GHz workstation class machine.

Then I tried Suse 9.1 Personal when the ISOs were released free. Very very nice. High quality, great polish. YaST is quite good, but not perfect. Package installation using YaST is nice when it works (usually does), but when it fails you get no details about why it failed. You end up doing rpm from command line anyway, and as with all Linuxes you find that the reason for the failure was a missing dependency or a conflict.

Ramming (force) the latest Samba server and client software down rpm magically got me a system that can painlessly connect to Active Directory network shares via Konquerer file manager, and after manually starting smbd and nmbd, I have a working Samba host. Very pleasant.

My great desire is to find a distro that automagically does Active Directory membership/browsing, as well as hosting of shares within the domain. I also long for some kind of package management system that doesn't have every package fighting with every other package, or doom me to using several old version software.

I'm sure this is naive, but I'd be happy with every package/app going in its own directory, and including (or automatically downloading) every library it needs and storing it in its own dir.

If there's one huge huge rough spot in Linux/BSD desktop adoption, it's package management. None of the existing systems - ports, rpm, apt/dpkg work in all cases.

Good luck.