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Survey Finds Most Popular Linux Laptop Distros: Ubuntu and Arch (phoronix.com)

After collating 30,171 responses, Phoronixhas released some results from their first Linux Laptop Survey. An anonymous reader quotes their report: To little surprise, Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution running on the respondents' laptops. 38.9% of the respondents were said to be using Ubuntu while interesting in second place was Arch Linux at 27.1% followed by Debian at 15.3%. Rounding out the top ten were then Fedora at 14.8%, Linux Mint in 5th at 10.8%, openSUSE/SUSE in sixth at 4.2%, Gentoo in seventh at 3.9%, CentOS/RHEL in eighth at 3.1%, Solus in ninth at 2%, and Manjaro in tenth at 1.6%. The other Linux distributions had each commanded less than 1% of the overall response.
Only 10.3% of respondents said their most recent laptop purchase came pre-loaded with Linux. But 29.3% are now dual-booting their Linux laptop with Windows, while another 4.4% were dual-booting with yet another Linux distribution.

141 comments

  1. What kind of Software Development Work on Laptops? by mykepredko · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was really surprised to see that Software Development was the second most popular primary application for Linux laptops. Personally, I use a couple of tower systems with a couple of big monitors for software development that I can upgrade periodically with new M/Bs, Processors, etc. The code that I write is mostly (C/C++) firmware with some Java followed by scripting/Javascript but I feel like there's no way I can be productive (other than emergency bug fixes) on a laptop and I worry about losing a laptop with any kind of code on it (even though it's backed up on GitHub). A laptop for me is something to do presentations, demos, emails and the occasional spreadsheet, not for developing code.

    Is it a personal style thing that I prefer the desktop systems or are there reasons why people use laptops for their software development?

  2. ugh dual boot by js290 · · Score: 0

    Not being productive when system is rebooting. Windows 10 Linux subsystem installs Ubuntu for you.

    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

    --
    "Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
    1. Re:ugh dual boot by F.Ultra · · Score: 2

      Never ever, Ubuntu on the workstation and Windows 10 as a Virtual Box guest for the rare occasion where I have to make a Windows build (using GCC on MSYS2 since VS is cancer).

    2. Re: ugh dual boot by thundercattt · · Score: 3, Informative

      Agreed. I want to give M$ as little power as I can on my laptop. Within VM, if by chance I can't do something on Debian. Which almost never happens

    3. Re: ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you cannot be productive while rebooting, how do you manage with Windows?

    4. Re:ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just cross-compile on Ubuntu? All cross-compiler packages are just an install away.
      Also gives a much smoother release process.
      Can even do some basic testing via wine if you want...

    5. Re: ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      systemd needs rebooting far more often than windows

    6. Re: ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What are you doing with it that requires a reboot?

      I'm running Arch Linux with systemd, and have been for years now. I've never had to reboot due to systemd yet.

    7. Re: ugh dual boot by Spacelord · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So what do you do when a systemd update comes in? Just leave the system running?

    8. Re: ugh dual boot by Jerry · · Score: 1

      Whaaaaat?
      I've been running Neon on top of Ubuntu 16.04 for two years and systemd has NEVER forced me to reboot. I'm also running my NVidia GT650M via nvidia-378 and it makes my secondary GPU, which cannot be set as the primary in the BIOS, act like the primary.

      --

      Running with Linux for over 20 years!

    9. Re: ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I usually do the update, pray, reboot, swear when the new version of systemd that was just installed fails in some way, swear again, get out my phone so I can google for a fix or workaround, try to find a Linux live disc so I can boot the system and make the fix, pray again, reboot again, wait for systemd to screw up again, fix it again, pray once more, reboot once more, give a sigh of relief when the system seems to finally be booting properly, and then kick myself for not switching to FreeBSD.

    10. Re:ugh dual boot by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

      Does not work if you want to provide proper QA to paying customers. Also one of our products puts data into MS SQL Server among other things and running that beast on Wine is no fun when you have some 200K updates per second.

    11. Re:ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Windows 10 Linux subsystem installs Ubuntu for you.

      LMAOOOOOOOOO

    12. Re: ugh dual boot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, I would assume proper QA isn't being done on a developer system anyway, and your "when you need a Windows build" sounded like Linux was the primary platform.
      But if you need to do something like run against mssql a native Windows environment is probably the only thing making sense.

    13. Re: ugh dual boot by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

      Our customers run a wide variety of systems so in order to support the poor ones who run Windows I do occasionally have to both provide a Windows build and perform QA.

  3. CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 2

    I can understand CentOS/RHEL on servers, but on desktops, who would choose that? While Fedora is bleeding edge and ships with 10-minute old kernels, CentOS/RHEL are possibly even more conservative than the Debian "stale" branch.

    Unless one has antiquated hardware, there's just no reason to pick antiquated libraries and kernels. I mean, if you buy a recent laptop, why would you want a kernel that was released 3-4 years before the hardware you bought was designed? Or who in their right mind would possible desire Java 7?

    --
    lucm, indeed.
    1. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by gustygolf · · Score: 2

      Some people just prefer not having to deal with a major software upgrade to their computer every six months.

      --
      "Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 58 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment" -- slashdot, driving users away.
    2. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 1

      Maybe my thinking is biased because I don't keep laptops or desktops long enough (I usually buy new ones every year, I'm like those women who have 20 pairs of shoes except in my case it's laptops I no longer use).

      But the way I see it, there's been no point in time when CentOS/RHEL or Debian stable was in sync with whatever modern computing offered, which means that unless one buys computers second-hand, one has to restrict themselves to antiquated software if they install those distributions. I don't see the value. It's like buying a Samsung S8 and installing Android Jelly Bean.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    3. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by RotateLeftByte · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or (like me) prefer to have the exact same OS on their Laptops as on their servers. Makes S/W development easy.
      The Stability is as you say a key point. 10 years of patches with CentOS and built from the same sources as RHEL. Great.

      --
      I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
    4. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      CentOS/RHEL work on recent hardware. They release updates pretty sharpish once say a new CPU is released. These are backported into older versions. So you don't have to buy old or secondhand kit. You obviously have no real experience with this sort of stuff.

    5. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I run CentOS 6 on four laptops here for work and for family. Old and creaky but also stable as a rock. It's on the laptops for several reasons. Mostly inertia. I run CentOS 6 on servers and it keeps admin effort low to run the same thing. I'm used to it. It's the last of the RH distros that does not have systemd (nothing against folks that want it, I don't). Finally, it works very well on the laptops. If necessary, I host whatever shiny software I need in a VM.

    6. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 2

      I don't have to point out what an idiot you are, all I have to do is provide this link.

      https://www.intel.com/content/...

      Now go buy a new laptop at Best Buy that has a 3168 or 7260 wifi chip (which is fairly common) and come back to tell us all about the fun you had getting it to work with CentOS/RHEL. Since you probably don't even know: those distros ship at best with a 3.10 kernel.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    7. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by mixed_signal · · Score: 1

      There are large hardware development systems, like Cadence, that are guaranteed/supported only on RHEL, which CentOS is essentially equivalent to. It works fine for that purpose, and often is run on shared servers, as well as desktops.

    8. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 2

      I usually buy new ones every year, I'm like those women who have 20 pairs of shoes except in my case it's laptops I no longer use.

      As long as the shoes are bootable, why throw them away?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    9. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 1

      Been there before. CentOS "works" for stuff certified for RHEL but if the vendor finds out you're f*cked.

      There are a few interesting differences. For instance while you get the same patches (a few days late for CentOS), with RHEL you can do a bit of cherry picking and decide to only apply security patches. On CentOS you can't do that, it's just "updates" without nuances. If the vendor certifies his app for a specific RHEL release you can bet they're not gonna support it if you have conflicting libraries following a CentOS update.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    10. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have been running Fedora for about 13 years now. Please don't confuse "bleeding edge" with unstable. During my entire time running Fedora, I had three major upsets (I won't lie to you) all which were fixable with about 1/2 a day's work, all which occurred over ten years ago.

      Fedora's commitment to using the latest software does not come at the typical price of having a wildly unstable machine. For a business, sure I'd still recommend full backups before rolling forward to a new major release, but that's because it is a business, where such things are routine to ensure a fall back plan. Safety against failure is a business idol, even when they run backups that have never been verified (and it's not a backup in my book unless you tested restoration).

    11. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I myself dumped Fedora because of SELinux. I used Fedora for a few years but it got to be too big a friggin pain in the ass to customize with unsupported apps. Lots of weird errors.

          And learning all the nuances of how to administer SELinux is not a trivial task. There are a myriad of ways an application can fail and it can be extremely cryptic on the right way to fix it, rather than just adding a hack.

      That said, I really think the idea of SELinux is pretty cool. It's the practice that is painful. If you stick with the prepackaged software it's not too bad.

    12. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 1

      You could simply "setenforce 0" and be done with it, or find which app is causing problems and use a permissive domain, or use audit2allow. Either way you end up at worst with the same thing as a distro that has no SELinux.

      For instance I have long given up on getting logrotate to work with SELinux, I always set logrotate_t as permissive otherwise by the time I need to check logs I realize the app has failed to write logs because it's using a weird combination of copytruncate and others. I don't find added value in spending too much time dealing with this stuff.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    13. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

      This, a million times this! Consitency between how the code works on the servers and the dev machines is important to me and also it makes distribution far easier, you just have to scp over the binary.

    14. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

      And how often does CentOS/RHEL create conflicting libraries due to updates within the same major version? Have they even done it once? Sounds like they have from your post but I find that really strange since the big reason to have a stable release such as RHEL or any of the LTS systems from i.e Ubuntu is that they do not do changes like this.

    15. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Brockmire · · Score: 1

      Shoes are not boots, you insensitive clod!

    16. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Brockmire · · Score: 1

      When I install yum-cron and only select security updates, how is that not the same?

    17. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 1

      I don't mean that they release updates that cause problems within the o/s, I mean that they release updates that the vendor's product may not work with. I've seen that happen more than once with specialized apps; for instance, a million-dollar wonder behaving weirdly after upgrading some obscure library from 4.7.3u22 to 4.7.3u24.

      And of course when it happens you don't get an obvious error message; something weird starts happening - maybe sessions don't serialize properly when they reach a specific size or something like that - and you may notice it days after the update. Troubleshooting becomes really entertaining and of course since you're using the wrong o/s the vendor will not touch it and won't be able to reproduce your problem.

      That's one aspect of RHEL that is important. You can reject all updates except for severe security patches. If you use CentOS or one of the clones (ex: Oracle Linux) then it's all or nothing, so you end up either playing roulette with bugs.

      I'm not saying this is a showstopper for using CentOS, but if you pay a lot of money for a specialized product that is certified to run on RHEL 7.1, running it on a "compatible" CentOS is not always a good idea even if it "works".

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    18. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 1

      When I install yum-cron and only select security updates, how is that not the same?

      Doesn't work. The security updates are not tagged as such in those repos, that's a feature available only in paid versions of RH repos.

      See this discussion for instance: https://serverfault.com/questi...
      or
      https://bugs.centos.org/view.p...

      I don't know what exactly you see in your list but it's probably everything, not just security ones.

      The only way to do it would be to piggyback on the updates in a valid RHEL subscription to pick & choose, but I'm pretty sure that would break the EULA.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    19. Re:CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People who don't use Java don't care about Java 7.

    20. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

      Ouch that sounds really bad. Wonder what that vendor or your was up to, they must have been doing something really nasty for an update like that to break in such a way.

    21. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by lucm · · Score: 1

      Ouch that sounds really bad. Wonder what that vendor or your was up to, they must have been doing something really nasty for an update like that to break in such a way.

      This happens all the time with all kinds of products. This is because they have very very specific test cases that are only validated on very very specific o/s releases.

      For instance, look at this exciting series of support windows for SAP Hana:

      https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/...

      and look at the comment at the bottom:

      Contrary to the unclear statement in picture in chapter "Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA (RHEL for SAP HANA)" where you can see the gray arrow for RHEL 6.8 from June 2016 which might indicate that it is a validf release for SAP HANA SPS 12 Red Hat Enterprise 6.8 is NOT supported for SAP Hana SPS 12. We cleared this with an official ticket @SAP. See also Note 2247020 - "SAP HANA DB: Recommended OS settings for RHEL 6.7" where RHEL 6.8 explizitily is excluded from support !

      Same kind of limitations is to be expected with most ERP/MRP/CRM/etc. You have to stay in their narrow "corridors" to be supported or you're on your own when shit hits the fan.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    22. Re: CentOS/RHEL on the desktop? by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

      Well glad I don't have to use such shitty software. I have yet to see an upgrade of RHEL or CentOS that breaks the software that we create and support for our customers.

  4. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by F.Ultra · · Score: 4, Informative

    I prefer a proper workstation myself but all the other developers at work use laptops, I'm the outlier there. They claim it's so that they can take them home but at home I have another workstation with all the code on anyway so that one does not fully compute either.

  5. Mint @5th? by Type44Q · · Score: 2

    Mint @5th? Not buying it.

    1. Re:Mint @5th? by lexman098 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Maybe Ubuntu isn't as bad as the vocal minority keeps telling us it is?

    2. Re:Mint @5th? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is a laptop survey. I doubt many serious computer users use a laptop.

      Mint is still top by a long way on DistroWatch:

      https://distrowatch.com/

    3. Re:Mint @5th? by Jetstream · · Score: 1

      I think that's only a "page hit" ranking, though, and doesn't reflect what people actually use. Personally, I use LMint on both my desktop & laptop.

    4. Re:Mint @5th? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why? What makes Mint special, or separate from the pack? Because it's called Mint? It's Ubuntu! -- and Ubuntu is Debian! -- and Debian is just Linux! All of these stupid distributions need to just die off. You only need a few flavors with real differences that have some kind of impact.

      Now eat my sausage and cry like a little cunt slice.

    5. Re:Mint @5th? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nor am I buying it. There must be a selection bias in the survey. Maybe the Ubuntu users responded more as they feel they have had issues that they bravely resolved. Mint users don't have to flash their collection of achievements, they just get on with computing and working. Survey? There was a survey?

    6. Re:Mint @5th? by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 1

      Why? What makes Mint special, or separate from the pack? Because it's called Mint? It's Ubuntu! -- and Ubuntu is Debian! -- and Debian is just Linux!

      Everyone also seems to forget that some people use versions of Mint based directly on Debian, without the Ubuntu mumbo-jumbo. Still, it is worse than oversimplification to say "Mint is Ubuntu," because that is not true, even when talking about mainstream Mint, nor is it accurate to say "Ubuntu is Debian, Debian is Linux." If that were true, you could just say Mint = Ubuntu = Linux = computer = Windows 3.1 = Mac OS, which is just ridiculous.

      --
      This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
    7. Re:Mint @5th? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A survey doesn't accurately reflect what people actually use either. I trust the numbers from DistroWatch a lot more.

      Linux Mint has been the #1 distro for a long time. Ubuntu isn't even close.

  6. Re: Linux on the Laptop by thundercattt · · Score: 0

    Odd. Apple laptops do quite well. iOS is just a candy coated version of Linux. Suck it AC

  7. Re:Linux on the Laptop by lucm · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you make your decisions based on what the masses want, you must have a tedious life.

    Linux on the desktop today is excellent. Sometimes there's problems (for instance I found out that Wayland still has some kinks especially with Java GUIs) but overall, the user experience on a recent Fedora or Mint is vastly superior to the user experience on Windows 10. Or install OpenSUSE and see how futuristic bleeding-edge KDE has become, it's like using a computer in a Hollywood sci-fi movie.

    Is the Linux desktop ready for the enterprise? Maybe not, and that's because a vital part of computing at work revolves around spreadsheets, and LibreOffice is just not there yet. Until browser spreadsheets improve an order of magnitude or until Microsoft release Office for Linux it's going to be a tough sell. But apart from that, the stability and quality of the Linux desktop is definitely better than that of Windows or OSX.

    --
    lucm, indeed.
  8. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The way the question was worded it didn't mean "use it full-time for software development".
    I have a couple of projects I sometimes like to hack on sitting outside.
    Or when travelling.
    Or on the kitchen table, because the computer room got too hot with the computer running full speed and heat outside.
    So I answered that I do use it for software development, even if it's below 20% of the time.

  9. Lenovo most popular? by maestroX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thought most Linux users would stay away from Lenovo after the bios incident

    1. Re:Lenovo most popular? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What was the Lenovo bios incident ? In market for linux laptop.

    2. Re:Lenovo most popular? by LVSlushdat · · Score: 1

      Yup... As far as I'm concerned, if it aint Dell, it can go to hell... And it is nice to see that Dell is finally putting Linux on their Precision line of laptop workstations..There for the longest time all you could get Linux preinstalled on was consumer-grade XPS. Running KUbuntu 14.04 on both my Precision T3500 desktop and M4400 laptop. Flawless operation...

      --
      THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
    3. Re:Lenovo most popular? by infolation · · Score: 3, Informative

      Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops - by hiding it in the BIOS

      In 2015 it installed some Lenovo executables into the system32 dir that ran with admin permissions (so they could download more Lenovo rubbish).

      They seem to have stopped doing it. It didn't affect Linux (afaik, since it exploits WPBT which is Windows-only). And ironally I actually own a stack of old 2008 Lenovo thinkpads precisely because they can have the firmware removed and replaced with a safer FOSS version (Libreboot).

    4. Re:Lenovo most popular? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      many of us have lenovos that are older than that, for one thing.

  10. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by jouassou · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Academic here. Most of my programming are physics simulations programs, which are a bit too heavy to run on a laptop, but can be tested comfortably on a workstation, and are then run on a supercomputer to produce the final results. However, I still do most of my programing from a laptop. What I typically do then, is that I ssh from my laptop to my office desktop computer, and keep open a terminal with one nvim tab for development, one cmake tab for recompiling, one tmux tab for running test simulations, and one tab where I tail -f the output logs and plot any resulting data (relying on X forwarding).

    The main reason I do this, is that I find a typical office setting very uncomfortable over time — I much prefer switching rooms, furniture, and working positions every few hours when doing longer programming sessions. That's something you can do with a laptop with a decent battery, but not with a desktop computer. Also, I do a lot of work from home, where I haven't even had a desktop computer for the past 5 years, as a decent laptop now does everything I want from it.

  11. Re:Linux on the Laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Has the AMD open office calc rewrite been making any progress? It's only been 4 years or so...

  12. Re: Linux on the Laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Odd. Apple laptops do quite well. iOS is just a candy coated version of Linux. Suck it AC

    What absolutely ill-informed dreck. "candy coated version of Linux"? macOS has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Linux, you retard.

  13. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by MightyMartian · · Score: 1

    I'm the same. I like as light and small form a laptop as possible, and that makes for a fairly shitty development machine. I also like to monitor setups, and while you can do it with laptops, I find it interesting awkward.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  14. HiDpi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Linux Mint 18.2 on a Lenovo T470s.

    Is Mint my favorite as a software dev? No. Is it the lesser evil with HiDPI? Right now, yes.

    Don't get me started on Java apps on HiDPI.

    1. Re:HiDpi by epyT-R · · Score: 1

      Don't get me started on Java apps period.

  15. Not surprised about Mint's spot by QuietLagoon · · Score: 2

    I had been running Linux Mint on my notebook for nearly a year. About 25% of the time it would not get through a cold boot-up. I had to power down and restart. Thinking It might be an install quirk, I wiped and re-installed Mint. Same thing. Now I run Debian with no issues at all. (notebook is a ThinkPad)

    1. Re:Not surprised about Mint's spot by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 1

      If you ran Mint for a year and it wouldn't boot 25% of the time, that's on you, your install, an/or your hardware, not Mint. In the same vein, I can't claim that Mint is perfect just because it boots perfectly 99.98% of the time for me on my laptop.

      --
      This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
    2. Re:Not surprised about Mint's spot by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1

      If you ran Mint for a year and it wouldn't boot 25% of the time, that's on you, your install, an/or your hardware, not Mint. ...

      Oh, did I strike a nerve? The hardware is fine. It has run OpenBSD, FreeBSD, various other flavors of Linux, and is now running Debian with no issues or problems whatsoever. There is the possibility that the hardware exposes an obscure bug in something Mint, I don't know.

      .
      I'm coming into Linux from Windows. I don't have any "favorite" Linux distribution, I just want a notebook that is reliable. Debian provided that for me. You may have different experiences. That's fine. Pick what works for you. Mint didn't work for me.

      (as an aside --- As a new Linux user, I am amazed at the tribal-like warfare among the various Linux distributions. But I guess that is a different thread.)

    3. Re:Not surprised about Mint's spot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "As a new Linux user, I am amazed at the tribal-like warfare among the various Linux distributions. But I guess that is a different thread."

      i don't know that that's the majority. probably more like a vocal minority. though, there may be a majority of pissy nerds but that's probably not OS specific, despite what some might say. i usually only criticize other distros because i care if they get better or not. i get mad at ubuntu because they make stupid decisions sometimes and i want them to succeed in making a distro grannies can use without a bunch of BS, for instance.

  16. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I was really surprised to see that Software Development was the second most popular primary application for Linux laptops.

    Like any solicitation-response based survey, this one suffers from a huge selection bias. The Linux users that see the solicitation differ from "typical" Linux users, and those that take the time to respond differ even more.

  17. The first distro still leads by a large margin by swillden · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ubuntu and Mint are Debian based, so the Debian total is 65%. Manjaro is Arch-based, so Arch is 28.7%. I also tend to lump RPM-based distros together, Fedora + SUSE + RedHat is at 22.1%.

    Personally, I started with Red Hat (5.0 IIRC, and note this is not Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which started a new number sequence), obtained as a boxed set on CDs purchased at Barnes & Noble. It wasn't long before I gave Debian a try, starting with 2.0 (Hamm), and I was hooked. Within a couple of years I had stopped using Windows completely, so Windows 2000 was the last version I used, and that only briefly. For many years I ran Debian unstable, then I backed off to running testing, since it was less fiddly, not that unstable is bad, really. It's quite solid; the name refers to the changing nature of the contents, not to the reliability of the system. Along the way I tinkered with Gentoo, Slack and a few others, but always came back to Debian.

    These days I just use my work machines which run a customized version of Ubuntu (desktop) and OS X (laptop). If I did have a personally-owned laptop, it would probably be a MacBook running Debian testing. Though I'd probably give Arch a try. I like the rolling release model and Debian testing undergoes occasional lockdowns as the project gets close to a release. If Arch is less fiddly than Debian unstable, I might like it better.

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    1. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yup, 65% Debian matches my own observations in other companies. One of my laptops runs Fedora, one runs OpenBSD and everything else are FreeBSD (Macbooks). Linux is a bit too cavalier about security for me, but it works fine.

    2. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Given that this asshole works for Google, I'd consider this posting an ad...

    3. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why would you mix in openSUSE with Fedora and CentOS? they're not in the same family. the only common link is RPM, but they don't share code or history, just a package manager.

    4. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 1

      Wow. So tell me - did he steal your girlfriend, or was it he kicked your dog?

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    5. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by swillden · · Score: 1

      Wow. So tell me - did he steal your girlfriend, or was it he kicked your dog?

      Other way around. I stole his dog and kicked his girlfriend. I think. It's kind of hard to tell them apart.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    6. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by swillden · · Score: 1

      Given that this asshole works for Google, I'd consider this posting an ad...

      So... what is it that I'm advertising?

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    7. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by swillden · · Score: 1

      Why would you mix in openSUSE with Fedora and CentOS? they're not in the same family. the only common link is RPM, but they don't share code or history, just a package manager.

      It's been a while since I uses SuSE (since before it acquired the "Open"), but it always felt like it had a lot in common with RH. I think SuSE largely followed RedHat's lead in the way they modularized the system, in ways beyond those driven by the operation of the package manager. Obviously, SuSE was a KDE distro from the beginning, while RH was GNOME, but the differences always seemed pretty shallow.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    8. Re:The first distro still leads by a large margin by WallyL · · Score: 1

      Given that this asshole works for Google, I'd consider this posting an ad...

      So... what is it that I'm advertising?

      Systemd

    9. Re: The first distro still leads by a large margin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Whatever uncle Sergey tells you to. Your comment history confirms it.

  18. Re: Linux on the Laptop by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Informative

    Apple laptops do quite well. iOS is just a candy coated version of Linux.

    1. Apple laptops run OS X, not iOS.
    2. OS X is based on BSD not Linux.

    Perhaps you are thinking of Android, which is based on Linux, and accounts for way more instances than all the servers in the world combined.

  19. priorities by lucm · · Score: 1

    I don't know how much time they should spend optimizing it for AMD GPUs, maybe first they should make it work on computers that have high resolution monitors. Every time I launch Calc by mistake (because I type "Calc" in the Gnome search box and press enter too quickly) I chuckle when I see how LibreOffice looks on my 32 inch high-dpi display.

    --
    lucm, indeed.
  20. Fedora? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm using Fedora (latest respin needed to get it working when I bought a new laptop beginning of 2016), but.

    Working hibernate isn't even a release-requirement for Fedora (it's not officially supported at all, and it does not work, either). There's various other shortcomings regarding laptops, too.

    The Fedora-on-laptop percentage looks a bit high, for something that it isn't even intended to be used for.

    1. Re:Fedora? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've abandoned Fedora after over ten-years of use(fc5-fc20), was trying to avoid Gnome3 yet running FC20 for three years without update was becoming extremely unstable. Searched for a new distro, thought about going back to FreeBSD yet I'm addicted to KVM. Gentoo's compile everything similar to FreeBSD was tempting yet portage and emerge where just too confusing. Slackware great idea yet I cant run my system without selinux. Ubuntoo! your joking right? Arch why when there's CentOS. So went with CentOS6 because of gnome2 for six months yet to many old packages. Now on CentOS7 with MATE, thinkpadW500 runs cooler and whats not available in the repos i compile from source.

    2. Re: Fedora? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's the point of hibernate? With SSD and large amounts of RAM, boot is faster than restoring a hibernation image anyway. Unless you use lots of programs with a lot of state that cannot restore that state themselves it has become a useless technology.

  21. Russia Obviously Screwed with the Voting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Everybody knows that Puppy Linux and DSL are the top two!

    1. Re:Russia Obviously Screwed with the Voting by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 1

      Slackware is actually number one by a wide margin, but everyone knows Slackware users don't bother responding to stupid surveys, duh.

      --
      This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
  22. Once you go Slack, you never go back by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Although I've heard those little blue pills can help.

  23. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by fluffernutter · · Score: 2

    I hate being tied to an office, and because my development 'gig' is a sideline for me often I find myself at my kids' extra curricular activities with spare time, so I develop from swimming pool lobbies, sometimes parking lots. I develop all the time, mostly web server and mobile app development. It works fine on a laptop for me.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  24. Re: Linux on the Laptop by fluffernutter · · Score: 1

    Also, there is nothing candy-coated about it. I find I have to configure macos far more than I have to configure linux to get it to do what I need to do.

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  25. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I do mostly back-end web stuff. I like a laptop because it gives me the flex to go to clients, demonstrate work, capture requirements and rapid-prototype, all on the one system. Ubuntu is my go-to OS for that, because it means a mid-range laptop can do the work efficiently, and also run multiple dev environments simultaneously. I'm currently using a Dell e5430 from three years ago, and it handles everything with aplomb: I don't feel any particular impetus to upgrade (apart from maybe replacing the Optical drive with a caddy and moving to a two HDD system, one of them an SSD).
    Consumer/Executive laptops aren't much use, but a decent business-oriented laptop should come with a fair degree of upgradability.
    That said, I use a dock when I'm at home base. It just makes life more pleasant.

  26. Re: Linux on the Laptop by Stormwatch · · Score: 2

    Not exactly. Linux is Unix-like, macOS is officially certified Unix.

  27. Re: Linux on the Laptop by Stormwatch · · Score: 1

    They don't call it OS X anymore, now it's macOS.

  28. Wonder how much of the Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Was Mint?

  29. Re: Linux on the Laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Almost none of the users of either *ever* interacts with their OS in any fashion other than the GUI. And it that realm Linux is shite. No Linux DE or GUI even approaches OSX's visual polish and core design (although iOS is crap, as is iTunes UI). Linux will never be adopted by the masses. If nothing else the license will block funding for a major product design effort. No profit because of "information wants to be free" thievery.

    Linux is great, and great for servers too. If you aren't interested in learning a BSD, be happy and move along.

  30. Which laptops are most repairable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The one question NOT asked was about repairability and availability of spare parts.

    My choice in laptops has been based on what brand has parts readily available at a reasonable price. In my limited experience, Dell has been the best in this regard. I still have one Dell laptop that is 10 years old and with upgrades and repairs is better than new, and still fairly competitive.

    Can anyone share their experieces with repairs based on brands? Thanks!

  31. Exactly correct by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Our customers run RHEL, so we use CentOS for most everything except the last phase of test on RHEL. So having CentOS on my laptop makes perfect sense. Plus (provided I move to the mainline kernel to get wifi working) almost everything works fine on my cheap HP laptop (touchscreen doesn't work, don't care enough to fix it). Anyhow, it lets me plink away at things over the weekend or fix things at a customer site and then svn commit (call me traditionalist) and know it the Jenkins rebuild is 99% likely to build without a problem. Plus stability.

  32. Re: Linux on the Laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    actually ATM pretty much any linux uses this severely retarded init systemd that some stupid piece of shit half copied from apple's crap

  33. So update to the mainline kernel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I had to do that to get the wifi to work with my HP laptop. Google will show you how. Just make sure you get a usb ethernet to get started if the laptop doesn't have a wired ethernet port.. We use CentOS for compatibility with customer machines and long term stability, so having my laptop match our standard dev environment is pretty important to me.

  34. Re: Linux on the Laptop by chipschap · · Score: 1

    "No Linux DE or GUI even approaches OSX's visual polish and core design"

    This is true, but it doesn't matter. Linux is incredibly efficient from the command line.

    "Linux will never be adopted by the masses."

    This is probably true, but again it doesn't matter. Those of us who are productive with it every single day are quite happy. On the other hand, many casual users who have a Linux system set up for them use it and barely know that they're not using Windows. How many of us have set up Linux systems for grandparents, spouses, etc.? Many. They browse the web in relative safety and don't care what the operating system is called.

    "No profit because of "information wants to be free" thievery."

    This argument has been debunked many times in the past.

  35. DistroWatch gives a different result by Jerry · · Score: 2

    http://distrowatch.com/awstats...

    Ubuntu is only 2.3% of the 14,445,000 hits running Linux this month. The rest of the name brand distros hoover around 0%.

    The most popular distro is Unknown:
            GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution) 12,446,745 44.4 %

    --

    Running with Linux for over 20 years!

    1. Re:DistroWatch gives a different result by ckatko · · Score: 1

      Why are they unknown?

    2. Re:DistroWatch gives a different result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The stats are based on browser IDs. If the distro does not add a fingerprint to the web browser then it's classified as unknown.

    3. Re:DistroWatch gives a different result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But DistroWatch and the Phoronix survey both agree that Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, and OpenSUSE / SUSE are among the top 6 Linux distributions.

    4. Re:DistroWatch gives a different result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not just that. Some BSD or Linux flavours would even spoof (report incorrectly) their browser header and OS type to ward off simple attacks and exploits. Most Linux and BSD's are reporting as Win10, WinXP or Win7. Hence the bloated Windows installations on stat counters.

  36. Re:ugh dual boot - virtual box is the way to go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    yep. - too many come to me and ask me to fix their dual boot situation.

    arggghhh...

    just use virtualbox and be done with it folks...

    recommend - win7/win10/server2008r2/server2012r2 with virtualbox -- with 7-10 different OS's loaded just waiting inside to be sued.

  37. People still use Gentoo on laptops? by PvtVoid · · Score: 0

    Or is it that they just haven't finished compiling yet?

  38. Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by Jerry · · Score: 2

    on this thread reminded me of the great uptime wars 15 years ago. Linux users were claiming uptimes of 200, 300, 400 and more days, only to be countered by Windows users who claimed equal or longer uptimes.

    The argument was settled abruptly and permanently when Microsoft announced the 32bit clock bug which automatically rebooted ALL Windows installations after an uptime of only 49.7 days. Any Windows user claiming 50 or more days of uptime was lying.

    My longest uptime was 410 days (IIRC) on an in office PostgreSQL server running SuSE 6.3.
    I've been retired for nine years and I no longer need 24/7/365 access to my computers, all of which are laptops, so I turn them off every night.

    Today I see in this comment sections lots of criticisms about the "usability" of KDE, Plasma, Gnome, Mint and other Linux DE's and it is obvious from the nature of the complaints that the complainers are less than truthful about their assertions. The more things change the more they remain the same! :D

    --

    Running with Linux for over 20 years!

    1. Re:Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by pi_rules · · Score: 1

      The 49.7 day bug was only on 95 and 98, maybe Me too but nobody even had that installed for 49.7 days.

      The stuff on NT kernels (Win 2k, XP, etc) never suffered from it.

    2. Re:Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Any Windows user claiming 50 or more days of uptime was lying.

      Or running Windows 3 or 3.1 or 3.11 or NT 3.1 or NT 3.5 or NT 3.51 or NT 4, or if they were writing in Chinese they could have been running Windows 3.2

      There were 2 versions of Windows affected by the bug.

    3. Re:Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by e432776 · · Score: 1

      I ran a selection of those OSs, and have to say that the NT kernel flavors were also the ones more likely to approach 50d uptimes compared with the others.

    4. Re:Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by Reziac · · Score: 1

      Not quite. The Windows rollover bug triggered due to a bug in the system's timer chip, and not all hardware had the bug. My Tyan S1830S (440BX) motherboards certainly didn't; my unpatched Win98 (and WinME, once I got it beaten into submission) had no problem staying up for months on end.

      My longest uptime in that era was WinXP (no SP) on one of the Tyans, which ran 24/7 for eight *years* with only two restarts along the way, both due to power outages beyond the UPS's capacity. And that box did all the heavy lifting.

      Thanks to that, I still think rebooting more than a few times a year is embarrassing, regardless of your OS. :)

      --
      ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
    5. Re:Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by toddestan · · Score: 1

      You don't have 8 years of uptime with 2 restarts along the way, though if you really only restarted it twice in 8 years that means you had at least 2.66 years uptime which is pretty impressive as Windows XP goes. I never really got XP (or 2000) to last much longer than 120 days, which iI repeated on multiple installations on multiple pieces of hardware. I've seen NT4 make it close to a year, and my personal best was a Vista(!) system that made it all the way to 497 days, which you might notice is 49.7 days multiplied by 10. Vista and Windows 7 have (had?) a bug in their networking stack that kills the networking after 497 days but doesn't actually take down the OS. You would think that kind of uptime would also be possible for Windows 7, but I've found Windows 7 to be too unstable to last more than a month or two. You can forget about Windows 10, though Windows 8 might be possible as it's really much improved over Windows 7 except for the whole UI thing.

      Of course, my Linux computers will plug along until either I reboot them for some reason, a hardware failure happens, or the power goes out. I usually get a good power outage here about once a year that lasts several hours, which keeps me from usually getting more than about 300-400 days or so. As a matter of fact I can tell you it's been 279 day 5 hours, and 40 minutes since the last one.

    6. Re:Comment wars between Linux and Windows users by Reziac · · Score: 1

      Yep, that old XP box really did have uptimes measured in years; was closing on 3 years when it got sorta retired because of a protracted crosscountry move. (WinME on the same hardware did almost as well... started off so bad it couldn't even crash properly, but applied 98Lite and disabled System Restore, and it never crashed again. Best uptime was a little under 2 years. Tyan motherboard and Matrox vidcard, stable hardware makes a huge difference.)

      Then again, my original DOS6 box was just as stable, and all my everyday boxen have been solid, so now rebooting is against my religion. :)

      My current champ is the XP64 box at about 8 months; likewise restarted only if the power is out too long or for dinking with the hardware, tho so far it hasn't had the opportunity that its predecessor did.

      The other XP box is pretty good too, normally the only thing that knocks it down is a buggy flash stick (stay away from the Lexar 140GB, it does something rude). But the real leader is its boot drive... which presently has (are you sitting down?) power-on time of 78,202 hours!

      Not impressed by Win7. Don't use it much but I've noticed if anything buggers up Explorer (or anything that replaces it, eg. Ex++) it never really recovers, and will keep hanging up in the same spot until I give up and reboot. Plus lots of odd little bugs and deficiencies that unfortunately more than make up for its improvements.

      Win8/10 (no, I do NOT want a *&$^# cellphone as my desktop!) are what drove me to seriously hunting for a linux I can stand to live with (been looking a long time). So far the leader of the pack is PCLinuxOS, with either Trinity or KDE (or ideally, their unholy hybrid).

      --
      ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
  39. Re:Linux on the Laptop by xtronics · · Score: 1

    Totally agree..
    What surprises me is how many times Im asked to fix someones Linux system - find that it is Ubuntu and why?

    It is basically Debian testing or worse and yes - there are bugs that an average user will have trouble dealing with - why not just use Debian stable?

    I have also fixed other Linux systems and find them better than Ubuntu. Just dont get why it is so popular..

  40. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by pi_rules · · Score: 1

    Most of my programming life (11 years) was as a consultant where I'd frequently be working on site so a laptop was a must. I never really felt like coding on one was any real hindrance though a second monitor when at a permanent location was a nice plus.

    Coding on a laptop is another reason I really like vi/vim keybindings in any editor I can get them in. I'm very used to only using smaller laptop keyboards that don't always have the arrow keys in handy locations.

    And to this day I sorta despise the giant 17" laptops because they're a pain to lug around. My wife has one but I prefer my 14.1" Lenovo. It's underpowered and ancient but travels so nice.

  41. but you can't get a fedora laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I want a Fedora laptop and would buy one if I could find one.

  42. Re: Linux on the Laptop by F.Ultra · · Score: 1

    Yeah right, the macOS GUI is so polished and nice that whenever I boot one up in Virtual Box I only ssh to it, at least Apple haven't managed to idiotize that yet.

  43. Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ubuntu with Gnome is going to sell less because of stupid ideas from Gnome Team we don't want any of those functions you can find in windows och os x

  44. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've been using a laptop for personal software development for the last 14 years, and at work for the last 11 years. I wouldn't want to go back to a desktop, indeed it's a requirement I bring up when I get job offers now.

    Why a laptop? I can work anywhere I want: at home, in the office, I can shift between my desk and a meeting room, or move to a colleague's desk if necessary. It lets me be far more productive than a desktop ever let me be. I just wish it had been an option earlier in my career! Certainly at home, I much prefer to work on a laptop, and the desktop kit I own has effectively been relegated to server duties.

    About half the team at my current job are on desktops, but people are gradually shifting over to laptops just because they work out to be more convenient and productive for them too.

  45. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh, and for the record: Fedora when it comes to Linux, although I mainly use OS X but that's partly through habit (I came to Macs in 2003 because I needed a PowerPC laptop running a BSD-like OS for a project I was involved with).

  46. Windows Linux subsystem, complete with keylogger! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not being productive when system is rebooting. Windows 10 Linux subsystem installs Ubuntu for you.

    Windows 10 Subsystem For Linux. All of the Microsoft features you've come to expect on Linux! Includes a keylogger, back door access to your files, data mining, forced updates, mandatory automatic uninstallation of programs Microsoft deems incompatible, eavesdropping, ads, forced reboots, automatic forced banning of web sites Microsoft deems unacceptable, randomly reset privacy settings, and deceptive practices to install it in the first place. And, coming soon, complete lockout of programs not available through the Windows store. And best of all, not only does Microsoft control your computer in exchange for Cygnuwin Deluxe (Ubuntu edition), you don't need to waste time during reboots between installations, just during forced updates! How did I ever live without this? Better hurry up, Facebook and Google, you haven't got your keyloggers integrated into the desktop OS yet! </sarcasm>

  47. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by henni16 · · Score: 1

    I do mostly server-side Java stuff and have been using the same Linux laptop for it for the last 6+ years.
    But since working on a laptop for more than a couple of hours is literally a pain in the neck, I connect an external keyboard, mouse and monitor.
    So from a practical, prouctivity-related point of view, there really isn't a difference between laptop and desktop for me.

    I'm mostly using the laptop instead of a desktop because it's nice to have my current environment wherever I am AND because I work mostly at home and it saves a lot of electricity.
    From my measurements, calculations and comparison of electricity bills, this 1000EUR laptop is getting close to having paid for itself.

    The CPU is fast enough, so the only upgrades during those years were to replace the optical drive with an SSD and upgrading the RAM from 8GB to 16GB after SuSE 13.x reached its end of life (the current SuSE and KDE have become incredible memory hogs and moving all work from Java 7 to Java 8 didn't exactly help either).

  48. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by swillden · · Score: 2

    I was really surprised to see that Software Development was the second most popular primary application for Linux laptops.

    No kidding. I write a little code on my laptop while traveling, but for day-to-day work I want a beefy workstation with multiple, large monitors, and I want a better keyboard than I've ever found on a laptop, and a good trackball. My workstation is has two 24" monitors and one 30" monitor (and I'm looking to upgrade that 30" to a 40" 4K display) and has a Kinesis Advantage Pro keyboard (with foot pedals!) and a Kensington Expert trackball (which I'm not entirely happy with -- recommendations welcome!).

    I can work through a porthole, but why would I want to?

    --
    Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  49. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Ramze · · Score: 1

    My cousin owns his own software company that largely creates middleware solutions, and while I'm not sure what he has at home, he always has his laptop with him so he can work anywhere in nearly any environment. In the car, at a hotel, in an airplane, in a hospital waiting room, a coffee shop, etc.... He can take calls, open a project on his laptop and edit code and issue patches. He's often travelling.

    There's really no other solution for someone who lives on-the-go so much.

    Another friend is a programmer working for a large software company. He works almost exclusively on his Apple laptop in either OS X or Linux. I'm not sure what he's working on these days, though. He used to mostly work with systems integration and web page back-end scripting, but he's proficient in many areas and languages. System speed and compile time aren't always as important as other factors -- especially if one has more than one machine to work with or more than one project to work on simultaneously... and since the changes go to a development server anyway, there's usually no rush if a project is planned properly.

  50. Not surprised by Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Since Ubuntu comes on a lot of retail PC's. I am not surprised its one of the popular distro's.
    Mint has been a favorite but my personal experience has always left me thinking Mint is not nearly as polished as Ubuntu.

  51. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ive abandoned Fedora after over ten-years of use(fc5-fc20), was trying to avoid Gnome3 yet running FC20 for three years without update was becoming extremely unstable. Searched for a new distro, thought about going back to FreeBSD yet I'm addicted to KVM. Gentoo's compile everything similar to FreeBSD was tempting yet portage and emerge where just too confusing. Slackware great idea yet I cant run my system without selinux. Ubuntoo! your joking right? Arch why when there's CentOS. So went with CentOS6 because of gnome2 for six months yet to many old packages. Now on CentOS7 with MATE, thinkpadW500 runs cooler and whats not available in the repos i compile from source. I'll stay with CentOS untill mayby version 9 then use some thing else; LFS

  52. Server or Laptop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I use Butoo on laptop. Great wireless. Redhat for $$$$!.

  53. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    I'll stay with CentOS untill mayby version 9

    Don't! That'll be the best one. Either they'll realize what a bad idea systemd is and chuck it away, or Lennart will have handed it over to someone competent who'll have knocked most of the bugs out of it.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  54. Honestly surprised to see Arch so high by x_t0ken_407 · · Score: 2

    I've always run Arch on my desktop/laptops [when running a Linux distro] but I always though that it was "too hard" for most Linux newbies. And when I recommend a Linux install to new Linux users, it's ALWAYS Mint, bc it's so easy and built ready-to-go after install. Currently use a MacBook for my main system (work perk), but I do still use Arch in a VM when necessary, and run Arch on my personal laptop.

  55. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    me too:

      beefy desktop workstation (dual-xeon + ton of RAM + SSD arrays + Matrox M9148 with 4 big monitors) for software development on a daily-basis running Windows Server configured as workstation

      17-inch @ 1920x1440 laptop for those times that I like to program everywhere else other than the too-hot/noisy computer room, mainly for smaller side projects, reading dev manuals, SSHing to some other box, and the like running arch-linux (love pacman)

  56. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Arch why when there's CentOS.

    I'm somewhat confused by this. They are substantially different distros.

  57. Perl Web-apps, Python, Ruby web-apps too. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Perl Webapps.
    Ruby on Rails webapps.
    Python webapps.
    Ansible scripting (testing when disconnected).

    I develop code and test (using TDD) on a chromebook, BTW. My main "desktop" system is actually a virtual machine running in a private cloud with less CPU and less RAM than my chromebook. Why? Because we like to use cheap VPS to host our webapps and a powerful system leads to lazy developers. OTOH, if spending $200/month more on VPS saves 2 hours of developer time, that is an easy trade-off for first few times. But if it becomes a habit, quickly we would be spending $10K/month more on cloud servers and that does impact our small, boutique, company bottom line.

    IMHO, no laptop has enough CPU+enough RAM to handle Java development. However, IMHO, no server has enough CPU + RAM to run Java code either.

    In 1994, Sun came to the govt lab where I worked to show off this new language. They said it was compile once, run anywhere. They said it was a little slow and took lots of RAM, but that it would get better in a few years.

    I'm still waiting ... 23 yrs later. It still is slow and uses lots of RAM.

    BTW, I wrote C++ code for 12 platforms for about a decade. I would happily develop that same code on this same chromebook, but libraries have all bloated out and would probably demand a Core i7 + 12G+ of RAM to be handled if I used Windows. For Linux, 4G would be fine, I'm certain.
    These days, I'm infinitely happier writing Ruby and Perl code. Doing compiled code burned me out. It just isn't fun.

  58. Linux could be better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ... overall, the user experience on a recent Fedora or Mint is vastly superior to the user experience on Windows 10.

    (emphasis added)
    Being better becomes easier as your competition gets worse. It isn't a good commentary on the quality of Linux distros or software in general.

    Casey Muratori made a similar observation on the topic of C++ debuggers, saying that he uses the MS Visual Studio debugger because it's better than any open source ones he knows, but since VS gets worse with every release, it is possible it will fall behind.

    If you tilt your head just right, you will be able to observe in that domain too that OSS has become "superior" to Microsoft's stuff.

    1. Re: Linux could be better by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What the heck is better about the VS debugger? It doesn't even seem to be scriptable? Like many Windows programs it seems like the typical tool that is only better if you're not willing I learn too use it properly. In which case you should maybe consider if a debugger maybe isn't the kind of tool you should learn to use...

  59. Re: What kind of Software Development Work on Lapt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How would it pay for itself by saving power?
    Even if your desktop had the crappiest power supply and used 60 W more and power was 33 eurocent/kWh, 1000 EUR is 3 MWh or 50 000 hours of those 60 W difference. That's about 20 years of work! Are you really working on a 20 year old laptop?!

  60. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by e432776 · · Score: 1

    You probably do more coding than I do; When I am at work I dock my notebook to a KVM, large monitor, etc and find that setup just fine for what I do, including some light development. I completely agree with your point on SW development on the small screen- I'd do that when docked.

  61. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by codeButcher · · Score: 1

    What kind of Software Development Work on Laptops?

    I've been writing software for the last around 18 years for various employers, who all provided the machines. For the first 4 years or so did I have a desktop (Windows 3.1 then NT, MSVC, those cluncky CRT monitors... - mostly C, with 4GL and database clients), then also for a short stint at a European subsidiary that had a fairly locked-down environment. But for the rest I've worked mostly for contracting houses that wanted their workforce to be mobile - even if based at the same client's office for years. For the last 3 months or so I'm working at a big banking client that just issues everyone a (fairly heavily locked-down) laptop (seems easier to obtain than a parking spot or logins to the Dev servers); I don't even take the thing home. This business also have Agilified their office environment with a lot of first-come-first-serve desks, open-plan stretches with lots of whiteboards on wheels, etc. - not that conducive to a fixed workstation (or concentration or avoiding getting the flu every other week - but I'm digressing).

    I'm sure it depends on the type of application being worked on, but my impression is that the more high-end modern laptops (given enough RAM) are quite capable of running all the usual FOSS as well as commercial suspects like Eclipse/Rational platform/Netbeans, MySQL/MariaDB/Oracle/DB2, Glassfish/Firefly/Webspere AS, etc. etc. locally without too much of a performance issue. (And I'm guessing a lot of the Linux crowd would be in the FOSS, LAMP etc. type space) I've never worked on a project that really needed some server hardware for dev-level compiling and running - production of course being a different matter.

    The only issue I've ever had with laptops is screen real estate. Even taking into account that I started in the 80x25 terminal world, modern IDEs do want that extra. I do see the benefit of the "see as much as possible code on one screen" principle and format Java code to 120 columns minimum these days, but find that a 1920x1080 screen is fairly sufficient (as a minimum). Yes, a multi-head setup may be nice, but through years of not being available I've become accustomed to the Alt-Tab window switch - hardly even use multiple desktops were they are available. At some workplaces second (plug-in) screens are available, but I have found that I hardly use it. It shows a lot less activity than the primary. Maybe I'd have the e-mail client open on it or a spec (IF available...).

    So in summary, there are all sorts of setups that can work and that people are used to, one is not really more "proper" than another :-) It depends and everyone's mileage can vary.

    --
    Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
  62. Shocked by JimSadler · · Score: 1

    Linux Mint is so good that i am shocked it does not reach the number one spot. I really love Mint.

  63. ArchLinux the new way to go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ArchLinux with an easy installer like antergos has been the best descicion i have made, ubuntu was always behind and the ppa system is a pain to deal with on every major updates.

  64. Re: What kind of Software Development Work on Lapt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I use a laptop on a docking station. I have two monitors. My code syncs to the file server.

  65. Re:What kind of Software Development Work on Lapto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm with you. Anytime I try to do any serious work on a laptop, I get this sort of mental nausea. I can't help but want to return to my desk with my 50" monitor, full-size keyboard, and mouse.