I was just lurking around (as usual), and I realised that there are many technically oriented DLPers around. And hence, the doubt. What Linux (and/or BSD) distros do DLPers generally use? And why those distros? In what environment do you use these distros, and what advantages do these distros confer? Also, if you have a dotfiles repo, please do link it here!

I'll keep the original post short and sweet, and add my answer after a bit.

 

I use Ubuntu for personal use. Free, fairly easy to install, and I am used to it. Mainly using it for a laptop and a family webserver, so I can even play around on my laptop before doing something tricky on the server.

Generally it is fairly easy to find answers/guides to specific problems, and the guides are specific to the distrubition.

 

I recently started using Lubuntu (preconfigured lightweight version of Ubuntu). Installing it alongside Windows turned out to be far easier than I expected - transformation from only Windows to dual booted Windows + Ubuntu is trivial with Linux installator.

 

I use Arch Linux, personally. I love the customisation it allows as well as the lack of crazy pre-configured defaults. Once you're used to pacman, it's hard to go elsewhere. Also, the documentation (wiki) is some of the best out there.

Arch is also bleeding edge, which I really like. systemd, python3 and all were adopted by Arch relatively early, which is good. SOmeone should jump ahead and do it. I use it on my laptop and try to eke out as much performance as I can out of it without going full retard.

My dotfiles (I'm not a programmer, so there's not much else): https://github.com/genghizkhan91/dotfiles

 

I used to like rolling my own desktop environment on Arch Linux (Openbox + wbar + tint2), but after that laptop died I didn't feel like getting that back up and running. So I just use the Ubuntu LTS distros at home, while we use RHEL/CentOS at work. My wife killed our last Windows laptop and she got a Chromebook instead, so we're pretty much Windows-free here (I have a very outdated Windows 7 partition on this computer, but it's been a few months since I booted into it).

 

Arch in a VM running on Windows 7. Using xforwarding to get the native feel.