[LeFantome]

I am a Manjaro user currently but have used other distros in the past, including Ubuntu. Given that, I would obviously recommend Manjaro.

There are a million reasons but, for development, I find the rolling release model far superior. On Ubuntu, especially an LTS release, you are going to find over time that the software versions on your machine are too old. This will lead to installing from source or Flatpak or what have you and then your system is a mess. Worse, it also means that when you eventually move to a newer Ubuntu release, things are likely to break ( more likely at least ). Manjaro means more software updates more frequently and more hassle keeping software at older or stable versions but always up-to-date software and no big system upgrade ever again. For developers, I find the Manjaro model superior.

I also highly recommend looking into Distrobox.

https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is Docker but instead of heavy sandboxing, when you are in the container you can see your real home directory, your real device tree, your real process list, and your real Wayland server ( desktop GUI ). This means you can Distrobox into an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS terminal for example and be able to run any software available Ubuntu ( including graphical ) with an experience very much like Ubuntu is installed directly on your machine. Best of both worlds.

Distrobox uses Docker though so you are not going to want to run containers in Distrobox. So the real distro still matters.

[mikewhy]

I just use homebrew on Linux. Things are relatively up to date, there's better support for installing multiple versions of something compared to apt/pacman/what have you, and development tools are separated from system packages.

[emptysongglass]

Homebrew is the lowest common denominator of package managers. If you search Algolia for homebrew you'll find many, many stories of hard times. It seems to be the most popular package manager on macOS but it is dog slow. It is easily the slowest package manager I've ever used.

This is a place where Nix really shines. Known inputs produce known outputs. When you remove a package nothing is left behind. The package selection is immense. I use it on WSL and Arch (with a flake) and it works exactly the same everywhere with no gotchas.

[mikewhy]

Aye, homebrew is pretty slow, but I don't actually interact with it much outside of initial bootstrapping.

Surely you can search for any package manager and find lots of people having issues with it.

I should really check out nix-shell.