Linux

48008 readers

1847 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Is there a programming specific distro? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't know how Debian's solution works, so I couldn't say for certain. Gentoo usually installs the different package versions to their own directories, and there are methods for selecting a "system python" (or lua, etc) which is the target of the /usr/bin/python symlink. Other versions have to be called with qualifiers (for instance, python3.10). Python libraries installed through the package manager may install to one or several versions depending on the content of a couple of environment variables, and applications that need python can request a specific version if they need to, or accept the system python if they don't care. (Note that python2 is no longer eligible to be the system python—you need at least one python3, although 2.7.18 remains in the package repository and can be installed as well if you really need it.)

Of course, if you're not a programmer, you can leave the defaults for everything alone, and most of the time it should Just Work.

[–] ouch 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sounds pretty close to Debian as far as I remember. In Debian those symlinks are called alternatives, and can be configured with update-alternatives. Not sure about the Python libraries though.