Every single vm in my home lab is Debian, from the minimal installer, running on proxmox which is Debian based. Every new install is ~7 minutes and has been so stable that my uptimes are only under 100% because of yearly power outages longer than my UPS can handle. Average uptime is ~half a year on each box.
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If you want easy way - Ubuntu. All packages exist, all developers support. But snap is pain.
If you need mainline packages - Arch. But be care with bugs. Use LTS kernel or you can broke filesystem on one day for example.
If you want forgot about dependencies - NixOS. But Nix not classic packet manager and you can feel pain on start.
In reality, a lot depends on the environment in which your code will work. If it's Java, then in principle it doesn't matter, but if it's C/C++, it's better to develop in an environment as close to production as possible.
I can throw in a vote for Debian stable as well. I've recently installed Debian 12 and I've been blown away by how great it's been compared to my recent Fedora 38 experience out of box.
What kind of hardware are you running it on? I've started using Debian for servers, but I'm still using Fedora for laptops, currently. I am always curious about different options.
I'm super happy with OpenSUSE. Cannot recommend it enough, having it on my home server for 2+ years and never had the slightest of issues
That's where I'm headed.
Personal and general purpose: KDE Neon (yeah yeah)
Servers: IDK, now. Probably going to check out SUSE.
Mint is excellent right now
For all my non-compliant, non-supported hosts I started using Fedora CoreOS quite successfully.
If you package your applications as containers, you should have a very easy time with it. It's based off ostree, which means a couple of things:
- immutable (so not easy to break, I guess?)
- atomic upgrades, which means you upgrade in a single step
- atomic and full rollbacks, which means if an upgrade breaks your host, you can rollback to the exact previous version booted simply by choosing it from grub
- still based on rpm, so you will still have a grasp of it, even though many things are completely different
- other benefits I forgot, I'm sure :)
All with the added benefit that once you go towards containers you can change your distro with minimal effort, so there's that.
Devuan over Debian for stability and speed.