What is a good linux distro for development

[nullroute]

I don't mean for this to sound as much like a rant as it is going to, and I definitely don't want this to start a flame war. But, I've grown quite disappointed in almost every distro that I've used.

- SuSE - I currently use SuSE 8.1, this distro makes a very pritty desktop linux, and not much else. I'm extremely disappointed in its poor development environment where many of the tools (Glade, autoconf, automake, kdevelop...) depend on packages that are not in thier rpm dep-list. Some of them depend on versions of packages that SuSE has not yet updated to. Almost all of them do not work properly.

- RedHat - This is my ex-favorite distro. As of version 6.2 and beyond, RedHat started using developmental code branches rather than stable for almost all of their packages. What makes this worse is that they alter the source code to make it banner a stable or fake version number (like gcc-2.96). Stability and trust went out the window.

- Mandrake - Based on RedHat... see above... only worse (at least in their early days)

(as a side note, both RedHat and Mandrake are very robust and capable distros. They have just completely lost my trust)

- Debian - I actually like this distro, even though it is a bit of a pain to install (until you get used to configuring apt and using dselect). They just lag behind in versions (It took them forever to make a 2.4 kernel series distro stable, and I don't know if 2.6 will ever get there).

- Corel - I didn't actually use this distro, but there is still something to be said for a distro that lets you play tris while it is installing.


- Caldera, Slackware, and others - I still have not tried

 

[The Khan Artist]

You should try Gentoo. While things aren't quite as smoothly integrated as Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSe, it has a huge number of packages available, maybe even more than Debian, and it pretty much always has bleeding edge stuff available if you want to try it.

Compiling from source is a downside, because most programs don't get any speed gains, but oh, well.

 

[AlphaWolf]

The main thing I like about gentoo is that its extremely easy to use (well, extremely painless that is, as most administrative tasks have a one step script associated with them). Its installer isn't the easiest though; its not a graphical installer like the big 3 you mentioned. Its package manager, portage, is a lot like dbn's apt-get, only instead of downloading binaries, you download and compile the source to be optimal for your system all in one step. Like Kahn Artist said, there are lots of bleeding edge versions of software available on portage, and not only that, but this distro works fine with the vanilla kernel sources.