Top Linux distribution for coding depends on your needs, but Ubuntu and Fedora are popular choices.
Top Linux distribution for coding depends on your needs, but Ubuntu and Fedora are popular choices.
I believe you meant free in the context of speech, not beer. Fedora would clearly be the best option.
I thought there were just three operating systems: Windows, OS X (Apple Mac), and Linux. If there are more, I’d like to learn about them. I meant free options only—like Red Hat, which costs money—and didn’t want to spend more.
OK, that makes things harder... let me put it this way: Linux alone is basically a clone of a clone, namely MINIX , of BSD Unix (which happened to be not freely available in 1991 yet), which itself dates back to the mid-70s Unix versions (after Unix had been rewritten from Assembly to C). Here's a (slightly outdated) overview of the Unix history. While the most "real" Unices today (with AIX being the last really popular one) are commercial because they still use licensed AT&T code and the original Bell Labs Unix (now called "Plan 9" and/or "Inferno") has mostly disappeared, BSD itself has already grown its own ecosystem with a number of actually free spin-offs, probably starting with 386BSD in 1992. The Wikipedia has a notable table of (most of) them. (Some of this could become handy for your Computer Science stuff.) Note that Unix was never alone on its market (in fact, IBM's mainframe computers already had "regular" operating systems - of course quite different from what we call an "operating system" today and always tied to exactly one platform - in the mid-50s, over ten years before the first Unix releases. (Please note that Mainframe operating systems never tried to be "consumer-friendly", they were and are made for the industry. They speak Rexx and COBOL instead of Perl and Python and their user interface is rather rudimentary. - Sorry, I'm drifting away. Back to topic...) It had - regardless of its unbeaten market share in the 80s when even Microsoft was a Unix vendor (their Xenix was later sold to SCO) - various competitors all the time, one of which (VMS, see OpenVMS ) was highly influential for the development of Windows NT. However, your only obvious prerequisites are "it's free and you should be able to write software on it", but the most interesting part should be the latter, more or less excluding experimental operating systems like TempleOS , KolibriOS and RISC OS which was the original ARM OS and highly popular in the late 80s, as the available compilers for these platforms are limited. Reading your prerequisites again, you're primarily interested in C and Assembly development which is great because both languages are addicting once you've understood them. Did you know that there is a C-based Web Application stack built into OpenBSD? The main advantage of Fedora Linux, Ubuntu Linux et al. is that they are "install and forget" desktops. But that's not actually important for development tasks (as you'll live in your editor and not in a shiny GUI most of the time, right?). I, personally, recommend OpenBSD for its general reliability (and it even has ASM compilers in its packages ), but it's entirely up to you.
Wow, a lot to process... My system is now facing similar problems with Ubuntu as I did on Windows 10. I get what you mean about operating systems and their differences. You mentioned Unix distribution by Microsoft, and I'm looking into "Open BSD" or "OpenBSD." The link you got includes downloads for OpenBSD along with programming resources. Is that a catalog of software available through Open BSD?
I checked for installation videos but found nothing clear. I’m planning to use an extra drive to test it out.