Re: laptop, OS recommendations for gtk work

[Colomban Wendling <lists ban herbesfolles org>]

Hi,

Le 10/06/2017 à 02:17, Karan Ahuja a écrit :
> I am looking to purchase a new laptop to work with gtk.
>
> Please recommend good laptop, operating system based on your experience.
>
> Thinkpad vs macbook?

Either work just fine, it really doesn't matter much wrt GTK, and I know
people happily working with both.  Just note that ThinkPad has several
lines of laptops (X series, T series, L series, E series, W series…) and
they are not equivalent.  I know people happy with some X and T series,
no idea about the other ones.

> Fedora vs osx vs ubuntu ?

Unless you want to target OSX, I'd recommend a GNU/Linux OS because GTK
is primarily targeting GNU/Linux, so it's your best bet if you want
things to "just work".  However, if you're targeting OSX for your apps,
I'd obviously recommend at least having a machine to test there, if it's
not your primary environment.

Apart from that, I don't think the distro matters much.  Using
widespread ones like Fedora or Ubuntu is probably a good idea if you
want your environment to be as close as the users', but apart from that
you should be fine with whatever you pick.  I myself use Debian (stable
and unstable), but many dev are on Fedora and Ubuntu.  My choice is
based on my OS preference and because I'm used to it, but either of
those is a good choice, probably just as openSUSE, Mint, Arch, Gentoo or
whichever has your preference.  The only point I'd check is which
version of GTK the distribution ships with: you might either want
something very recent for latest features, or something more
conservative to be able to easily target older versions shipped with
more conservative distros.
If you really don't know and just want the most obvious choice, I'd say
Fedora (even though it's not my personal favorite), because it's
probably the most up-to-date/stock/GNOME distro, and possibly the one
most GTK authors use themselves.

But again, that's mostly a personal or target choice you can make and
that won't change that much.  I'd rather say, pick whichever distro
you're most efficient with.

Regards,
Colomban