As Jason mentions, there are personal decisions about stability vs. update frequency. I'd give a spectrum from Debian Stable (rather conservative; what I happen to run) Debian Testing, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, most other distros (a good balance of stability & package freshness) Debian Sid (pretty bleeding edge) Gentoo (bleeding edge) As far as distro choices, all should be pretty reasonable as long as they have access to a full-fledged repository. I might shy away from the micro distributions like Puppy or DSL where it might be harder to obtain development libraries, compilers, etc. If you plan to multi-boot, I'd at least do one of each of the major flavors: an apt-based (Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, etc), an RPM based (Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat), and possibly a Slackware-based or source-based. That said, you don't mention what sort of language you plan to use for development. I don't know much about other languages, as I tend to do most of my work in Python, but you can use "virtualenv" and "pip" to create virtual Python environments where you can control the exact versions of all the components on a per-directory basis so you can even have multiple versions on your system at the same time. I've done some work in C and C++ as well, and having a variety of compilers can help. So other than the mini distributions, they should all mostly be about the same for most development purposes. -tim _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list