Four days ago I switched from Linux Mint 21 to Ubuntu 22.10, the interim release of Ubuntu. I stated a number of reasons why I switched, the biggest being the updated kernel and critical tools. Yesterday I swapped the SSD with Linux Mint still on it back into my machine in place of the SSD that I’d installed Ubuntu on.
The primary reason I switched back was the lack of certain types of development support. For example I had to install everything necessary to support a full build-out of Python 3.11. There were other missing library and development support packages. When I had to install the Fuse file system library support to run some AppImage applications, that’s when I realized I’d made a mistake for my daily driver usage and that I needed to switch back to Linux Mint. Fortunately for me I’d not made any changes that I hadn’t already saved elsewhere, such that switching back was completely painless.
Now that I’ve had this experience I’ve come to realize that Linux Mint can be considered the more supportive developer distribution compared to Ubuntu. That is, I can do more development without having to hunt down and install various libraries to make it all work. For example I run several AppImage applications. Before they would even execute I had to install the libfuse2 library. I did check with my Ubuntu 22.04 Parallels virtual machine, and that support is there. But it was missing in Ubuntu 22.10. Installation is all of 60 seconds, but the fact it was missing makes me suspicious, especially because Ubuntu is pushing (hard) Snap packages over all others. Was support for AppImage deliberately dropped in 22.10? As they say, things that make you go “hmmm.”
Ubuntu 22.10 will appeal to fans of Ubuntu and fans of the latest Gnome, and they’ll install it and use it without a second thought. But if you’re a developer, especially an embedded/IoT developer, make sure nothing breaks if you decide to install Ubuntu 22.10 and make it your daily driver. You may be unpleasantly surprised like I was.
Radarwitch
They are all different and it comes down to one’s needs. For test automation I develop across Mac, Linux and Windows. Ubuntu worked well in terms of getting the tools I need (OpenJDK 11, Visual Studio Code, Git, Subversion, Maven). RHEL 8 OTOH was rather painful. To get Maven to work with my project, I ended up killing it (and the default Java 8 JRE) with fire and installing manually from apache.org. Ditto for Chromedriver and Geckodriver. To get Visual Studio Code, I followed some instructions to use a different repository.
The benefit of developing software all over the place? It’s not unusual for bugs in my own code to reveal themselves in surprising ways, in one environment, but not the others.
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