Posted May 09, 2016
My main points are to be able to develop with:
- JAVA (IntelliJ IDEA IDE + GUI development on Swing);
- Mobile development (Android studio, probably thru IntelliJ IDE) - something I really would like to learn and I wonder if it could be made on Linux;
Most of the tools require or rather "works best" on KDE or Gnome, at least those are officially supported. Since there are many changes KDE is going thru now I'm leaning toward Gnome. Another plus for Gnome, for me, would be that I've heard it is lighter on resource requirements. Personally I've used KDE till v.4 and many lightweight environments like LXDE, XFCE, Mate and don't know how painless the transition would be, but I'm willing to try out.
I also would like some distro that is LTS (Long Term Support) as per Ubuntu terminology, because I don't want to have to reinstall it after 6-12 months, (My Mint 16 can't update anything as of the beginning of this year) :( Don't know how I' would feel for a rolling release, do you think it could easily break a carefully setted up development environment?
Also, if you're going to develop anything for Linux please do try and keep it somewhat future-proof :) You have no idea how much of a pain it is to have hunt down obsolete versions of various libraries just to be able to compile something :/
As for development, I am not sure what distro would be best, to be honest, as I always thought that the tools are what mattered the most...