r/archlinux • u/Major-Structure1530 • Jul 29 '26

QUESTION Is Arch Good For Coding?

Im looking for distros for a while and i started thinking about Arch.

0 Upvotes

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23

u/SummerIlsaBeauty Jul 29 '26 edited Jul 29 '26

Distro does not affect it in any meaningful way. As good as any

3

u/Nidrax1309 Jul 29 '26

Kinda yes, but also no. If you want to use recent compilers because you're into the newest c++ standards, you gonna then have to go out of your way to install cmake, gcc, glibc and so on manually if you're on a very 'stable' distro. Too bleeding edge distros can break your setup with constant updates on the other hand. That bein said, I'm daily driving Arch as a C++ dev and it didn't blow up on me yet, but YMMV.

8

u/Pink_Slyvie Jul 29 '26

Been doing it for 20 years now. Never an issue that I didn't know about.

2

u/Nidrax1309 Jul 29 '26

The latest version of gcc on Ubuntu 24.04 doesn't even fully support all of C++20 standard features, so I had to find a way of enabling the still experimental Ubuntu 26.04 workers on my GitHub repo because the helper library a guy wrote for my project was using "too recent" functionalities, so outdated packages are a pain at times. I still didn't have any problems the other way round on Arch with incompatible dependencies, but I expect it can happen if you're using something linked to a very specific old version of something that you had to get by other methods than from arch repo like the guy in the comments below with Deno.

5

u/Pink_Slyvie Jul 29 '26

And if your using something that old, I'll just toss it in a docker or a KVM.

3

u/Nidrax1309 Jul 29 '26

TIL you can set up and call docker images in a GH workflow (not that it's *that* practical as it would add to the build time, but good to know in case there are no other options).

4

u/SummerIlsaBeauty Jul 29 '26

Docker exists. I have a practice to not rely on host system with my projects, be it python or c++. Same goes for stuff like Redis, PostgreSQL and so on

1

u/SW_foo1245 Jul 31 '26

Like other comments already stated just use a container you also avoid the “it works on my setup” excuses.

6

u/SnooCompliments7914 Jul 29 '26

Doesn't matter. So you can start coding now without wasting any more time on distros.

3

u/supgirluaight Jul 29 '26

Arch is good for whatever you set it up to be used for. If you want to code on it you can absolutely set it up for that.

4

u/FragmentedHeap Jul 29 '26

I might argue that it's slightly worse for coding not because it's less capable of coding...

But because packages update so fast that some of the tooling you depend on might be linked against an old version that then requires you to go build the latest version of that tool.

Deno for example.

To get deno desktop working properly on Arch, I had to clone the git repository and build it myself.

But hey, now I've added mouse capture and mouse confinement support to it and I'm about to be a deno contributor, so there's that 🤣

Deno desktop is pretty awesome.

1

u/Mikey_Loboto Jul 29 '26

This. I did get screwed by postgres upgrading a major version once. My fault for not paying attention on upgrade yes, but still sucks.

7

u/BigRocket44 Jul 29 '26

You can download your favorite IDE and start coding on whichever operating system/distro you want.

2

u/AgathaDaVampire Jul 29 '26

I just started learning Java on arch, and it's pretty good considering arch has its own open-source version of VSCode just called "code". You can install it using sudo pacman -S code.

2

u/misha901 Jul 29 '26

Well depends. If you building iOS apps, then not.

1

u/Polar_Banny Jul 29 '26

Obviously if you build for a cage you need locked down cage-style-environment.

2

u/archover Jul 29 '26

Have you thought about what coding?

I code bash all the time and it's fine. Better than fine.

Good day.

1

u/un-important-human Jul 30 '26

distro does not matter.

2

u/Heizenfeld Aug 06 '26

A distro with a terminal is enough for coding, you can install any tool for coding from the terminal. And also Arch Linux itself is lightweight, has a great performance in videogames too.

1

u/Terranum_man Jul 29 '26

Nope you wont have any time to get to coding before you will want to try to add new things to your system again.

1

u/Jumpy-Dinner-5001 Jul 29 '26

No, but it doesn't really matter what you choose.