I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?
I’d argue… Alpine?
Why? Well, because it’s small. So Alpine isn’t the programming distribution itself but rather the distribution for the container your run whatever you build inside of just because it’s very VERY small (like… 5MB?!).
Obviously that makes sense only in some cases. For example for a frontend Web developer or a game developer (or a WebXR dev like me) it might not help much but otherwise,… maybe?
Anyway if you are into this kind of things check also Gitpod, it’s about wrapping your dev environment inside a container then having it anytime, anywhere, including for other developers and facilitate their onboarding.
Not disagreeing, but if you’re just looking for a small Docker image, might as well build a static binary and ship it without any distro at all. Or, if you really need shared libraries and other dependencies, you can build a docker image with Nix and not get anything other than the dependencies.