Linux and Python

[requerent]

I'm looking into taking Python a lot more seriously. I learned it for a Machine Learning course a while ago, and, well, I always keep going back to it for prototyping and the awesome math libraries.

I've been forced to rely primarily on windows for the last year, so I'm a bit out of the loop on the linux breeds. Historically I've always been an ArchLinux user, but their decision to package python 2 as 'python2' and python 3 as 'python' is, more or less, unacceptable (every other distribution does 'python' and 'python3', to avoid breaking the kabillion python 2 scripts out there).

Until that problem is rectified, I need a new distro. Another thing that is giving me a headache is the GTK vs QT problem. It's never really bothered me, but all of the python IDE's in linux depend on one or the other and I have no clue which one I will prefer given that I haven't had an opportunity to use any of them (I love Python for Visual Studio- but pip in windows never seems to work).

I've never been fond of Ubuntu or it's spawnlings but I don't really want a customized distro. Just something that is out of the way and doesn't waste resources. I don't want to fiddle with Gentoo, I really like the Enlightenment shell (it's ridiculously faster than any WM/DE I've ever used, including tiling wms), but there really isn't a distro worth using that runs it (bodhi is meh).

I'm downloading Funtoo now to give it a try, also went ahead and picked up the latest Fedora and Sabayon to see what they're all about. I'm just tired of messing with this stuff. Any advice for python development specifically?

[kraflab]

I share your disdain for ubuntu but have recently fallen in love with fedora.  As for python I have no advice (except to use another language )

[requerent]

I share your disdain for ubuntu but have recently fallen in love with fedora.  As for python I have no advice (except to use another language )

Haha- I used to HATE python. But... frankly, it just takes so little time to make things happen and many of the data-set operations are fast. Any sort of iterating should be done via Python wrapper in C, though.

Thanks though-- I just booted up the fedora live image and... I really liked it. Got a few more to try first though... I just wish everything worked off of a GUI abstraction so I wouldn't have to deal with GTK vs QT all the damn time.

[ludamad]

Eclipse+Pydev is an awesome IDE.
Also what's causing problems for you exactly with arch ? Can't you just symlink python2 as python ?

[requerent]

Yea- I'm just breaking down and using Arch with symlinks. Sabayon takes twelve years to boot, and it's supposed to be fast. I just set up an enlightenment build and it's... acceptable.

The problem with 'ln -s'ing it is that there may be a script that makes a hard call to python, bypassing symlinks. This is poor coding on the part of the script creator, but there hasn't been an alternative precedence for, what, 17 years? I'm just going to accept the fact that I don't really need that functionality.

[AgingMinotaur]

Requerent, if you're still in an experimental mood, you might want to try out Debian. (For me, at least, it's been a perfect match for almost ten years.) Do a minimal install, that leaves you with a pretty bare bones Linux-in-a-terminal, weighing a few hundred megabytes. From there, you can do eg. "apt-get install gdm3 && apt-get install gnome-core" to get a basic desktop up and going. Debian is typically built with binary packages, but there are also Debian-specific tools to compile your own software.

As always,
Minotauros

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Slackware is fast and actually quite simple to setup (just install everything). Python3 can be found as a SlackBuild. I just did some programming with it myself, no problems.

I like Debian too. I've found that starting with the default XFCE setup works well, even if you actually want to use some other light window manager.