Ask HN: Do many developers use “beginner distros”?
I'm a relative newcomer to Linux as a development platform (one year), and I've distro-hopped my way through several in a search for something stable and hassle-free to use as my primary OS for development work. The one I've chosen is Mageia, the Paris-based Mandriva fork, mainly because it seems to be rock solid, low maintenance and installation of my chosen tools has been remarkably painless - no endlessly tweaking Skype and Virtualbox just to get them running etc..
But of course I read in various places that Mageia is regarded as a "beginners distro", as is Ubuntu, Mint etc - so I was wondering if many/any experienced devs used these distros as their preferred environment, or is everyone up to their neckbeards in Arch, Slackware etc? For a system I'm using a lot, I want the configurability of Gentoo. But if I'm working on a temporary machine, Ubuntu is fine. Honestly which distribution is not very important unless you're developing parts of the actual system. Just use what works for you.