Which Linux distro for Developing in Rails?

I'm just starting to learn Rails (Rails 3 specifically), and everything I see leans toward working in Linux to make things easier. Since I'm bound to Windows for work, I'll be running Linux in a VM. Are there any Linux distros that are well suit开发者_开发知识库ed for Rails development? Please give some kind of justification for your recommendations.

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Go with whatever goes well for you. There's no need for a particular distro to develop in any language.

My advice to avoid installing useless stuff is to install Debian (maybe a testing version if you want the latest software) or Slackware.

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I find Arch to be great for customizing to do anything so also dev environment, it's really easy to setup (as vbox guest for example) and you can easily handpick many tools from either the main repos or AUR.

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If you use anything even remotely mainstream there will be packages for everything you need in the repository. Configuration is going to be broadly similar across distributions as well, with only a few minor differences.

I'd suggest looking at one of Open Suse, Fedora, or Ubuntu. All of those distributions are going to be fairly newbie friendly. Open Suse lets you select XFCE as your desktop environment, and Xubuntu is an ubuntu variant that uses xfce instead of gnome. You might want to look at one of these options if you're running in a VM since xfce is slightly lighter weight than gnome (although not all that much lighter these days).