Linux Distro

what do you think, which Linux distro is best for programming?

Learning Codeigniter 

well lets make this more on topic and suggest " an alternative to Windows as a means of web development for CI4"

Since ( and i have experience with quite a few) you can generally get anything you need, for web development via the OS's repo, there isn't really any distro thats best.
With some distro in the past where they had a very slow cycle release eg Slackware that was a problem, because php version requirements for Ci4 were way ahead of the php version in the distro. i got around that with Slackware by switching to Slackware current ( development branch)

Really you want a linux dsitro, that you feel comfortable with , and you feel you could get to know inside out. Preferably, users of that distro on forums etc are tolerant and haven't forgotten how they found it difficult when they were newbies.

Another consideration is where you are in the world , the reliability and cost of internet. I say that because i spent quite a bit of time in the land of my late wife's ancestors - Ghana. I think it would be prohibitive to use Arch or any rolling release out there since internet is flaky , poor bandwidth and expensive.

The package management system of Debian based does my head in , with their "priority" package system where a newer package in repo, gets a higher value than an old package unless its washing day.

Arch is fantastic has a beautiful package manager pacman , you can get literally anything you want via official repo or the AUR and only ever had one glitch due to "grub" never had dependency hell , or a full break that I couldn't fix. Requirement to do frequent updates is a bit tedious though . Size of user base should not necessarily sway you since my empirical observation with say Ubuntu is that there are a lot of posts by people, none of which know the answer.


Mint , generally considered first port of call for newbies
EndeavourOS was good (arch based but aimed at newbies)
ElementaryOS good (based on ubuntu but useable)

Slackware now 15 solid but package management mainly manual and thus can be trying .

CMS CI4     I use Arch Linux by the way