Hello,

I'm a long time Linux user, but I've been kind of out of touch with the different distros for probably the last year and a half. I am now trying to move more into Ruby development and away from .NET development.

What do you think would be a good, fast, focused distro for developing Ruby applications. Obviously I'll be installing Ruby, Gems and Apache (and probably from source), but I have no interest in using it for any multimedia or graphics.

[edit]I would prefer to say away from KDE. I'm not a huge fan of eye candy, so a simple environment will due (fluxbox, XFCE, etc.). I would also prefer to stay away from RPM-based distros.

Thanks in advance,
~Justin

Fedora, Debian, Slackware, Arch.

Which part is it that your ubuntu does not satisfy? I cannot think of many other distros - other than Debian - that offer the same range of Ruby related packages.

I think I would actually prefer a Debian derivative. I've used Ubuntu almost exclusively for the last couple of years, but I think it's a little too bloated for what I want to use it for.

Ubuntu is a Debian derivative. Some have even called it Debian with drums. But yes, Debian can be less bloated - though you shouldn't count on it being so out of the box. Over the past 2 years, default Debian has increasingly come to imitate Ubuntu in terms of ease of configuration. I am sure you could get a far more streamlined box if you used something like Gentoo. I have used Gentoo in the past but gave up because it took so much time to administer and by the time I had installed all my software, it wasn't a bit faster than the "ready-made" distros. Still, for a truly dedicated box, it would make a good choice. The same could be said for Slackware. Both can provide flux or xfce(but so can *buntu, by the way, in its Xubuntu and Fluxbuntu incarnations). I would say that it depends on two factors: how trimmed does it need to be and how much time do you want to invest in it.