Hi! I hope I'm posting this in the right forum..

As the title says, what is the best live Linux OS for development? I tried AntiX but I had compiler issues... gcc didn't work and a few things missing here and there (not exactly sure what those missing stuff were, couldn't find them in the repos). My IDEs didn't appreciate it either (compiler errors, no auto-complete etc). I'll be using C and Python. I have no persistent storage, my drive is busted Thanks for reading and helping!

The best is always subjective and I assume you are running from a USB flash drive. Without persistent storage of some kind I would find it extremely difficult to do any programming.

I have not played with knoppix in awhile but it has/had a "complete" gcc environment that includes the source header files as well as being able to setup persistent storage.

It is also fairly easy to setup persistent storage using Ubuntu, Mint or debian and possibly others using mkusb so you should be able install whatever is necessary to setup your development environment.

And it is always possible to install a full version to a flash drive.

Even with USB3 I'd go with an external disk (SSD ?) than a flash drive for a full install. Never tried tho' I must admit.

That is just wrong. No live distro - or any other distro can solve compiler related issues. So I would rather suggest you to buy a HDD (or an SSD). "Best" is meaningless, it always depends on your requirements, goals and knowledge.
Otherwise using a live OS for development is extremely hard. Additionally using a flash drive is probably slow.

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Yeah I have no USB flash drive.. DVD/CD only. I have no money to buy a new hdd/ssd so gotta do with live environments for a long time. I used Knoppix for some time... Same issue as AntiX. IDEs cry about something missing, always. Not much different with the terminal.. Think I'll just not do any development until I get persistent storage

When I used Knoppix (running from CD at the time) to write some simple programs I only used a text editor and had a USB flash drive to save my work.
Its possible to remaster some live versions to add whatever dependencies you need for the IDE's but having persistent storage is a lot simpler.