I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?
Distro packages don’t really matter much in my experience. You either use project-specific package management or install stuff with Homebrew or Nix package manager. Sometimes maybe even containers.
One problem with distro packages is that you can only install one version. And in practise a lot of software projects have outdated dependencies. Sometimes you have multiple projects with conflicting version dependencies.
This isn’t technically true for all distros—Gentoo has a mechanism that will allow multiple package versions to be installed in parallel. I have multiple distro-packaged Python and Lua interpreter versions on my system, for instance. But it does require some extra work by the packager, so it isn’t done universally for all packages.
Well, now you are hitting on my real recommendation which is to use Distrobox. Distrobox allows you to install multiple userlands that are all isolated from each other but all seem native on your system and give you full access to shared files and resources ( even the GUI desktop ).
It is very common to work on something not that just has outdated packages but that targets a specific distribution. If you are building something that will target an Alpine container in the cloud, it is handle to create an Alpine Distrobox to have all the same libraries. Similarly an app might target a specific version of Ubuntu. One of the products I worked on last year was based on Ubuntu 18.04. I could easily create an Ubuntu 18.04 Distrobox to work on that.
Distrobox also means I can prevent the build-up of cruft from all the little specialty tools and dependencies that projects require that I will not need long term. Remove the Distrobox and remove all the junk.
This is different than pure Docker to Podman though since Distrobox still gives you full access to your base system. You only have to install what you uniquely need in Distrobox. So i am not necessarily installing all my tools in Distrobox. Just the specialty ones.
Anyway, this is a more complicated answer and setup. In my view, the host environment still matters a lot and what I said above still stands.