I don't think the headline reflects the content or that there's much of a takeaway for devs, hence flagged.
Every single UI and every single complete set of defaults has a fair number of things wrong with it. Instability, insecurity, lagging feature set, slow ui, ugly and non-intuitive ui, bad documentation, inconsistency everywhere. There is none that are good.
Having done all this, Ubuntu is a very well thought starting point.
Ubuntu loses in every one of these categories for me compared to Arch.
Apart from that, if you're going to replace most of the DE-functionality with dedicated components anyways, you'll want to start out with a more minimal DE, if possible, for the sake of resource usage.
You get the software releases as quickly as possible.
This empowers you to work with the latest releases and also forces you to be more conscious of what is supported by which software release. In which case you spin up VMs to test out all the other distros / software releases for compatibility concerns.
My 2 cents... Sometimes Ubuntu 14.04 will be perfectly fine for whatever environment you need...
- 14.10 isn't LTS, and is EOL now, i think you might mean 14.04?
- If you're going to disable unity for a dock, you might want to try elementaryOS, ubuntu Gnome with the dash-to-dock extension, or xfce. in 16.04 now you can also put the unity launcher at the bottom using unity-tweak-tool or running `gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Launcher launcher-position Bottom`
- I dislike droid sans mono because 0 and O look pretty much identical
- in my opinion, conky is just a useless waste of resources
I can't even think about using Ubuntu for developing stuff without first enabling virtual desktops, and they are not included in this guide.
Also missing: system indicator with CPU, memory and network usage.
No mention of a clipboard manager.
And he doesn't install SublimeText!
