Linux distro for a developer

distribution-choicelinux

I am mainly using Linux for programming. I basically started with Archlinux and Manjaro and I kinda like it.

What I really like is the package management. It has a huge collection of new software and the updates are coming out really fast.

For example when GCC 4.8 was released I instantly had it 2 days after the release which was pretty neat.

Even small libraries such as "OpenAssetImporter" are in the repos.

It is so convenient because if you have a huge collection of libraries that are coming out frequently, all you have to do is a system update.

What bugs me is that my system breaks really often, and I don't want to spend so much time to fix stuff.

Basically all I want is up to date libraries such as gcc etc. I don't really care if I have up to date Gnome etc.

Any recommendations that you can give me?

I'd recommand you Gentoo for programming. I use it myself and it's very convenient:

latest updates with a powerful system to prevent you break all the dependencies
rolling release, so there is no jumping from a version to another
it's a compiled distribution, so they are particularly concerned with the packaging of the toolchains, and the fact you compile all your packets yourself give you a great control over the options of compilation and may optimize a little your software
tools for cross-development are very handy
you can install several versions of the same library at the same time in different "slots", that can be useful sometimes, when there are huge changes between two versions and you want to be able to use both. For example, I've got three versions of python and two versions af gcc.

It's a matter of choice, of course, but I used Fedora before and I can tell you that it's a lot easier to start developping on a Gentoo.