I was handed an old Toshiba Pentium laptop which has Windows 7 on it but due to the old display drivers it could not be upgraded to Windows 10. So I took the bold step and did a clean install of Linux.
I chose Linux Manjaro (based on Arch Linux) using the bog standard (i.e. nothing flashy) Xfce desktop environment and I have to say that I am rather pleased with the performance on this laptop. The only odd thing about Manjaro Xfce is the bootup sequence. There is about 30 seconds to a minute where you just have a blank black screen before it springs to life.
Then, I have only had one gotcha so far and that came when I tried to install the NXP MCUXpresso IDE. The NXP website only offers a Debian binary and I could not figure out how to do.
However, thanks to help from the forum, all I had to do was enable AUR on pamac (the installer option) and I was able to search this repository and it had the latest NXP MCUXpresso IDE installer files and I could build it. This worked like a charm.
Finally, the exciting part (yet to explore), is that they offer an (embedded dev) option for ARM based processors...
I'm assuming you mean the linux distribution that you use to compile, link, and load code onto your microcontroller. The answer is different if you mean a linux distribution running on an embedded microprocessor.
To me the question isn't entirely clear. There are embedded linux distributions, and there are linux distributions that you may use to compile and develop the embedded linux distribution on to then deploy to a platform.
In the latter scenario I tend to use debian, and where I don't use debian I use slackware. In that operating system I then build the distribution which I would deploy onto my hardware, and that has been OpenWRT, dd-wrt, debian, Yocto and Android.
Though there are potentially many more embedded linux distributions. Some based on FreeBSD, others based on CentOS, etc.
I voted on Raspbian, but it is paired to Debian. As well as Ubuntu also Raspbian is Debian, that in my opinion is one of the better embedded Linux distros also considering all the dedicated versions. I use all the others in different embedded devices and I always regretted that they don't use Debian.
Our production systems used RedHat licenses. CentOS gave us the ability to do development without license costs. It has been three years since I have used a development Linux so that model may have changed.
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