I'm in Uni for Software Engineering, and while all my classes are currently online, I'm looking to get a laptop for class later on. Once I get it, I'm gonna pop a linux distro on it (gotta clean up the poor windows infected machine), but I'm curious if there's a distro anyone thinks would be best for programming? I used to use Fedora, but idk if there's anything better now

You can install ubuntu under windows.

Most of my customers require me to develop under Windows to create programs for them. I work at a "Linux Shop" and I still need another computer running Windows for our Windows customers. If you ever have allusions of doing contract work for people you will need windows. I get it, you are at university, but that is not the real world. You would be better served in the long run to at least dual boot.

There are also laptop vendors that don't bundle Windows too. If you really don't want to pay the MS tax you could go for one of those.

@Demolishun I understand, my desktop runs Windows. I'm not avoiding it, I just prefer Linux on my laptop

They're all pretty much the same. Use whatever you're comfortable with. For me that's Manjaro for edge, Fedora for work, and Mint for daily use.

@RememberMe Fair enough, I'll look into distros and what their package maintenance is like. Thank you!

@Demolishun you don't necessarily need to dual boot since virtual machines and remote desktop exist.

@electrineer I am done with VMs especially VirtualBox. It has become a literal POS. Yes, vmware is better. I won't touch virtualbox anymore.

I ran into major issues trying to run Windows 10 in virtualbox:

- opengl

- networking

- writing files to disk

It just has gotten worse and worse on each release. My coworker was running virtualbox with Ubuntu in it. It just had more and more problems. He finally switched to vmware.

So yeah, virtual machines are good when they work, when they don't...

Are there other good ones out there?

@Demolishun since the op wants to use gnu/linux as the host os, they would probably use KVM/QEMU.

Honestly, distros don't matter that much
If you got something that works for you and you get regular updates and patches, just stick with it.

Distro hopping can be fun and all I know, but for productivity I'd try to make a decision and go with it.

The only important thing is rolling release or regular release cycles. I personally prefer rolling release, just for development purposes.
And (personally) I prefer Arch (or arch based distros) solely for the fact that the arch wiki is a good source of info (in general) and you can pretty much any application running on it fairly easily.

Manjaro or Ubuntu. don't go for some distro that doesn't have enough support and fucks you over by not having the fixes and releases on a proper schedule.