Pretty much any reasonably-mainstream distro will be about equivalent for the features you're prioritizing. Usually, when someone asks about which distro to use, my go-to answer is openSUSE. It's easy enough to give Ubuntu a run for its money, and I've found it to be much less prone to breakage.
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I personally use Slackware. Some developer-friendly features I've found to be useful:
* Ships with all sorts of editors, including Emacs (which is what I use)
* Ships with the full GCC suite among other compilers (including LLVM)
* Convention is for all packages to include development headers; no more "foobar" and "foobar-dev" like in most other distros
It ain't for everyone, though. Like Arch and Gentoo, Slackware carries an expectation of being very comfortable with low-level Linux use.
Over years, I have tried all three and found Slackware to be the easiest one to install and get up and running as a development environment or as a server. It worked perfectly on a Dell laptop (including wifi) in 2003, and it is working perfectly now on an Asus UX305 (the best light-weight non-Apple laptop I know of).
It's definitely the easiest to install of the three. There are some tradeoffs, though:
* No dependency resolution. I consider it a feature, but quite a few folks will understandably consider it a huge drawback.
* No PAM. Again, whether this is a feature or a drawback depends on the user.
* No systemd. Same story.
Basically, the aim of Slackware is full customization and transparency, which means that users are not required to worry aboit dependencies or broken authentication systems or binary log files. Slackware also has a pretty strong "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, which probably explains why the installer doesn't look all that much different from the one in Softlanding Linux System ;)
I'm sure you already know all this; just clarifying for other readers on this thread. It's definitely the easiest of the SAG Trifecta to install, but it deviates pretty strongly from the Linux distro norm due to its history and philosophy.
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I personally use Slackware. Some developer-friendly features I've found to be useful:
* Ships with all sorts of editors, including Emacs (which is what I use)
* Ships with the full GCC suite among other compilers (including LLVM)
* Convention is for all packages to include development headers; no more "foobar" and "foobar-dev" like in most other distros
It ain't for everyone, though. Like Arch and Gentoo, Slackware carries an expectation of being very comfortable with low-level Linux use.