I want to start learning android dev and I understand that I’ll need the android sdk and cli tools. I want to try it in a kvm because even though it is open source, I would like to keep it separate from my main system. Which distro and vm settings do you suggest I use? Any other tips or your experience with android development on linux would be helpful as well.
Okay this “which distro should I use” shit is just getting out of control.
Which one is best for Android development? Are you kidding me? Just pick any one you like.
You could use the android studio flatpak, install flatseal to ensure the app doesn’t have permissions you don’t want.
Debian-based distros are usually the ones with the most official support and documentation with regard to Android.
Anything that can run android studio basically. And Debian can.
Debian is the best for your needs, because that’s what Google uses internally too (they used to use ubuntu, but a few years ago they moved to a slightly modified version of Debian-Testing). All its engineers are using Debian-Testing at their desktops, so it’s the best tested and tried distro for Android. Although all other distros are also expected to work fine.
Had no problem with Linux mint 21.x.
Second the Flatpak, but stuff like installing APKs over USB might not work. Dont know if that is really needed.
You can make adb work on Fedora, I documented 2 ways (with or without installing RPMs) here
I used garuda for a while when doing Android stuff and was really surprised that a lot of things like adb, fastboot and all the filetransfer stuff was working out of the box without even having to setup any android sdk, drivers, … . Not really a distrohopper however, so I can’t tell you if this is a common feature on other distros.
