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.
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.
You could use the android studio flatpak, install flatseal to ensure the app doesn’t have permissions you don’t want.
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.
Run. Run now.
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.
