I know there choice of distro is really meaningless as you can install almost any program on almost any distro. But I have been playing with kali which is for security people and pen testers. Is there a similar distro for programmers? Like a few ides installed some profiling tools some virtual environment tools etc?
No, but some are better suited for programming, because each distro has different packages in their repositories. I find Fedora to be very good when it comes to having basically every dev tool available in their repos. Arch is good too but too unstable for actual work. But keep in mind in most distros you can add separate repositories that contains the software you want. You can also use Homebrew that contains lots of dev tools as well
I enjoy arch on my work laptop.
The last time I used arch it worked fine for 6 months then it needed to be scrapped because the network fully stopped working after an update. I’ve been on fedora ever since without a single issue. Arch is fine for personal devices where you can afford to spend half a day on troubleshooting a package that is too recent and straight up doesn’t work because there’s no real testing being done. I wouldn’t put it on a work device simply because it’s not a just works distro