Installing different Eclipse IDE distro vs. installing plugins to existing Eclipse IDE

Question

Currently, I'm using Eclipse Neon and I'm thinking about coding in PHP. Usually, I just add the appropriate plugins; but this one got me thinking on whether I should install Eclipse for PHP Developers instead.

Any thoughts on the difference between installing PHP plugins vs. installing Eclipse distro for PHP?

Answer 1

I prefer to have an Eclipse installation that is tailored to the actual needs. Therefore, if your workspace holds only PHP projects, I'd recommend using the Eclipse for PHP Developers package in your case,

Ideally, it wouldn't matter having many (unrelated) plug-ins within a single installation. But in reality, installing many plug-ins may

• increase the time needed at startup, because the extensions of all plug-ins need to be read
• increase the likelihood of plug-ins not working well together
• increase UI clutter caused by contributions of the many plug-ins