Tails is Linux, but no, you won't be able to do many things that you can do on Ubuntu, or they will be much harder. Tails is a very restricted environment. Programs that you install are not persistent, unless they are portable programs saved in the persistent volume. Programs installed system-wide are lost after each reboot. You could reinstall the tools you need after each boot, but it would be a pain to do so. Yeah, that's basically Tails. There are other options, like Whonix, but they leave traces on the computer. Tails (or Liberte) are the only solutions that leave no trace on the main hard drive and can be easily destroyed. What are your programming needs? Will any text editor due or do you need special tools? Some specific IDE, VM, programming language packages, etc? It's possible to reinstall these things with each reboot, but as I said, it would be annoying. If you are skilled enough, you could create a custom spin of Tails with the tools you need. Well that's interesting. Welcome to our community.