Qt Creator, Geany, Eclipse, Code::Blocks and Anjuta are some solid choices. As with everything Linux, you have a multitude of options to choose from. Try out a few and pick your favorite.

I've used Eclipse before for Java, and it can do other languages too. I'm not a big fan of it though. Netbeans might be decent as well.

What I've been using lately (for C/C++) is KDevelop, and sometimes Geany. I actually really like KDevelop. It's quite powerful (it has much better understanding of the code than VS for C/C++) and doesn't feel nearly as bloated/slow as Eclipse. It also gets out of the way and doesn't force me to use its own idea of what a project is. It is a KDE application though, so it has plenty of dependencies.

Geany is very lightweight and doesn't have many dependencies, and it's also nice to use. I even use it as a general-purpose text editor. It does the basic IDE tasks, but it's not as powerful as the big ones.

SciTE is similar to Geany (same code parsing engine underneath) but feels odd and not as nice IMO. It's more of a text editor to me.

Quote: Original post by mikeman
It seems to me that it's never the "year of the linux on the desktop", because there are dozens of popular distros around and even hundred in general. All of them amounting to a small piece of the pie. And yes, they all have a more-or-less common kernel(which *is* the linux), but especially for non-programmers, what difference does that make? I can't have, for instance, GNome installed and expect me to easily communicate with another lay person that has,say, Ubuntu. I don't really see why Torvalds insists on just taking up the role of organizing the open source projects and doesn't release his own distro with his own brand-name and be done with it.

And at some point linux fanbois must accept that not everything can be open-sourced. Like cutting-edge 3D drivers for instance. Other than that, Torvalds has gotten much flak here(me included) for being "unprofessional", as if professional managers and programmers talk like 8th century trovadures in their site of work :P

I think you missed that this is not a Windows/Linux-flame, but a thread about Linux IDEs, with Open-Source not even being a requirement (see OP). I could counter at least 75% of your personal opinions and factoids with my own ones, but ... I don't and won't.

[Edited by - phresnel on December 14, 2010 2:24:25 AM]

Quote: Original post by mikeman
I can't have, for instance, GNome installed and expect me to easily communicate with another lay person that has,say, Ubuntu. .

Ha. Fail. This sentence right here demonstrates that you literally know nothing about Linux.

Also, on-topic; I use CMake for my projects, and I highly recommend it. It allows you to build the same project under VS,CodeBlocks,Eclipse,KDevelop, and XCode, on OSX,Linux,and Windows.

Code::Blocks, Gedit, and (lately) KDevelop4 are the IDEs I use under linux and they are very good. I haven't used enough KDevelop4 to really comment on it, but when I was using C::B, it is better than Visual Studio if you take 20 minutes to tweak it so it doesn't look like crap.

Quote: Original post by Steve132

Quote: Original post by mikeman
I can't have, for instance, GNome installed and expect me to easily communicate with another lay person that has,say, Ubuntu. .

Ha. Fail. This sentence right here demonstrates that you literally know nothing about Linux.

Yeah man, I don't really have much experience on using Linux, but I have installed and ran for some time GNome, Red Hat(in school mostly), Ubuntu, and some smaller ones(like Puppy Linux) and from what I saw the GUI, icon placing and various procedures are different...I don't know what you consider a 'lay person', but for me it's, for example, my aunt or mother who go to work, want to get some work done on Excel or Outlook, have zero interest in enganging in scripting or command line work, and when dealt with a problem, except to be guided by phone, or find an internet page to the solution, even by click-to-click and button-to-button description.

Personally, I had troubles with all of them, as is expected of course with any software, but a lot of hard time finding solutions in forums as the whole linux OS thing seems so scattered.

Also about the off-topic, yeah, I got stuck in "linux use" more than "development", so sorry...

By the way it might seem odd that a lot of people are saying vim, but it really is an amazing editor. I do most of my C++ programming in Linux via SSH to my server. It has boost setup and vim with a simple makefiles is all that's really needed. Nice and simple.

Another happy Vim user here. Out-of-the-box Vim is a good editor but not terribly useful. But there are hundreds of plugins that make it great for any kind of editor. Personally I use Netrw, surround, VIP (lots of PHP tools), xdebug, taglist, bufexplorer, latex-suite, omnicomplete, snippetsemu and a whole bunch of others, along with quite a big .vimrc file.

Vim (like emacs) is pretty much just a programmable editor. You can make it do whatever you want, make it work how you want to work. That's the beauty of it. Most IDEs work best when you work in a certain way. You need to adapt to the tool. With Vim (and emacs) it's the other way around.

The only downsides are a steep learning curve (it took me six weeks to be as fast in Vim as I was in a regular editor) and that you start to fiddle endlessly with your configuration :-)

Quote: Original post by mikeman
Yeah man, I don't really have much experience on using Linux, but I have installed and ran for some time GNome, Red Hat(in school mostly), Ubuntu, and some smaller ones(like Puppy Linux) and from what I saw the GUI, icon placing and various procedures are different...

Gnome is a windowing library which is used by a number of linux distributions. It is not a distribution on it's own. Ubuntu for instance uses gnome by default. Red Hat ships with both gnome and kde allowing you to easily choose between them on install.

I am kind of surprise that no one mention CodeLite. I actually use codelite at work for ubuntu.

Mostly, I use C++, Python and Clojure. I use QtCreator for C++ (on both Windows and Linux), even if the project does not use Qt. For Python, I usually use Geany and for Clojure (and everything else, really), I use Vim.

With a little configuring, Vim can work as a full blown IDE, supporting everything a traditional IDE does (except stuff like diagrams, since Vim is usually run in the terminal). Of course, learning to use it and configuring it is a lot of work, so it may or may not be a good option right now.