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I ended up with Codelite. Its OK, after realising you have to install a load of stuff to make it work, 6 sub packages and plugins....
Why isnt this made obvious at the start?
COme on guys, of you want Linux to work for an idiot end user you need to sort this out.
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it wouldn't be Linux if it was obvious.
Nihil obstat
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I like Linux, it is VERY configurable, VERY flexible, and easy to code for. And fortunately there is loads of good documentation, unlike with Windows, in the net, and a load of good forums. Which makes up for the lack of toughness of installers.
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Yep. To the point where you have to configure again and again, almost never in the same way.
Loads of good documentation? I agree that MSDN is not anymore what it used to be (lately improving, though), but Linux docs I've saw are HTML versions of man <function>. Very scarce samples and not anyways compiling... It can be better than that.
Nuclear launch detected
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Cristian Amarie wrote: have to configure again and again, almost never in the same way.
Have to configure each piece of software you get [if you don't prefer the defaults], and the options/configs/settings get pretty regular so it's pretty to get the hang of.
Cristian Amarie wrote: but Linux docs I've saw are HTML versions of man
You should always click more than one link when you do a google search. Lots of things will start getting a lot better if you do.
If it moves, compile it
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What's pretty? To scour the file system for options/configs/settings?
Let me make this clear: I don't care WHERE are the settings; this is the software's business, not mine.
I want to *change* settings, not figure out where the file is. I want to add a new update location, not to ls -l the hell out the disk for sources.lst; I want to do sudo apt-get install, not to figure out why after installing debian on my netbook no valid deb sources were present. (That's from a 4 hours ago semi failed debian install - one hour later Mint 12 was downloaded/installed immediately. Go figure.)
Thanks for the "click more than one link" hint - I suppose you think I'm dumb, lazy, or both. However, I am considering myself an educated person, with a good sense of what A element click() does.
Nuclear launch detected
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Cristian Amarie wrote: What's pretty? To scour the file system for options/configs/settings?
Let me make this clear: I don't care WHERE are the settings; this is the software's business, not mine.
might be a language barrier. Making changes to preferences is what my statement was about. And the fact that they are all similar, so it's not like a new challenge every time.
Cristian Amarie wrote: I don't care WHERE are the settings; this is the software's business, not mine.
Then use the GUI to change them.
Cristian Amarie wrote: I want to *change* settings, not figure out where the file is.
Settings and configuration files are in the same place all the time. It's a file system standard.
Cristian Amarie wrote: <layer>I want to do sudo apt-get install, not to figure out why after installing debian on my netbook no valid deb sources were present.
I thought you were talking about changing preferences, configurations, or settings. Handling dependancies for apt is another thing entirely.
Cristian Amarie wrote: That's from a 4 hours ago semi failed debian install - one hour later Mint 12 was downloaded/installed immediately. Go figure.)
I don't even know what to say. It sounds like you need Mint, not debian. This is not the software's fault. Mint and Ubuntu are made for a more "windowsy" experience. I'm happy you got Mint installed.
Cristian Amarie wrote: Thanks for the "click more than one link" hint - I suppose you think I'm dumb, lazy, or both. However, I am considering myself an educated person, with a good sense of what A element click() does.
I was just saying that you didn't search very hard. Each distro has a website with forums, and all the workings are very well documented in easy to read ways. I have only seen a couple of HTML versions of the man page when searching.
If it moves, compile it
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You obviously never heard of find, locate, grep, whereis etc. nor of the Linux standards base, which, among others, also contains a filesystem standard . Your ignorance doesn't make Linux bad for development. You also can't expect to properly use a system without knowing how it is supposed to be used.
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Guys, your responses are textbook for why more people don't like Linux. Quite frankly, you're needlessly being dicks to this guy when he's expressing valid concerns. Why not take the opportunity to teach and introduce, rather than try to show how much smarter you are? How is somebody supposed to know or even learn about the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard unless somebody helps them out and points them in the right direction? Trying to show off like that just makes you look petty like the comic book guy on the Simpsons.
I like Linux and I'm liking it more the more I learn about it. You have to admit, though, that the learning curve is quite high and it's not always easy or straightforward to find the answers to questions or how to do something. I've invested a lot of time learning about Linux and that time is paying off. Should somebody have to invest this time all at once on the front end to begin to start getting use out of Linux? Perhaps it might be better to get somebody hooked and then tell them about all of the cool things they can now begin to learn?
Thank heavens for distros like Ubuntu and Mint so that people can see that Linux doesn't have to be so scary. Hopefully they'll get in and discover how fun it can be to learn to configure your computer to behave exactly how you'd like it. I'm really encouraged to see more and more Linux tutorials and help for people just getting started with the OS. We need more of this. For those people that don't want to dig as deeply, though, they shouldn't be left to an incredibly difficult computing experience. Linux is good enough to meet both types of needs.
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Obviously the previous reply was just a "yo' mama, Windoze guy" and was adding nothing to the thread (after all, about linux IDEs which are, IMHO, some light years behind what Visual Studio does since VC6; but I digress). It's not so obvious - I described already in the follow-up reply... - even on Ubuntu/Mint how to tweak your machine to get the maximum out of it. And if one has to rely doing gsettings/gconftool-2 in a console instead of a GUI wizard, then we're hitting a wall here. How hard can it be to change a key-value setting in a file which I don't have to know where is, using a syntax as :minimize,maximize,close or minimize,maximize,close: ?
Perhaps Florin thinks I should memorize all the GTK/Gnome/whatever fields in order to have the caption buttons or background as I like.
Thanks for support!
Nuclear launch detected
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Let's suppose for the moment that you thought I am one of the dont-known-how-to-do-a-sudo-apt-get-update-and-I-want-to-do-everything-with-my-mouse whiners, which I agree that are lazy oafs who cannot be bother to do a ls -l | grep "cairo".
But I am not considering myself such a newbie - although I admit I earn my living on Win32 land, I have enough experience also on Mac (Tiger up) and Linux (back in the RH 7.2 days).
What I am saying is that I have to KNOW where, for example, libflashplayer.so resides, when I want to install Flash on Epiphany (and that's only from this morning). My statement is "why I have to know where the goddamn file is - /etc/bin? /usr/bin? /tmp? /home/user ? - and why the setup does not take care about this.
And guess what: there is no viewer (?) for the file when I tried to install.
So let's continue (what I enumerate here are my adventures since last Saturday trying to put a distro on my netbook):
- Debian net install: too bad your wireless is TKIP, we do only WEP. Ok, I didn't knew this, was somewhere hidden in the docs. My bad. Net cable install. Package fail. Finally I get Debian running. Slow as hell, abort.
- Linux Mint 12 LXDE install. Ok, first time saw, didn't like it particularily. How do I change to Gnome (2) ? You can't. Ok, my bad.
- Ubuntu 12.10 x64. Install flawless using USB iso. Let's install Mac Lion theme. Added ppa, install step 7 of 12 or so. sudo apt-get install mac-osx-lion-theme-v2. Ah, there is no such package. Although documented. Ok, this is not official, so maybe someone trashed the ppa content on the other side.
- Let's get browsing. Install Epiphany, Arora, Midori. No Flash. Try to install. No luck (see above). I need to have a viewer (asked by sudo -i) for a .so. I don't know what is a lib viewer, neither do I care. I want a setup running. Guess is too much for configure/make/make install type of guys.
- Cairo Dock (my favorite). Appears and dissapears random. Succeeded to display 3 modal (?) dialogs at a time. Finally I got rid of it.
Morale: don't jump into insulting me right of the bat. While I admit I am no linux wizard, I am educated enough to read a forum and fire up a console. But if x guys make a setup, it is THEIR job to make it running. Not mine. Otherwise gimme the source and I'll do it myself.
PS. Do you have to know MSI api on Windows to install programs?
Nuclear launch detected
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Don't want to be rude. Some people consider me a Linux fan. When I about to start a project I always think first in Linux support, and if possible I begin with the Linux version first.
But I encounter invalid your claims. If you want to point out Windows weak points you probably can come with some of them without think a lot in it. But documentation is not one of them, either APIs or applications. In my browser I have MSDN site as a sticky tab. Also if you are using Mono in Linux for C#, the Mono site only has documentation for GTK#, they send you to MSDN for all the standard .Net classes, even the IDE encourages you to go to that site by showing you links at startup. So the site has value not only for Linux users.
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For those who are not into the OS for its "freedom", it's usually about saving 50 bucks on OS costs and spending 100+ hours across a couple of years in maintenance and just getting it to work.
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Yeah, for the corporates and home end users Linux just isnt going to fly.
Its a good tecchie OS though, and good for bespoke embedded stuff.
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Big corporates could actually more easily utilise it to save money, as it would be cost effective to have administrators that can customise and standardize the internal Linux.
One corporate I know of have a network boot Linux distro and any change to the end users can be rolled out in a matter of minutes and a rollback of that is also quite easy, as compared to Windows and yeah I know with an centralized update server the same could potentially be achieved with Windows...
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Got to disagree here, or at least point out that its not as clear-cut as you're suggesting.
Even if the techs in a big corporate are developing *for* linux, the rest of the company are going to be using windows and some corporate type is not going to want to put up with linux office tools and the rest, especially if they're not technical themselves. There's a good chance they've not even heard of linux either.
Then you've got the fact that the IT department that's been hired is trained and experienced in windows admin, the infrastructure is already in place for SMS management and the like. Inertia is a big problem.
Kev
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..there's more reasons; for one, it's a great platform for Windows-developers. I kid thee not; it makes one re-think a bit more than just the UI. Small example;
Don't you hate installing all tools on a Windows-machine? All those little setups, installers, asking the same bullshit; what location and do you want a Toolbar for IE? Wouldn't it be great if you could apt-get under Windows? Write a simple batchfile to install all crap in one go on a fresh system? Well, there's already two applications that provide such a service under Windows.
I think we'll see more environments in the future where you find different Operating Systems, partly due to that economic fact and the current state of affairs. 50 bucks might not sound like much, but once you're talking about an entire department..
(and think of all the people you'd make happy if you were to announce the company will *not* upgrade to Windows 8 with a touchscreen!*)
*) then tell them to sudo their work, and run like Hell
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Don't you hate installing all tools on a Windows-machine? All those little setups, installers, asking the same bullsh*t; what location and do you want a Toolbar for IE? Wouldn't it be great if you could apt-get under Windows? Write a simple batchfile to install all crap in one go on a fresh system? Well, there's already two applications that provide such a service under Windows.
That's what Chocolatey is good for  Doesn't work for everything, and you are left with adding product keys to "buyware" apps, but it sure takes a lot of the pain out of package management. The simplest script to install a bunch of packages would look something like this [Powershell - I don't use cmd anymore]:
$apps = @("git", "SublimeText2", "GoogleChrome", "thunderbird", "skype", "VisualStudio2012Professional", "WHATEVER" )
$apps | %{ cinst $_ }
If you use Windows, use it to its fullest!
EDIT:  "Well, there's already two applications that provide such a service under Windows." - I should read fully before I reply. Well, leave this as an example of what you were saying.
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The other is called "wget". I love it when software simply works as advertised.
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yum sounds better 
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windows 8 app store.... it's like getting all your software/updates from one place. Probably gots ome kind of standard on software that goes in it. Like a package manager...
Cool idea.
If it moves, compile it
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Well, there's already two applications that provide such a service under Windows.
I have to call this one only half true. There are a variety of apps and services that will handle install, but none of them track updates. So, really, they're only doing half of the job of a Linux package manager, at best.
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Most of these apps, like FF (including the Flash-plugin and Java) check their versions themselves, and don't mind interrupting you when all you want is a result.
So, when can we expect an article on the subject? 
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Nish Sivakumar wrote: For those who are not into the OS for its "freedom",
Just need to accent that first part.
Nish Sivakumar wrote: it's usually about saving 50 bucks on OS costs
It's usually about $200 if you don't go with an OEM copy isn't it? Up until I got past the introductory period of my programming career, that was still to much money. I used all the open source software that I could anyway, made sense to use the OS that it was built for.
Lots of the free stuff people enjoy was made for Linux to begin with, then ported to windows.
If it moves, compile it
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Please pardon my language, but that's BS. I use Linux because it's much more convenient when used right, not to save on the licensing costs.
Software updates and system maintenance are a PITA with Windows, whereas it's zero effort in Linux. The command line is a joke in Windows, which is why nobody likes to use it. In Linux, it takes less keystrokes than in a GUI to perform even complex tasks, provided you know how to use it, of course. This is also the reason why very few Windows users ever think about automation, whereas it's quite common to script everything on Linux. In all the generations of OSes Microsoft has released so far, it has not yet managed to create a decent file system, so you're really constrained unless you use Linux. Heck, there isn't even a decent file manager available on Windows - explorer is dumb as a brick, and other file managers are way less well integrated with the desktop manager. Until recently, there wasn't even a nice sound manager for Windows - I'm able to play age of empires using Wine, listen to music and have a VoIP phone call at the same time, on Linux, whereas a few years ago you could have just one sound source active at a time. That's why I prefer to use Linux. And I didn't mention anything about resource hunger and performance - W7 runs faster in a VBox VM on my desktop system than on the bare hardware. I similarly dislike OSX, if you're wondering, alhtough what I consider to be flaws in OSX is a different set - it's closed even worse than Windows, has no way of booting into a plain command line, and its GUI is very inconvenient when you need to use lots of windows at the same time.
You absolutely need to spend some time when switching from Windows to Linux, but it's not going to happen for just getting it to work. It's simply a learning effort you have to go through. You need to spend learning effort even on a professional powertool, and you expect not to need to learn anything when moving from a toy like a desktop Windows version to a really powerful and featurewise quite rich Unix-like OS?
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