What's so difficult in debian, that you need 10 trials for the filesystem? And whether RPMs or DEBs doesn't matter too much, since they are not compatible over distinct distributions anyway. SuSE uses RPM too, but inter-package dependencies are very different, so that you can't just take a random FC5 and install it on SuSE, neither vice versa. Whether apt or yum is faster, I don't know. I doubt that there is a heavy difference, since the principle is the same on both and caching is done on both too.
That said: I'm not arguing against FC here, I tried it myself and found it a viable dist. I just want to say, that any current distribution should work fine and differences between those get smaller with each release.
What IDE and Compiler do you use? and why?
I am in no way trying to bash Debian. It's an incredibly usable distro... once it's set up correctly. Part of my problem was that I was using the Potatoe version. Which is known far and wide to be hard to install. It really only took me 3 or 4 tries to get my partitioning correct, the rest was trying to configure XServer. I was new to Linux at the time, so it was all a blur to me.
Personally, I love FC5's installer. Even though I like working with terminals and command lines, text-based installers never interested me. FC5 gives you a choice of Graphical or Text-based and even automatically chooes for you depending on your video card and RAM.
And what I meant when I said that "most Linux apps are distributed as RPMs", I really meant "most Linux apps are distributed as RedHat RPMs." Sure, there are RPMs for SuSE, but most websites give you a choice between RH and SuSE RPMs. I wasn't implying that RPMs for other distros didn't exist. My main point was that FC5 can run alot of programs.
Personally, I love FC5's installer. Even though I like working with terminals and command lines, text-based installers never interested me. FC5 gives you a choice of Graphical or Text-based and even automatically chooes for you depending on your video card and RAM.
And what I meant when I said that "most Linux apps are distributed as RPMs", I really meant "most Linux apps are distributed as RedHat RPMs." Sure, there are RPMs for SuSE, but most websites give you a choice between RH and SuSE RPMs. I wasn't implying that RPMs for other distros didn't exist. My main point was that FC5 can run alot of programs.
You can do that in FC5, aswell, using repositories like Livna or FedoraExtras. What I meant about "digging" was that you will have to find out which repo the MP3 plugin is located in (I'm pretty sure it's Extras). You can also download Java, but when I said it was a nightmare, I was talking about installing it and allowing Java programs to run. Just downloading the Java installer will not do this. You've got to do some editing here and there.
Ok, back to topic :-) For me C::B for several reasons
- runs on linux & windows (and i need both). I can even use the same project file (with 2 different build targets certainly)
- it's very light-weighted and easy to learn, so i got used to it very fast
- project files are in xml
- Supports gcc and other gnu-tools quite good
- The editor is ok and is using keyboard shortcuts which are very similar to those of kate
- it doesn't cost anything
There are some disadvantages to it, so i won't conceil 'em:
- Support for gdb is available, but very unstable
- In linux it hangs here regularly because it manages to grab the mouse focus and you won't get it back sometimes in X without killing c::b
Maybe i would have less trouble with a newer nightly build, but i didn't succeed to compile the last one's i tried.
As for other IDE's:
Visual Studio 7 is great if you can afford it and if you only develop for windows. Unfortunatly ms do no longer add a c++ profiler since 7.0 which is a shame!
Don't know about express - won't run on '98 and that's all i've got.
Dev-c++ is not bad, but also only for windows. Also i haven't written any code in Delphi for a long time (dev-c++ is written in delphi), so i wouldn't have a chance to fix any problems with it, while i could do so in c::b (if i ever find time for it...)
Eclipse looks also fine and runs on many platforms. The learning curve is a little steeper than c::b. Unfortunatly it's very slow here sometimes, and not always that easy to get it running on linux systems, even if it got a lot better lately. Also c++ support has to be installed addionally. Still an IDE which is definitly worth to check out.
For pure linux development i sometimes use KDevelop, sometimes c::b and for smaller projects just an editor (kate) and makefiles.
- runs on linux & windows (and i need both). I can even use the same project file (with 2 different build targets certainly)
- it's very light-weighted and easy to learn, so i got used to it very fast
- project files are in xml
- Supports gcc and other gnu-tools quite good
- The editor is ok and is using keyboard shortcuts which are very similar to those of kate
- it doesn't cost anything
There are some disadvantages to it, so i won't conceil 'em:
- Support for gdb is available, but very unstable
- In linux it hangs here regularly because it manages to grab the mouse focus and you won't get it back sometimes in X without killing c::b
Maybe i would have less trouble with a newer nightly build, but i didn't succeed to compile the last one's i tried.
As for other IDE's:
Visual Studio 7 is great if you can afford it and if you only develop for windows. Unfortunatly ms do no longer add a c++ profiler since 7.0 which is a shame!
Don't know about express - won't run on '98 and that's all i've got.
Dev-c++ is not bad, but also only for windows. Also i haven't written any code in Delphi for a long time (dev-c++ is written in delphi), so i wouldn't have a chance to fix any problems with it, while i could do so in c::b (if i ever find time for it...)
Eclipse looks also fine and runs on many platforms. The learning curve is a little steeper than c::b. Unfortunatly it's very slow here sometimes, and not always that easy to get it running on linux systems, even if it got a lot better lately. Also c++ support has to be installed addionally. Still an IDE which is definitly worth to check out.
For pure linux development i sometimes use KDevelop, sometimes c::b and for smaller projects just an editor (kate) and makefiles.
But it was useful... OS comparison... 