Hey guys,
Last night I was trying to get my SVN and stuff set up for Linux, you NEVER want to wait for a long time before trying to build cross-platform. GCC and Visual Studio compile, both attempting to comply to standards, but there is always going to be differences because they are two different products. I am not one of those Linux junkies, but I do think it is better than Windows and Mac operating systems. Everything is laid out there for you, and there is usually built in functions to get packages and libraries that you would need to compile code. I haven't finished setting up my SVN fully, since I passed out at the keyboard, but I do want to give my opinion about the whole Linux environment.
Don't think that I get some sort of pleasure out of using a pure command-line system, I use Ubuntu and Debian which both use KDE, which is similar to both Windows and Mac GUI bases. What you have to love about Linux is that it is free for the most part. And while I would love to install it as a secondary OS, I can just settle having it as a virtual machine for now. The reasons are simple: I am too lazy to partition on of my drives, I don't want to partition too much or too little for Linux, and there isn't a build of Steam as well as the Source Engine client for Linux. While I am pretty sure that someone actually has made some sort of JIT (just-in-time) compiler for running Windows applications in Linux, I am not too familiar with it and I am not up to reading around the net at the moment.
One problem that I have been having with Ubuntu is that its alot more user friendly in terms of ease to use, but it doesn't come packages with all the good stuff for compiling. Sure, I can get the packages manually but that alone takes alot of time and sweat. I have compiled with Debian before, but the recent transition to Ubuntu has put me somewhere between the Twighlight Zone and the Milky Way, that is when it comes to getting all the development packages that I will need. The cool thing about Ubuntu is that there is alot less of this:
cd '\lol\code"
make install
install
And alot more of just running executable installations, similar to the ones we see on Windows and Mac. Anyway, thats just my little ramble about Linux.
Your coder,
Anthony Iacono