Novell Survey

[Kurt Granroth]

On Jan 26, 2006, at 11:11 AM, Micah DesJardins wrote:
> Have you looked at Eclipse? How about KDevelop? What specifically are
> you looking for that you find in VS that you aren't finding in F/OSS?

I'm a vim and command line guy, myself, but I've worked with some  
long-time Windows developers that were transitioning to Linux.  We  
wanted to make the transition as easy as possible so we set them up  
with KDevelop first and then Eclipse.  The final opinion was  
unanimous: neither Linux IDE could come even remotely close to Visual  
Studio.  In the words of one of the developers (paraphrased),  
KDevelop and Eclipse were suitable IDEs only if you've never used an  
IDE like Visual Studio before and hence didn't know what you were  
missing.

If my memory holds true, the major differences were:
1. Integrated debugger
2. Integrated editor
3. Source code and class management

This was two years ago or so and I've since seen that both KDevelop  
and Eclipse have gotten a lot better in the last two areas.  Neither  
can still approach VS in terms of the debugger, though.  And, in  
fact, as long as 'gdb' is the only real choice for the debugger  
backend, neither have any chance of being as good.

Personally, I've never gotten used to the IDE style of editors and  
source file management so I can't really comment on that.  I have  
used the VS debugger and once I got used to it, I loathed having to  
go back to gdb (or even ddd).  Ah, to be able to reliably set  
breakpoints on classes inside of namespaces and to accurately step in  
and out of functions...

Kurt