I think you are right ... application development under any form of unix, 
including Linux, is scarce to the point of being nonexistant.  There is an 
excellent reason for this.  *nix seldom lives on the desktop, so there is 
little or no demand for application development, because so few people use 
*nix applications.

Obviously one can make a nice living in the *nix world as an administrator.  
As a developer one's options are more limited than in the MS world.  First 
there is no clear biz-wide language comparable to VB.net.  For that matter, 
there is no OS-wide RAD comparable to Visual Studio.  More importantly, there 
is no way to quickly whip together a brand-new stand alone application the 
way you can with VB.



Here are my impressions of some development realms.

A lot of what passes for application programming in the MS world becomes shell 
scripting and glueing in *nix.

Bash|Korn, PERL|Python ~~ VB
   It is easier to learn to do this in MS than *nix and you only have to learn 
it once.

There is plenty of call for web programming in *nix.

PHP ~~ VB
   Each is comparable.  Note, however, that when you learn VB for web 
programming the fundamentals get reused for application and shell 
programming.

Enterprise programming:

DB+SQL dialect+Java+Shell Script+Glue Script
  ~~ DB+SQL dialect+Java|C#+VB

This actually works better under *nix than Windows.

Kernel, device, and embedded programming.
  LOTS of guru level C, maybe some C++ for the lazy, a little assembly
     ~~ same as *nix.
Probably MORE work using BSD and Linux as embedded operating systems.


Application programming (such as it is in Linux)
Java|(C, C++ ,TCL)|TCL|Thin client (any language + PHP and browser)
  ~~ Java|C#|(C#, VB)|VB

==================

The big advantages for Windows from an application developer's perspective.

Windows HAS (GUI) applications.  

Windows HAS users who consume GUI applications.

Windows has VB, a learn once use everywhere for everything business friendly 
language. (That is, programmers with widely varying levels of experience and 
talent can be productive using Visual Basic).

Windows has Visual Studio, a learn once RAD environment for all projects in 
nearly all OS languages.

On Thursday 2005-09-15 12:42, Josh Coffman wrote:
> 'tag
>
>   Here's my dirty little secret. I'm a windows
> developer. I'm pretty good at it and make a good
> living. I've switched to linux at home(except a dual
> boot for some side-work) mostly because I was tired of
> MS annoyances, the cost, and I was generally curious.
>
>   One area I've still see MS more favorably is in
> development. Part of that is because I've been doing
> it for a little while. (Ok, maybe more than a little.)
> While I like Eclipse, I haven't seen dev tools that
> come close to Visual Studio even with it's stupid
> annoyances. Although, CVS has got to be better than
> SourceSafe; that's what I call crap.
>
>   Also, I have no idea how one would earn a living in
> linux other than network or server admin stuff. So
> please educate me. What do people use develop apps?
> What sort of salaries or contract rates are out there?
> Anyone else ever made the switch from MS-dev to linux
> dev?
>
> -j
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
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