Re: need advice during abandonment of windows
- From: Lars Rune Nøstdal <larsnostdal@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 09:30:45 +0200
Jeff Glatt wrote:
glenn
Each new version of windoze adds more layers over the win32 and win64 functions, pushing me farther away from the hardware.
Hopefully, your post, and my comment to it, won't start some stupid flame war
with OS fanatics. But I do want to comment on the above so that you understand
where I'm coming from, and realize that my advice may be more pertinent to you
than some others, because it sounds like your preferences are quite similiar to
my own.
I write most all my Win32 apps in plain C, going right to the Win32 API as it
existed before COM and NET. I never even liked frameworks such as MFC or WTL.
And I definitely don't care for C# or VB.NET. I loved my Microsoft Visual C++
7.0 IDE (but use it only for C coding, not MFC, nor the Class Wizard stuff). I
don't care for the latest C# and VB.NET IDEs.
I've done a bit of Linux programming recently because, like you, I noticed that
MS is really pushing toward very abstract languages like C#, and I don't want
to follow that path.
So here's what this particular Windows developer has experienced in moving to
Linux.
1) For GUI apps, I chose to utilize Gnome rather than QT. QT doesn't support C,
and I prefer C to C++. (Also, I prefer Gnome to KDE, and Gnome apps run better
under the Gnome desktop than do QT apps). I design my GUI using the tool
Glade2, which is sort of like the dialog editor in MS Visual C++'s IDE. But
Glade2 spits out an XML (ie, specially formatted text) file which remains
separate from your EXE. This one XML file contains all of the "layouts" for all
your windows, menus, and controls (called "widgets" in Linuxland). (Contrast
this with Windows, where the resource editor compiles your windows, menus, and
controls definitions into a binary format that gets linked right into your
EXE). Your Linux EXE then uses a library called "libglade" that has a function
you can call in it to present one of the windows (and its controls) from that
XML file. Think of it as the same thing as Win32's CreateDialog().
2) Linux dev tools are unfortunately way too command-line, and text, oriented
(aside from Glade2). You won't find anything quite as cohesive and intuitive as
Microsoft's Visual C++ 7.0 IDE. The closest thing is Eclipse, which is bloated,
and when compiling C/C++, still runs atop of the notoriously convoluted,
text-based GNU auto-tools. (Any IDE that requires auto-tools to compile C/C++
is going to be a nightmare). What I found to be easiest is to just hand-create
a very basic make file, and run it from the command line. Linux IDEs are more a
hindrance than a help. I write my code in Gedit (ie, the Gnome text editor),
and have a plugin for it that runs my basic makefile.
3) If you're doing C/C++ dev under a Debian distro, definitely apt-get the
package "build-essentials" which will give you the compiler/linker/assembler,
basic C libs and includes, and the basic GNU utilities like "make". Then if you
want to do Gnome GUI apps, you also install some Gnome dev packages, such as
libglade and the Glade2 utility.
Just a quick note; I recommend trying out build-tools like Scons or CMake (I have only tried Scons, but I've heard CMake being recommended). Scons is in my experience and for my uses way nicer than Makefiles/make.
Glenn Smith: I've been working on this platform since my switch in 1998/1999 (10 years O_o) and it is very nice once you get used to it. Don't give up. One thing I noticed about your post is that you seem to be looking in the wrong places for Linux software. You need to (in 95% of all cases) use the package manager of your distro. Debian/Ubuntu is very good choices as they have the biggest amount of packages out there. The less "manual work" you need to do downloading, compiling and installing software the better and packages solve this by doing it for you.
--
Lars Rune Nøstdal
http://nostdal.org/
.
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