I was working on a mesh simulation and wanted the convenience of an IDE (I like them more than vi). I had been wanting to use kdevelop. Well my server had the older version (2.1) so I decided to work on my laptop. Well kdevelop by itself is pretty good. Lots of templates and decent intellisense. An overkill for what I wanted but that did not stop me.
Since, I need some visualization or paths and routes, I though I would give Qt a try. Not an expert at UI, but I get the general idea. But behold, my laptop has no network connectivity – I remembered having trouble with the wireless drivers (ipw2200) with FC4. But I had got it to works …at least once! After much trying, I finally decided to use SuSe 10 as it seemed to have the necessary support. After a lot of wasted hours, it turns out that did not help either. I could not get it to talk to my NetGear wireless router , neither wireless not ethernet worked.
Since I was running short on time, I decided to give Visual C# Express and .NET 2.0 a try. Got the whole thing downloaded and running in under an hour. And actually got to what I was trying to do in less the 3 after that. While we can argue about Linux vs Windows and how much more powerful c++ is, I always think of the saying…”for the want of a nail, the horse shoe was lost, for the want of a horse shoe the horse was lost…and so on.”.
I love Linux and many aspects of open source, but there is a long way to go.