Integrated Development Environments / RAD tools / GUI-builders on Linux:





Warning: Some of the above are binary-only and x86-Linux-only.




To explain the context of this page: It came about really just as a small exercise in understated online rhetoric, the need for which long ago vanished.

That is, through the middle of the 1990s, you could not go onto online discussion media without encountering some dumbasses arguing that the Linux operating system was useless for developers and end-users alike, and one of the very most common talking points was the allegation that there were 'no IDEs for Linux'. This was a ritualised argument: The hapless Linux enthusiast typically fell straight into the intended trap and said 'Well, actually, you're far better off using emacs and gdb as your development environment [blah blah].' The critic then triumphantly pronounced his/her point conceded and posted yet another 50-line screed about how $SOMEONES_FAVOURITE_PROPRIETARY_OS was clearly better and Linux would be useless for decades.

These ritualised disputations annoyed me, because they cluttered up otherwise useful online media such as the non-advocacy parts of the comp.os.linux.* Usenet newsgroups. So, I found myself involuntarily thinking about the issue, and suddenly one day thought: 'Wait. What IDEs are there actually for developers on Linux?'

I spent a couple of hours researching the problem, came up with about 50 of them, and inserted them as a new item into my personal 'rants' pages. Then, the next five times I saw one of the usual suspects asking rhetorically 'Oh yeah? What IDEs are there on Linux?' I just posted the URL with the comment 'Here y'are.'

Oddly enough, it took only about five postings of that URL to Usenet and other places, and the entire debate point disappeared completely off the Internet. People simply stopped making the allegation. So, basically, my rants/FAQ item did its job.

Much later, I moved that 'rants' item to its own separate page and kept adding new items to it — but the underlying original reason for the page's existence no longer exists.