Preparing to abandon M$ - medium to long term.

[TheLurker]

This is a bit of a disjointed ramble, bear with me.

I haven't played with any *nix stuff in over 10 years since I retired my collection FreeBSD machines so I'm in effect a *nix newbie.  So be nice when answering the dumb Qs below. 

I'm {expecting/hoping to be able} to have to switch to a Linux variant when Win7 finally expires and/or I no longer need to be able to play around with M$ dev. tools at home; whichever comes first. It's not going to be anytime soon, but I'd be interested to hear what's currently available that would give me something (roughly) matching the following setup:

This is sort of an, "Is it feasible to switch to *nix and continue low level development activity when Win7 hops the twig or shall I just abandon any thoughts of developing proper stuff at home, install Haiku and go back to C++ and gcc?" question so I'm not expecting definitive answers.. Opinion, alternative ideas and views all welcome.

Oh and any recommended solutions/packages/applications have to be either free (restricted versions acceptable - this isn't for commercial output) or very cheap.

Dev Tools.
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 Android Studio - Don't anticipate probs with this.
 Subversion + Tortoise - Ditto

Mostly backend dev
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 .Net dev. What's the state of Mono?  Anyone tried .Net Core on Linux?

SQL Server alike.  Needs to be a "proper" RDBMS with a reasonable management tool.  Something about the level of Query Analyzer (I know it's not called that any more, but I am old and stuck in my ways) would be perfectly acceptable.  I'm happy to piss around with SQLite in Android because most 'droid apps don't need much more than a single table but for anything more complicated than that it seems to become a real pain in the arse to manage.  I know M$ are bringing SQL server to Linux, but I expect it'll come burdened with intrusive nagware and cliping and M$ aren't getting their corporate neb into my machine if I can help it.  We won't talk about Goggle and Android Studio's equally nosey habits but at least with *nix I can always uninstall their stuff and still have a usable machine if / when I've had enough.

Mostly Front end Dev.
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*nix app dev?  The last time I did any non MS application stuff was in C++ for BeOS using gcc (BeOS was _nice_ and yes it _was_ a long time ago - if you ever came across it check out Haiku) so a summary of what's available / good for thick client app dev would be helpful cos it's always nice/useful to be able to  knock together noddy apps. 

Reasonably at home with Eclipse so stuff that doesn't come with its own IDE but can be built within Eclipse would be acceptable.


Niff, naff and trivia.
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Currently using OpenOffice 3.2 and I'm happy with it.  Are the later variants for *nix any good?
Inkscape - don't expect any probs with this.

StarUML - I really like this and would be a little lost without it.  Anyone tried ArgoUML?  Seems to be rated as "OK", but no higher.

The hardware
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It will be a laptop. It may be this one (Acer Extensa 5230E), but I'd hope to be able to by something faster with more HDD / RAM and keep this going for Tracklogs and a couple of other odds and sods.  So which laptops play nice with which *nix distros?  Any machines to avoid at any cost when running *nix?

The distro needs to support WIMP, wireless networking, dual monitor and USB without extensive pissing around in config files.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I can't speak for the .net, but I think you will find the rest will run *better* on linux.

Mint is good for development work and comes in several flavours - you can opt for the dev version which has many of the commonly-used tools included with the distro. Most modern Linux distros support everything you've listed. The other sensible option is Centos.

[David Martin]

For SQL there are a number of options. I don't know about query analysers as I never had a need to explore them, but PostgreSQL and MySQL are both fully fledged RDBMS and there is always the option of Oracle if you really want to.

[Jaded]

SQL - we don't use MySQL any more, we've moved to MariaDB

[fuaran]

LibreOffice is more updated and more improvements / bug fixes etc than OpenOffice. I think most Linux distros now include LibreOffice as standard.

[Afasoas]

I'm not sure how you will fare with mono. I attempted to write a simple web service using mono, initially with WCF and then later with WebAPI.
In short, I don't think WCF works.
WebAPI was looking more promising, but I didn't get as far as completely switching the project over to WebAPI before I lost interest/more pressing things came along.

[interested]

Just some remarks:

 Subversion + Tortoise - Ditto

These days it is all about "git" as seen on github, gitlab etc. Depending on your goals and reasons, you should seriously consider "git" these days.

Mostly backend dev
SQL Server alike.  Needs to be a "proper" RDBMS with a reasonable management tool. 

These days the most widely used Free RDBM's on Linux are MariaDB and PostgreSQL. Perhaps look at PGadmin for a management tool:
https://www.pgadmin.org/
Forget "MySQL". It is more or less dead in the water.

Mostly Front end Dev.
------------------
*nix app dev?  The last time I did any non MS application stuff was in C++ for BeOS using gcc (BeOS was _nice_ and yes it _was_ a long time ago - if you ever came across it check out Haiku) so a summary of what's available / good for thick client app dev would be helpful cos it's always nice/useful to be able to  knock together noddy apps. 

"Qt" (and KDE) is probably the best framework for Unix GUI development, but if you later want to close source your stuff, be aware that such a license cost money.
https://www.qt.io/
Also, check out Kdevelop : https://www.kdevelop.org/screenshots

For developing apps for Linux I would clearly target a "Flatpack" runtime, either KDE's or Gnome's. http://flatpak.org/
It isn't finished yet, but it is basically a runtime framwwork that allows an app to run unmodified on any Linux distro and sandboxed the same way as Android apps.
There is also "snappy" etc. But my money is on "Flatpack".

Currently using OpenOffice 3.2 and I'm happy with it.  Are the later variants for *nix any good?
Inkscape - don't expect any probs with this.

Drop OpenOffice. Use LibreOffice instead. All the good developers went there after they forked OpenOffice. OO has the good name and history, but it is slowly dying because of lack of development (serious issues with some lead developers makes people flee). 

LibreOffice is at version 5 and is in much better shape on both Linux and Windows than OO.
Inkscape works of course, but depending on needs there is also Krita:
https://krita.org/en/

[TheLurker]

Thanks for all the replies, all helpful.

Regarding git vs subversion; I only need very basic source control, the old VMS file versioning would probably be enough for what I need.  None of the stuff I do at home ever sees production so all I need is something that lets me roll back to a previous file if I get a bit over enthusiastic, lose the plot and stuff something up so badly I can't unpick it and a local subversion does that quite nicely.

Flatpak. Anything that, "Isn't finished yet..." is automatically excluded.  I don't do bleeding edge.  Too old, not enough life left to waste chasing potential dead-ends. That and I'm getting slower on the uptake these days. If it's finished, stable and widely adopted by the time I cut-over then maybe...

[RichL]

Coming to this a bit late, but as a .NET dev of many years recently transposed to linux I of course have an Opinion.

.NET Core is still basic, but should improve. You'll be missing the tooling for some time to come however, and Mono (+SharpDevelop) will likely bite the dust. So the only decent option for tooling atm is Visual Studio and that's such a beast I can't see it getting across to linux. Possibly some scaffolding goodness will make it's way into VSCode the x-plat editor.

Alternatively Jetbrains have their Project Rider - a cross-plat C# IDE - in development: I like their IDEs, even though they cost money.

I presently keep a Windows VM on my laptops, and a partition on my desktop so I can run Visual Studio when needed.
Or... you could abandon .NET and use, say, Ruby on Rails, or Nodejs for your back end, in which case linux is the obvious platform.

[TheLurker]

I forgot to ask. Wireless printing; problematic or a piece of cake?

[Kim]

I forgot to ask. Wireless printing; problematic or a piece of cake?

"Does it speak Postscript over Ethernet?  No?  Then it's a Printer Shaped Object."

Real printers are easy.  Whether The Devil's Radio counts as Ethernet for these purposes is left as an exercise for the reader.

[Feanor]

As well as the usual port 9100 and LPD protocols,
more recent printers can use WSD protocol to advertise themselves and be discovered by clients and then auto-installed.
This works around the problem of printers moving IP address if they are not statically assigned, which is often the case with wireless printers.

I've no idea what the level of support for WSD is on Linux.

[David Martin]

Even better is being able to send PCL commands direct to the port. Had a rather green hell desk person trying to sort out our lab printer and he couldn't understand the error messages it was showing. Finally twigged when it read 'Out of coffee. Black no sugar please' and much hilarity from the office across the way.

[Kim]

Even better is being able to send PCL commands direct to the port.

[David Martin]

my printer has issues by David Martin, on Flickr