Linux will throw you in at the deep end. You'll know more sooner out of necessity. The down-side of that though is that the initial climb will be steeper and perhaps frustrating at times, depending on your temperament

If you want get started faster and aren't the kind of person that needs to know what's going on under the hood, Windows (with Visual Studio) is likely more appropriate.

So... games programming, eh?

It's easier. But having it easier means that in an environment without one, you're lost.

for 5 minutes.. how long does it take to learn you have to type "blablabla" instead of hitting a button? Do you really think a programmer that masters things such as game programming will be scared to learn a couple of commands to type?

And if you judge from what people write it seems to be more complicated for linux users to learn to press a couple of buttons to do a "hello world" in Visual Studio... use the search button and you will see more than one of these genius at it.

This has gotten to the point of silliness.

I'll give it one chance to return to some semblance of sanity, or out comes the padlock.

[quote name='SymLinked' timestamp='1315593132' post='4859683']
I have friends who think you're not a good programmer if you don't program in (Linux) Vim or whatever it's called (it's basically a Notepad-ish style code editor). Those friends also happen to not have finished any useful projects and I think many of the zealots fall into this category.

Careful what you say about Vim. It's about as different from Notepad as possible for a text editor to be. In terms of text editing speed, I don't think a tool exists that allows an experienced user to edit faster than Vim. As for you friends not finishing any useful projects... well... finishing a programming project has many (possibly more important) requirements beyond being able to edit text efficiently.


Regarding the original thread topic: Anything that enhances your beard will increase your "realness" as a man, and therefore, as a programmer.
[/quote]

FakeVim for QTCreator(included for free) or ViEmu for VisualStudio($99+ plugin) and you'll get the nice commandbased editing without having to give up your nice IDE. (Commandbased editing is insanely fast when you get used to it)

vim itself can be integrated with pretty much any build system, source control, debuggers, etc aswell though so with the appropriate scripts/plugins it can be a very powerful IDE on its own. (Personally i'm using QTCreator on both Windows and Linux these days since it makes it really simple to write cross platform graphical applications in C++ while i pretty much only use vim to edit scripts remotely (primarily php scripts)).

And ofcourse, vim is available for Windows aswell for those who want that.

The only real advantage Linux has for developers is valgrind, its probably the most powerful free tool of its kind and unfortunatly it hasn't been ported to Windows yet. (There are commercial software for Windows that can do some of the things valgrind does though but those tend to be very expensive and there are free tools that can replace some of the more commonly used valgrind features (I havn't found any that can quite match valgrind though))