Hi,

Using a cross-platform game engine which includes Linux will prevent many problems and thousands of hours of labor.

List of Game Engines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

Ultimately you must target a runtime environment of some kind. OpenGL and the other Open APIs are a serious consideration if you don't want to use a game engine. OpenGL is the cross-platform graphics API and comes with a mature and substantial collection of standard and third party coding libraries built for OpenGL. The fact that the USA Defense Department and NASA prefer OpenGL in many cases for cross-platform implementation of their top simulators is on account that their contributors build applications and software on Linux, OS X, and Windows systems in their companies. Some amazing top graphics software is only available in Linux, so take encouragement that some of the leading software developers prefer Linux. You can develop on Linux and implement elsewhere if you choose your workflow pipeline carefully. Like I said, a game engine for development in Linux and deploys cross-platform is ideal (and available).

Code::Blocks might work for you.

Afaik X11 is a low level windowing system technology. I suppose if you use libraries like SDL2 or an engine you will not need to deal with its API directly.

I do not remember any kind of programming as trouble free.

Better find the right pace. Trying to accomplish too much at once is usually frustrating ... and develop the resilience to struggle through build issues. They will not just disapear ... ever ... I fear.

What exactly went wrong when you tried to use Irrlicht?

There is a tutorial for Irrlicht and C::B (Code::Blocks) btw. (oops, might be Windows specific, though):

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/tut_codeblocks.html

I still recommend you to give QT Creator another chance, it is really powerdul IDE, you could also use Code::Blocks as DareDeveloper have mentioned. Personally, I use vim for source editing, gcc and g++ for compiling and wrap all building process with makefiles - this works perfectly for me with SDL2 and OpenGL.

If you want to do cross-platform development, you could try CMake(which also works with QT Creator).

I am new to Linux and any development on it.

I have a Radeon X1300 GPU, and will be coding C/C++/OpenGL/SDL2 or SFML2

I need some recommendations for IDE under Linux.

I am running Linux Mint 16...

QtCreator? If I remember right the UI wasn't to friendly to get a simple C++ project working....

How do I install the latest drivers for this GPU? From what I can tell the latest don't support the X1300?

What is X11? Do I need it?

I would like to use Irrlicht also but couldn't get that working either.

So I am not liking the experience so far... Not trouble free at all....

Thanks!

Hope to overcome the sour taste of this and enjoy coding on Linux but need some serious help!!!

The x1300 is no longer supported by AMD, they cut Linux support in 2009 (4 years after the first x1000 GPUs hit the market) and Windows support a few years later (there is no Win7 or 8 driver either (The vista driver works in Win7 though, and you can hack it to work in Win8) so you have to use the opensource driver that is included in your distribution, or use a very old(2009 or older) distribution.

Overall AMD tends to cut support really quickly for their hardware on Linux but their opensource drivers are decent, nvidia is the exact opposite (their proprietary support lasts a very long time(10+ years normally) but their opensource drivers are pure junk by comparison)

Edit: You don't have to install the opensource driver yourself, Mint installs and updates it for you automatically.

If you want better performance or more features than the opensource driver provides you have to either switch to an old distribution (IIRC Linux Mint 5 is the newest Mint version that works with the proprietary x1300 driver) or buy a new GPU (or an older nvidia GPU as nvidia supports their GPUs for far longer than AMD does)

Just for comparison, nvidias GF5 to GF7 series (The GF7 was the direct competitor to ATIs x1000 series) will get updated to support new linux distributions(and Windows versions) or to fix critical bugs until the end of 2017 and the GF2-GF4 series got their final update in december last year (and thus still work with most recent distributions and have a proper Win8 driver), the GF8 - 280 will be supported until 2019. (Later GPUs don't have a EOL date set yet but should be supported for atleast 10 years from when they were first released)

code::blocks - great, some issues with autocompletion sometimes

codelite - pretty awesome, some plugins aren't free

vim+spf13 - very good historical fuzzy auto-complete + snippets main<ctrl+k> will give you a full int main(..). or class<ctrl+k>ClassName<ctrl+k> will fill out a simple class def and impl and a lot more

eclipse - awesome auto-complete lots of different languages

A few tips that might help.

1) Like any new platform, start simple. Use a plain text editor and compile from the console until you understand what the IDEs are "meant" to be doing for you.

2) Are you new to C/C++ development too? If so, perhaps learn this on the platform you currently use so you are not in a completely foreign environment.

3) With Linux, in exactly the same way as OSX and Windows. If you have hardware that the OS does not support, swap out the hardware with something that does. In your case, a graphics card is quite an easy thing to replace. However, I would be suprised if your card was not supported. Perhaps try running glxgears or a 3D linux game (i.e OpenArena) to see if it is working.

What issues were you experiencing with Irrlicht? Did you install it from the package manager (# apt-get libirrlicht-dev) or manually from a source archive? If you specify the error you are having, I might be able to help solve it with you. In most cases you can compile code like:

$ g++ MyCode.cpp -lIrrlicht

Linux is trivial to develop for so once you get over these initial hurdles, you will find it extremely straightforward from then on.