And never mind getting a nice IDE environment like Visual Studio up and running.
So it may just be a matter of familiarity and/or the particulars of the projects you work on.
Free alternatives would be Visual Studio Code, which is pretty ok even for C++, or KDevelop, which almost kind of works, or SpaceVim / SpacEmacs and about a week of learning how to use it. I'm in the final camp, since basically every serious C/C++ dev on Linux has a Vim or Emacs setup they've built themselves that does about 90% of what Visual Studio gives you out of the box, with some things better and others worse. It can work pretty well, but you have to understand it's not VS and it works in its own way.
If you have the money, you can buy a good IDE for Linux. Otherwise, learning to make your own out of high-level building blocks is also a useful skill, but takes a little bit of time. Personally the first time I had to write C for Linux out of college it did take me about a week before I was up to speed with it (but I was already sort of familiar with vim as a pure editor).
Small parts of Qt for specialized applications are under GPL, and abiding LGPL in embedded hardware is hard, but for normal desktop software it's not a problem.
Even though I would argue QtCreator is only bearable when working with Qt.
No, you do not need a commercial license for creator, neither did you at other points in the past few years.
I guess I'll just have to settle with using Visual Studio Code for linux.
If you're willing to sacrifice the stability and performance of your output for a saccharine IDE and its installer then that really speaks more to your priorities as an engineer.
You mean like
- gdb randomly sucking up 16G of ram - gdb crashing with internal errors - clang/gcc miscompiling my code - perf refusing to record stacks - perf refusing to symbolise stacks because it's having a disagreement with the compiler people about debug data formats.
- locking up X11 and having to SSH in to fix it (because, you know, X11 doesn't have per-application input queues, unlike WindowsNT3.5)
- and a ton of other minor little annoyances with hardware support that Mac/Windows ironed out years ago
I like Linux a lot, the tools are great, but let us not pretend they are all that, they still have a way to go.
I feel like developing on Windows is more difficult because of all it's abstraction layers. WMI, DCOM, the registry, overlapping snap-in functionality, ect.
To me programming on Windows feels like you've got to peel apart all these layers to understand what's between them. Linux is one layer and you can already see right through it.
> - and a ton of other minor little annoyances with hardware support that Mac/Windows ironed out years ago
Uhh, did you just say that Mac has ironed out harware support? For what? They only support their own hardware. The hackintosh community will be the first ones to tell you that Apple purposely doesn't iron out hardware... ANYTHING unless it already says "Apple" on it.