It's mostly that Microsoft and Apple invest a lot of money in their IDEs to attract and retain development talent for the platforms that support the core of their business.

- In CLIs the function (what the software does) is more important than the presentation, in GUIs the usability expectations are higher.

- GUIs need constant cosmetic updates over the years to keep up with design fads

- GUIs in general require more work and a good eye to be considered useful

Linux market dynamics does not have such a "generous" vendor that might recoup their IDE development costs by selling other stuff.

- Historically, the Linux user base has been smaller

- GUIs are seen with contempt by a small but influent portion of the Linux crowd

- Linux users are less willing to pay for software because so much is available for free

- Visual studio has a trillion dollar corporation behind it

- XCode has a trillion dollar corporation behind it

- The graphical debugger projects on Linux pretty much only have volunteers (occasionally) working on them, and none has picked up enough traction to build a significant following and justify any kind of real investment

Also, it has never really been a pressing issue since GDB, LLDB, and tools like RR are perfectly usable from the command line once you learn them.

For devs coming from the full Visual Studio on Windows, VSCode is quite good for debugging with gdb on Linux.

I have the same question. I'm mostly a printf debugger but for some problems cracking out an interactive debugger is invaluable but I've struggled to find one that worked well for me on Linux. I usually end up using command line gdb and it's TUI but I'm not thrilled with the experience. Compared to something like browser debuggers for JavaScript it is so difficult to do simple things (even if the advanced features are more powerful).

I imagine the vast majority of people who use debuggers for Linux programs are doing it over ssh.

qtcreator seems to be ok for me - if your project has a CMakeLists file, just do “sudo apt install qtcreator”, “qtrceater .” Then “F5” and you’re off.

Am I missing out on important functionality?

different audiences, possibly.

*cries in vim*