> On Linux (which is my main OS these days) pretty much all options involve a text editor
You obviously haven't looked hard enough. CLion fulfills a decent amount of what you're looking for. https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/
A lot more limited, but still much more capable as an IDE than text editors is KDevelop, for example your request here :
> (i haven't touched topics like VCS support and how i'd like to be able to see and use different version of the code from inside the IDE - like e.g. go back in time to a different function while the debugger is running - or anything that has to do with GUIs)
https://kdevelop.org/features/
> An especially useful feature is the Annotate border, which shows who last changed a line and when. Showing the diff which introduced this change is just one click away!
Also example snippet of the debugging integration :
> You can also hover the mouse over a symbol in your code, e.g. a variable; KDevelop will then show the current value of that symbol and offer to stop the program during execution the next time this variable's value changes.
https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kdevelop/kdevelop/debugging-p...