Josh Coffman wrote:

>  Here's my dirty little secret. I'm a windows
>developer. I'm pretty good at it and make a good
>living. I've switched to linux at home(except a dual
>boot for some side-work) mostly because I was tired of
>MS annoyances, the cost, and I was generally curious.
>
>  
>
Developers generally find the MS most irrating.  The reason being that 
when you run into a bug/issue you can't "fix" it.  On an open platform 
you can fix or at least narrow down the nuisances.

>  One area I've still see MS more favorably is in
>development. Part of that is because I've been doing
>it for a little while. (Ok, maybe more than a little.)
>While I like Eclipse, I haven't seen dev tools that
>come close to Visual Studio even with it's stupid
>annoyances. Although, CVS has got to be better than
>SourceSafe; that's what I call crap. 
>
>  
>
Visual Studio is nice for point and click type of development, but for 
more hard core development you can't beat a raw editor like vi or 
emacs.  Currently emacs, python, postgres work fairly well for me.  Add 
php, ruby on rails and other tools there is plenty of choice.

>  Also, I have no idea how one would earn a living in
>linux other than network or server admin stuff. So
>please educate me. What do people use develop apps?
>What sort of salaries or contract rates are out there?
>Anyone else ever made the switch from MS-dev to linux
>dev?
>
>  
>
See above.  Currently our company uses python, php, mysql, postgres and 
other free software tools to develop supply chain / warehouse management 
software and other applications.  General contract rates can vary from 
$30 to $200/hr depending on the type of work.  Generally we see it in 
the $50 to $100/hr range.

You might want to try mono develop and mono.  I have done some playing 
around with it and it seems rather capable. 

I made the transition about 7 years ago.  I was a win32 programmer using 
mostly Delphi.

--
Derek Neighbors
Integrum Technologies

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