There are a few IDE’s for Linux, though maybe not as “powerful” as visual studio.
My last (and only as far as I can remember) experience with an IDE in Linux for C/C++ programming was with anjuta and that was many years ago… It didn’t look that bad… Though I’m not used to using IDE’s so my opinion won’t count much…
I rarely work on projects as large as audacity (or any graphical apps for that matter), so the only “IDE” I use is usually Vim…
Anyways, I was hoping that in the last few years anjuta and the other IDE’s (IIRC there was KDevelop for KDE or something like that) would have evolved for something more interesting… I might be wrong though…
I tried Anjuta and KDE (settled on KDE because it’s debugger better suited me) and they “work” but as there is no current Audacity project/solution for either (I saw a VERY old project somewhere) it would be many hours (if not days) of work setting up an Audacity project/solution with all the dependencies and header locations. I ended up doing all the work in VC++ then e-mailing the new files to my Linux box for compiling! I will say that compiling on Linux is WAY faster than on Windows!
I’m not a programmer so I can’t speak with any authority on that subject, but I’ve seen similar criticisms of Linux in the field of music production and it seems to come down to a difference in mind set between Linux and Windows.
The fashion on Windows for music production is to have one monstrously big program that rips CDs, edits audio, sequences midi, synthesizes sounds, has virtual instruments, sample banks, lots of built in effects, burns CDs, produces score notation, manages music and sample libraries, costs $1000’s and takes over the computer.
For a virtual Linux studio you would generally have one small application for ripping CDs, another for editing audio, another for midi sequencing… and tie the whole lot together with Jack. Each application dedicated to doing one job really well.
It seems to me that this is similar to the question of IDEs. Windows has few development tools built into it, so to develop on windows you need to obtain a full suite of tools, which generally comes in one monstrous application called Visual Studio, whereas Linux already has many of the necessary tools built into it and additional specialised tools can be added as and if required.
My apologies if this has wandered too far off topic.