[rant]
Its so damed confusing and difficult to use. I spent three days trying to install something on my Fedora 11 machine that would take me no more than about 10 minutes in Vista (or any other version of MS-Windows). As an example: wxWidgets. I couldn't even successfully compile their online Hello World tutorial because of uninstalled extra packages. Then after installing more packages using yum program, tried to compile Hello World and the g++ compiler couldn't find some include files. So I used find command to locate the header files and created a makefile to set -I flags for the include directories. That finally worked, but now I get trillions of undefined variables error messages. From this short experience it is no wonder that more *nix programmers don't commit suicide!

As for Vista: the same Hello World tutorial compiled without errors or warnings in about 15 minutes using VC++ 2008 Express. And not much more than that using Code::Blocks.
[/rant]

See, Switching to linux is like learning a bike or you can say, remember the time when you started to learn windows. Tell me at that time did you able to compile the helloworld program in one go, I can bet you did not.

remember the time when you started to learn windows. Tell me at that time did you able to compile the helloworld program in one go, I can bet you did not. coz first you will have to install VS then you will learn how to compile and so on.

As soon as I see "Linux" and "Ubuntu" in the same comment, immediately tune out. If you want to use the poor-man's OS X, be my guest; but please don't ply it as a real Linux distro, as it ain't![/LIST]

I use Linux on a regular basis (ubuntu) and let me tell you that it is not the same thing as learning to compile on windows.
Here's the difference:

Windows:
- dowload visual studio and install it by click 'next' a few gazillion times.
- start it by clicking it's icon.
- click 'new project'
- type in name etc.
- make code
- hit F5 to run


Linux:
- install a compiler by typing yum install g++
- find something to make code with like VIM, gedit or Netbeans etc
- go back to a console
- type g++ blabla.c
- find out you're missing dependencies.
- google for two hours
- try to yum install all the suggestion given to you by linux-regulars
- try to compile again
- edit your .bash_profile file to set library and include paths
- try to compile again.
- forgot to install libc++xxx, so yum install again
- chmod +x a.out
- run by ./a.out

Not to mention adding external libraries from source ....

And what if you need a big-ass project? Then you need makefiles... I've read a 200 page document on makefiles. In windows, you would just right-click and add a file to the project.

When (and if) it works on Linux, it works great. But until you get to this point it is a enormous pain in the behind IMO.