Although I’m not a Linux geek, I play around with it from time to time. I have a Gentoo installation on my notebook. One might argue about the different distributions, but I found this one to be the most intuitive among the ones I tried.
Today, I updated to the current Eclipse 3.1 M5a milestone, which I use at work, too. I had no trouble with this version yet, and if it’s good enough for work, it’s fine for using it at home, isn’t it? I did not use portage, but downloaded the GTK 2 binary instead.
One thing I disliked was the huge font size. I was able to customize most font sizes in the Eclipse options, but the main menu remained in its original way-too-large size. I found out that this was some kind of GTK default font, so I searched for a way to change it, and found a little handy tool called gtk-chtheme. I downloaded it using emerge gtk-chtheme and was then able to change this main font easily. Now everything suits my needs, and I surely will use Linux for development more often.
Short rant: for a long time, Visual Studio was my favourite IDE; then, I got to know Visual Assist and thought that VS alone was quite limited; then, I started to write Java code for a living and thought that Eclipse was an even more powerful IDE (a big plus are the great refactoring possibilities of Java, so this is not a real IDE argument); now, I got to know IntellJ IDEA and I’m looking forward to having the $499 bucks to spare. But I guess until then Eclipse ripped off all the great features 😉