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Welcome to the wonderful world of being a Linux user. I finished converting over in December. I've been a user of Linux for over a year, but I still had XP as my primary OS until December. Since I administer a network of Windows computers, I was getting a little sick of maintaining Windows boxes all day, only to come home and do more. You'll find that Linux is a very low maintenance OS. It's a bit of a pain to get configured correctly, but once you've got it setup, all you have to do is enjoy. I let cron run virus scans for me daily. I do a simple yum update once a week, and I clean out my firefox cache every so often. That's it. My machine runs faster now than it ever did on any Windows OS. BTW, I run Red Hat Fedora Core 2 (a very easy OS to get use to).
As far development apps for Linux goes...
The apps suggested here are great, but you may want to spend some time getting to know vi as well. vi is a command line editor that is extremely powerful. It's not the easiest text editor in the world to use, but it has some very nice features. If you've got vi IM (improved) installed, it will even color code the code you are working on. It's particularly useful if you have shell access to your hosting service since vi is installed on all versions of *NIX by default. There is also the option of running Windows apps on
WINE. Currently, you can run up to Studio MX 1.1 without any real problems. This is the route I went and I'm extremely pleased with the overall performance.
If you'd like to join a great community of *NIX users, you're more than welcome to join us at the
MOVLUG. We have members from all over the world spanning every level of IT experience. If you ever find yourself in the Parkersburg, WV area, we have monthly meetings that cover all sorts of great topics.
Oh, and yeah, you can *really* tweak the way KDE looks. This is my KDE 3.2 desktop.