Anyone here use Linux OS only (no dual boot) as main system? I’m planning to completely use only Linux *.
I know Eclipse will run well but how about the JDK? I have heard hiccup about Oracle’s and OpenJDK and IceTea but I don’t really understand.
*) as I can find well driver for my AMD machine.
edit: please mention your linux distro too.
I have dual boot, but I very rarely use Windows XP 
Eclipse runs well, JDK runs well, no hiccups dunno… IcedTea is a problem though… Getting browser java to work and stuff 
But I don’t like Applets and Webstart anyways (Sorry gouessej)
Uhmm… phew… I wish you good luck… :-\
Problem with applet? weuh sometimes I need applet too. What kind of linux do you use? I’m planning for Mint.
There are 2 kind of drivers that I need to verify first,
I’m using ArchLinux here. And no, there are actually no big problems with applets, but you need to get it working. Usually there are many guides out there for any distro. If you’re completely overwhelmed, then I guess gouessej could help you…
Linux works fine for Java development, so do Eclipse and Oracle Java 7 (except having to manually install it from Oracle site as Oracle have banned distro’s from including it in their own repositories for some reason).
Applets work fine with Oracle JDK. However OpenJDK (with IcedTea-Web) which mostly comes bundled on distro’s is still a little flaky.
Distro: OpenSUSE 12.2 + KDE4
Its a really nice time to dev on Linux, as it ‘just works’ for desktop use and the OS stays out of your way. Also one of the main reasons to dual boot (games) is less of an issue now as there are tons of games for the platform, Wine compatibility is really good and Steam is available.
I’ve been using Gentoo Linux as my main box for several years now without any major problems in regard to keeping it in working order. I’m able to get the applets to work in browser (both with Chromium and Firefox). As others posted, Eclipse works without issues. Of course, having the POSIX tool chains available at the command-line helps my productivity, too.
I keep my Windows XP machine for games and ensuring that code I write is cross-platform compatible. There’s a few minor things that can be different between the two on a Java app.
Ninja editing there
Sorry, but… beware:
I’ve had experience with AMD boards. I was once going to buy one of the newer AMD’s, but I’ve already heard there were problems with Linux and AMD… So I tried out my farther’s old AMD and installing the AMD drivers. Everything worked at the first try… problem was the speed. It was almost as fast as the standard windows XP “drivers”, when you haven’t installed the drivers on windows yet
So yeah… AMD / ATI is probably a problem. But an AMD cpu is not too bad, afaik.
I have fedora running on my laptop and Win7 on my desktop. I think linux is a better dev enviorment the win, I can get stuff done alot quicker(although I’m using linux just for a year).
I’m still using win on my other sys only because I’m to lazy to reinstall everything and, because I want also to play some AAA games
yeah, just got my invite, installing Steam tonight^^
I think Mint is an excellent choice, my favorite since Ubuntu used Unity
ATI / AMD GPU drivers are… a pain
I switched to NVidia only because of Linux support
Other than that no problems, never really tested applets & webstarts in linux, just desktop stuff
Ubuntu 12.04 here. Unity is a beautiful desktop for development - just keeps out of the way and text search is excellent. I used Mint for years, but find it incoherent in comparison, and don’t get me started on their approach to LTS - a number of bugs in the previous Mint LTS software that were never fixed.
If you go Ubuntu or derivative, my advice is stick to LTS releases for development.
Never had much issue with AMD graphics - never owned NVidia so maybe I’m missing nirvana!
I use NetBeans with OpenJDK. Not had any problems with OpenJDK for years, and if you go for 7 you shouldn’t have much issue - OpenJDK is the reference implementation after all. Don’t use applets much or webstart so not sure what the support is like - the sooner applets die out the better anyway!
I couldn’t stand Ubuntu’s Unity when it first came out, but as of 12.10 it seems to be actually usable. Unfortunately it’s not usable in Virtualbox – 12.10 doesn’t support the VBox 3d accelerator, so it uses the dreadfully slow llvmpipe, and if you do force enable the driver, it crashes virtualbox.
It seems to be a little better in VMWare player, though I don’t know if it’s using the 3d support there either. I’m also not a fan of the player’s many annoyances like lack of snapshots, a toolbar that doesn’t go away without editing the .vmx file by hand, lack of support for >3 mouse buttons without again editing the .vmx file, etc. But at least it works.
I’m using Linux Mint with a Lenovo Thinkpad E520 and virtually everything just works (except horizontal scrolling and any ‘special’ keys (my e520 has a calculator, explorer, and search keys which only work on windows))
I still dual boot because of gaming and Paint.NET (because I require absolute control over the pixels and do lots of messing around with the alpha channel to add precise shadows/color changes) but other than that, I use Linux.
It boots quicker than Win7.
Eclipse works. And OpenJDK seems to only launch my game when I run it from the command line (some error finding LWJGL.jar. The strange thing is I don’t even have to put the classpath as an argument. It just finds it properly with java -jar “name”.
Anyway, when you boot with the Linux Mint installation DVD, you can actually test most of the hardware in the ‘sandbox’ version before actually installing it to your Hard Drive (if you haven’t read the install guide, it boots the OS from the DVD so nothing is installed, and you can mess around with whatever is on the basic installation and test the internet etc.)
And if it doesn’t work, don’t install (or find the solution as firefox is available at that point)
Well I could never “work” on Linux until the Adobe Suite was released on Linux.
All my video, audio and image editing happens there (I do use Sony Vegas, which of course has no Linux port either, but I can use Adobe Premiere easily)
Thats really the main thing for my thats holding me back aside from games.
I use ubuntu with no dual boot. It works fine for the games I want to play (minecraft), and any other games I can go without.
As a development environment, I haven’t seen any hiccups.
I did have to follow a bunch of tutorials to get applets working though, :/. It took a few more to get the applet console up.
Thanks for the posts! Seems Eclipse and JDK work well on linux. I just need to test the Catalyst. What I concern from graphic driver is I need to play 1080p movie flawlessly. That’s all.
I just grabbed Android SDK bundle for linux which includes Eclipse 3.8. I also grabbed Ubuntu 12.10 and Mint 14. I’ll try with Mint first.
One more question, is it possible to use linux without much internet connection? I grabbed lots of tar and deb for offline install, but afraid hitting dependency problem.
I use Ubuntu and Arch, and its pro.
I heard Arch is quite hard to use ^^;
It’s hard to setup. (Or so I’ve heard)
After that it is supposed to be the same as other distros.
The only reason I didn’t choose Arch was that I wanted to get used to Linux first (and I’m too lazy to leave Mint)
I also couldn’t use it for work since ms excel is missing. Star office / libre office etc just aren’t the same. I wish they would use exactly the same keyboard shortcuts and have the same menus and names but they don’t.
I use dual boot ubuntu, but I’m looking for a desktop that beats unity since I hate the vertical left aligned task bar.
I got office 2012(?) running perfectly under ubuntu with wine(without any extra configuration), so no excuse there^^