Flex Builder for Linux Dead?

I think right now the adoption of Linux is really piking up speed. My wife for example is running Linux on her ultra portable and is perfectly happy with it. In fact many people I know could switch to Linux tomorrow and they would not see much difference. Many already use Firefox and use their PC mostly for Internet and some of them are actually switching to Linux (hear that Adobe). I really think we are at a turning point.

The adoption of Macs by developers fragmented an already small Unix desktop market. And to compound the problem, the history of distro development for Linux has always been a support nightmare for ISVs.

Just run a virtual machine.

I really think we are at a turning point.

That's been said every other day about desktop Linux for over 10 years now. It never happened, and never will. One reason is that there's no single, canonical desktop Linux (even though Ubuntu is somewhat becoming that).

The biggest reason, however, is that there was never a compelling enough reason for most to switch to Linux.

I've been using Linux(various distros) all my development career without any problems.

Now I'm starting developing widht Flex and I discovered, sadly, that there is a big disadvantage for Flex developers in Linux, as for today the only real option its IntelliJ IDEA, but its missing one of the most useful features of Flex Builder the Display View.
I think mxml is designed around the idea of having a visual WYSWYG editor, and in Linux is simply missing.

As for me next month I'm giving up and installing a VM just for running Flex Builder which is really painful.

First of all, why I think the notion of creating a development environment for multiple operating system is unsustainable. It is that in this competitive market, timing and first to market is everything, and resource is better to direct limited resources into winner "operating system" because in reality no matter no matter how attractive a multi-plaform development enviroment is, the company naturally tend to focus more resources on lucrative and established OS (since profitability is important for management since pay/perk link to it), and beside there is a tough challenge of maintaining consistent application behaviour/features across multiple platform as in the case of Development platform (where it tends to use native library or plaform-specific hack workaround if one ever peek at their files and codebase). Rather than spending time and resource to ensure that the development environment from multiple platform are keep in sync, the firm can better focus resource to improve the core product.

I think the Adobe will make the right choice to make Development environment available on Windows since it has the largest market, and and Linux already destined for "niche" users (As Borland Kylix prove that, so after years of Kylix's demise, the perception of Linux as technies' OS still remain, it is hard to change that perception no matter how friendly Linux Desktop has become)

Anotjer main reason to drop support for multiple platform is because of increasing popularity of virtualisaton running in powerful multipleCore PC using product such as VMWAre, the free Sun's virtualBox, Parallels Desktop. The improving performance and seamless integration of this virtualisation means that developers will use Windows OS for best-of-breed development in the future, and I think this will be the trend in the future. Windows will be used for development to develop multiplatform application (within virtual machine, eg JVM, FlashPlayer, CLR)

If you're not doing Windows/Microsoft development then most developers will be more productive on a non-Windows machine such as Mac or Linux. That's the bottom line and I think most if not all developers will admit that. However, it's quite rare their employers will let them have a development environment that is not Windows based. Running a VM is one option, but wrapped in a Windows environment ultimately stifles productivity.

So given this news post and the comments in response, I found this a little surprising:

"Adobe AIR won the Linux Journal's Readers' Choice award for "Favorite Platform for Developing Rich Internet Apps" this year."

blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/05/linux_journal_reader...

If you're not doing Windows/Microsoft development then most developers will be more productive on a non-Windows machine such as Mac or Linux. That's the bottom line and I think most if not all developers will admit that.

Perhaps you work for one of those companies where your bosses are more open to suggestion, or better still servants to the developers. Most people do not. The other contributing factor is that a lot of developers simply don't get the chance to try and work on Mac or linux. For none-Windows/Microsoft developer it is a much more natural environment to work in, that's just fact.

It is no surprise that all the major multiplatform development environment like Eclipse (which FlexBuilder based on), Netbeans and Intellij run better and deliver more positive experience in Windows OS platform compare to other OS counterpart due to large amount of attention and optimization to its Windows version. The strategy for most IDE vendors are pretty clear cut, that is the product running on Windows version is the first priority above any OS version, so if the other OS version fail or been underdevelop, the developers will be asked to fall back to Windows version (by using virtualisation software if they are not running Windows OS).

Adobe might feel that they are disadvantage rather than advantage to build on Linux version when JavaFX is now aggressively develop for Windows version first with Linux port later. There is a lot of progress make onto JavaFX when major limited resource is focus solely on Windows version. I guess that kind of progress might have surprised Adobe so much that it reconsidering its Linux Flex development strategy.

Yeah, I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. So I've been using IntelliJ and Flex Builder for years on OS X. Flex Builder had some issues (but all were attributed to Eclipse bugs). But IntelliJ gives the best experience on OS X, at least the same as it is on Windows. I used it on Windows 3 years ago before I finally got off that crappy OS and have been enjoying the full power of Unix with a great UI. With that said, development on *NIX platforms (outside of .NET) is much easier and natural, than doing the same on Windows.

It look like each person's experience on IDE running on different OS is different and depend on the comfort and preference of working with particular OS. I have to admit I biased towards Windows since I am using Windows extensively and it has a lot of great development tools (eg Jprofiler, yourkit) that work great.

I wonder too how long can the vendors sustain and justify the development of increasingly complex and feature-rich IDEs across multiple OS.

Perhaps you work for one of those companies where your bosses are more open to suggestion, or better still servants to the developers. Most people do not.

The other contributing factor is that a lot of developers simply don't get the chance to try and work on Mac or linux.

For none-Windows/Microsoft developer it is a much more natural environment to work in, that's just fact.

With that said, development on *NIX platforms (outside of .NET) is much easier and natural, than doing the same on Windows.

> Now if I could get management to fork out the bucks for a 8 gig PowerMac the I'd probably run OSX.

Which vindicates my point... you'd prefer a Mac, if you could afford one. (Note that my 4gb Mac Book pro is a very adequate dev machine for what I do)

> I do need at least a windows virtual machine for some video applications I write.

Why not run Windows in the VM instead? Very easy to do on a Mac.

What you'll be running is a much more developer friendly environment, but it sounds like you know that already.

Which vindicates my point... you'd prefer a Mac, if you could afford one. (Note that my 4gb Mac Book pro is a very adequate dev machine for what I do)

Why not run Windows in the VM instead? Very easy to do on a Mac.

What you'll be running is a much more developer friendly environment, but it sounds like you know that already.

I agree that "Linux adoption at a turning point" has been stated before. However, the reason why I think that things are changing is that the people use their PC is also changing. More and more people are using their PC to browse the Web and in fact I think a new category of user has emerged: the Web appliance users.
For those people the traditional stoppers for alternate OS adoption are less valid. Security and good performance on less powerful hardware however are a factor. The ease of installation (often better than Windows) of the new distributions is also a factor.

Sorry, but that statement simply is not true. I run Netbeans at home on Linux (Ubuntu) and at work on Windows and everything runs better on Linux (for example, same version of Netbeans takes 50% less startup time under Linux).

Sorry, but that statement simply is not true. I run Netbeans at home on Linux (Ubuntu) and at work on Windows and everything runs better on Linux (for example, same version of Netbeans takes 50% less startup time under Linux).

Can someone here explain to me why I would want to develop on a mac / linux desktop for a program that will be run in windows?

I use eclipse, flex builder, python / ruby for scripting, and photoshop for image editing. I already have cygwin installed so I am not lacking a shell, what would be a good reason for me to want to run Linux /Mac outside of personal distaste for Microsoft.

Nothing in this thread posts any reasons for why its better, just that it is. My day to day activites are read requirements, write up a design, code java, code flex, do other coding stuff, builds usually in Ant / Maven... refactor, make some images. What in mac OSX or the linux desktop is going to make that any easier to do, over what Windows XP / Vista gives me? I currently use XP and my computer usually runs for a month or so before I even bother to reboot it (and this usually because our tech services team has made an update that requires a reboot), so OS stability is not an issue at all.

If I want to test my web app in IE 6, which unfortunately is still the target browser for lots of companies out there it just means more work for me.

Convert me with something other than its just better.

"Can someone here explain to me why I would want to develop on a mac / linux desktop for a program that will be run in windows?"

It is generally matter of OS preference and wanting to use a "OS-native" application, not "second-class" application. If someone favour a certain OS, it naturally for that person to prefer to use application (or IDE) native to that OS.

Sometimes, it does make business sense to develop a application using a IDE that run on the same OS as the application to save testing time and avoid fixing OS compatibility issue later.

As in the case of FlexBuilder, developer naturally will prefer "native" Flexbuilder application especially when the Flex RIA or AIR application developed can be run in multiplaform. It is same argument for JavaFX/Java applicaton too.

I don't think Windows development is dying. Linux and MacOSX may be improving but so is Windows. It is not just performance factor over Windows, it is also combination of many important factors such as support, ease of use, wide-range of development application, vendor-support, profitability and market-share etc that make a certain OS attractive environment for development.

Indeed! The problem is that the machine at home is the less powerful of the two. Both hard drive speed and CPU. Sorry...
The reason why I switch to Windows at home is because I just got tired of the ridiculous performances of Windows. I'm not a Linux fanatic but there is a point where you have to get serious.

You're talking about the desktop OSs used by developers(because if not, whatever OS the end user runs is, as of now, relatively irrelevant for flash apps),right? In that niche linux is and has always been strong! Partially because the target platforms(the servers) for running the server-side products are linux themselves. LifeCycle for example is written in java, which is an opensource technology, and the majority of servers out there running BlazeDS are *nix.
Something else that you seem to argue is that "everyone must use commercial OS", even developers. That would be unsustainable, but that's a whole different discussion..

Man, I develop with linux flex builder and I must say I don't miss the display view at all. Nor does the rest of my team.
Running flex builder inside a VM is quite painful indeed(you'll need a very good machine with lots of ram), good luck with that :)