I'm trying to think of advice to give to you, but it seems, you've already got your hands dirty with Linux distributions, so I doubt there are a lot of things left to surprise you (on Mint at least). Linux Mint is a solid and user-friendly distribution, it takes care of a lot of things for you, including proprietary graphics driver and CPU microcode installations (both are just a few clicks away).

If you're interested in ricing or modding your installation, check out r/unixporn (safe for work despite the name) to gain inspiration. Get more familiar with the command-line tools (unless you are already confident with them). Read up on the issue if you've got any—chances are somebody has already written a blog/forum post about it and figured out a solution. Don't forget to come back and ask questions—if you can't figure out how to fix an issue or how to do something, then you are welcome to ask. Take it slow and don't get worked up if something isn't working as expected, also submit bug reports if you've got the time—this isn't Linux Mint specific, but sometimes it's easy to forget that you're not on Windows anymore and fixing or configuring something may take a bit more on Linux than just heading into Control Panel and clicking here and there on Windows; also, if you find a bug in the system, it's best to report it to the software developers.

As you're a software developer, I recommend engaging yourself in the vim vs emacs war. Pick one and defend it, or simply go with Nano. This is a joke, of course, you're welcome to use a full blown IDE, too! Atom is favored by many, also there is Code::Blocks.

I think that's all from me. Welcome to the subreddit, enjoy your stay!

> In this class, we're just coding console applications! I don't need all this junk that Visual Studio installs.

But unfortunately, you are not in a position to know what bits you don't need.

> So now I tried installing Notepad++ instead,

Notepad++ is just an editor - you also need a compiler.

I'd suggest you use Code::Blocks, which is a much lighter-weight IDE than VS, and comes with a compiler. Get it here http://codeblocks.org/downloads/26 - you want the mingw-setup version.

If you'd like to try a different IDE, for testing and comparison, Code::Blocks is one that I've used.

Otherwise, I think it's possible to install a newer version of MinGW and configure Dev-C++ to use it. That might also be worth a try.

I don't use IDEs much, I'm partial to Sublime Text and a terminal, but I can give some suggestions.

If you're looking for a C IDE, I recommend CodeBlocks. It's a nice IDE with quite a few features.

If you're looking for a C++ IDE, I would go with Xamarin. It's extremely similar to VS, and I would recommend the hell out of it.

Honestly though, Sublime Text with some extensions and plugins and a terminal would do you just fine for some basic programming. Hell, I've got a pretty complex (for me) project I'm working on and I'm ONLY using Sublime.

Good luck with your class!

go to http://codeblocks.org - they have an IDE called "Code::Blocks" for free (It's open source). Note, this is a real hardcore programming IDE, it doesn't have the "visual point and click stuff" (training wheels) that Visual Studio has.

You should go to the forums and download the "latest nightly build". The codeblocks team takes long to deliver a stable release; IMO they're slower than Debian :P

You need to download the GNU GCC compiler collection (also linked in the same site). This is a cross-platform program, so if your c++ program works by using the built-in libs, it will run on linux too (you'll need to recompile).

Important thing: The support forums in codeblocks.org are for supporting the quirks and bugs with the IDE; They're NOT for asking your programmer questions.

Once you got your "hello world" c++ program to work, you're free to try your algorithm.

EDIT: www.codeblocks.org/user-manual <- there's your manual :)

It's hard to help without seeing the code. It's quite possible that you've got a bug in your code that only shows up if the contents of your computer's memory are in a certain state when the program starts. Like, if you're using variables before initializing them, or accidentally performing out-of-bounds memory accesses.

> I'm using version 5.1.1

Dev-C++ is ancient enough that the exact version almost doesn't matter. Is there a reason you're using it? Have you ever looked at Code::Blocks or Visual Studio Community?

Code::Blocks is an alternative (it is a much more complex alternative, supporting multiple compilers, multiple compile targets, project-global compile options + target-specific options, parallel compilations, etc, but it's also significantly more complex than dev-cpp, with a bigger learning-curve =/ )

Ubuntu should work fine.

For battery life, I'd guess that by default, there may be a bit of a drop in battery life, however there are ways to deal with that. One of the most popular packages is TLP, which should do a good job of optimizing battery life with its default settings.

sudo apt install tlp

For programming, there's countless options for IDEs. Personally, I'm a fan of SublimeText, but that's pretty much just a text editor. The last true IDE I used was Code::Blocks, which might be worth looking into.

You really don't need an antivirus on linux - so few people use it that folks don't tend to waste their time developing viruses for it. If you really want one, though, Sophos has a free one available (I used it for a bit, but really didn't find it useful).

For firewall, ufw is the go-to.

sudo apt install ufw

It looks like the [screenshots](http://codeblocks.org/screenshots) on their own website.

It definitely doesn't use the GTK-themeing, so maybe you can change its look by changing your qt-theme.

TL;DR download code blocks

So the command line is just a place where programs are executed. The compiler is a special program that takes plain text (called "source code") and turns it into a program ("executable code"). Therefore, if you have a compiler installed on your computer, you can write your c++ program in anything that saves it as plain text(notepad will do). Once you've written the program, you can use the command line to call the compiler and have it turn your source code into a program. If you have gcc installed you can do this by typing gcc my_source.cpp and it will create a program out of it (usually called a.exe), which you can then run by typing a.exe in your command line.

Uh oh, make your life a bit easier:

http://codeblocks.org/downloads/26

Download version 16.01mingw-setup. This will give you a nice IDE to work with that integrates a debugger, syntax highlighter, mingw etc.

Using mingw directly is a bit annoying. You need to add directory mingw/bin to your PATH first so you can simply do gcc/g++ from command line anywhere. Otherwise if you don't do that then the process could go like this (assuming your mingw is installed at C:\mingw and program you are writing is on D:\Project and is named main.c):

• start a command line
• D:\
• cd Project
• C:\mingw\bin\gcc main.c -o program.exe

Programming, it can be brilliantly fun once you start to get the hang of it, it will make you seriously appreciate the engineering behind a great deal of applications you use, and it's a generally useful skill to be able to throw together a simple program for personal use.

http://codeblocks.org http://cprogramming.com

That's all you need to get started.