If you have a video you would like me to add, feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

I also idle in #xna on EFNet. If you have a video you would like added, feel free to PM me. I’ll add it when I’m around.

For the most part, my two week experience was fun. I’ve used Linux as a desktop before, but I’d always get bored and boot back into Windows. The biggest frustration for me is not in any configuration that has to be done, it’s in the lack of good apps. (Believe it or not, the fact that an app is running on Linux does not automatically make it awesome.) For instance, Bluefish. Cool at first, until you realize how buggy it is. When using parentheses the highlighting sometimes breaks and leaves part of your file completely unformatted. You can fix it by hitting F5 to refresh, but this is a huge annoyance. Bluefish has other annoyances, but these are mostly missing features that I would like to have, like the ability to reorder the tabs for open files. The file explorer seems completely broken too. I eventually installed Notepad++ in Wine. It sounds like I’m bashing Bluefish, but it’s actually the best editor for web development that I’ve found for Linux. I like gedit for editing other files, but I need a file explorer sidebar for web development.

I think what this comes down to is the number of “windows developers” versus the number of “linux developers”. Windows just has tons more people making apps than Linux. People talk a lot about the market share of linux/windows users, but I would be interested in some numbers involving the number of people who can program for Linux. Unfortunately I’m not in that second category. Mostly because I’m pretty hard against learning C++ unless it’s taught to me. C++ programming just seems like a whole lot of non-fun. I want to implement features, not debug endlessly and muck around with garbage collection. I really want to learn D, but right now it seems like the D community is geared toward attracting C and C++ programmers and not newbies developers (which, despite a few years of web development and screwing around with .NET, I still consider myself).

As far as Windows goes, I’ve really been itching to give XNA another go. I’ve sort of lost interest in making any games in XNA but I still want to mess with it. I’ve been thinking of trying my hand at making a GUI system. Or just mess around with 2D physics again. I also want to give WPF a try. From the short glance I’ve given it, I looks a bit like XNA for desktop apps. Which sounds awesome.

Wow, that was a big post.

Edit: Turns out gedit has a plugin system (cool) and there’s a file explorer plugin. I’ll have to check that out.

Yes, they’re new, but you don’t need to dumb things down. XNA has already been simplified. That is, in fact, what XNA is all about. Because XNA has already made it easier, I think we need to concentrate on making the newbies good programmers instead of making it even easier for them to program. I can understand making the most basic “putting a sprite on the screen” tutorials as simple as possible to just get them started, but in order for them to really take off and get to the point where they no longer rely on tutorials, they HAVE to learn OOP.

Articles need to have OOP. This is even more confusing to me. Even the more advanced articles contain little OOP. Is this just how people program? Maybe it’s just me. When I program, I am obsessed with making everything as OO as possible.

Maybe I’m totally wrong. Maybe I’m just looking at the wrong tutorials. If I am, tell me.

Instead of going on some big thing about what XNA is, I’ll link you here.

After I made a simple Pong game and it was boring, I started on an Asteroids game. Then I was reminded that I didn’t like playing Asteroids clones so it wouldn’t make much sense to make one.

So now, I’m working on something else. I’m not sure if I want to tell anyone what it is yet, since certain people will fap over it and compare it to something and flame me when it doesn’t meet their expectations. I will tell you that it involves the Farseer Physics Engine. It’s pretty new and undocumented but it will end up being the core of my game. I haven’t been working on it much lately because of schoolwork. Maybe I’ll post something on it later so people can motivate me.