I'll throw this out since noone else has... with Java you have your choice of 
multiple free and commercial IDEs that run on Windows and Linux.  You could 
develop on Linux OR on Windows and then deploy on either or both.  I am 
familar with both JBuilder and Eclipse.  Both are excellent IDEs, however only 
JBuilder will give you a Visual Basic like experience, because the last time I 
checked Eclipse did not have a GUI painter. 

http://www.borland.com/jbuilder
http://www.eclipse.org

I feel the need to point out that Java compiles considerably faster then 
C/C++.  On a decent PC there will be a hardly noticeable pause for a small 
application.  I personally would not leap from the Java camp to Perl/Python 
camp because of compile time worries.  There could definitely be other reasons 
though.

One drawback to using Java is the standard GUI toolkit, Swing, is quite a bit 
more complex than Visual Basic and even QT.  You could also use IBM's GUI 
toolkit SWT, but I have no personal experience and thus cannot comment.


As an aside, I have experience with the KDE/QT IDE KDevelop, but I think you 
will be dissappointed in it since you are used to Visual Basic.  It's 
definitely better than VI though!  :)

Mike Bresnahan
--------
Quoting Patrick McCabe <patrickm at citilink.com>:

> I have been using Linux for a few years now, but all my software 
> development has been for Windows (MFC and VB). We finally have a 
> customer who wants to use Linux.
> 
> What tools/development environments are available for developing GUI 
> apps in Linux? Favorites?
> 
> What we need to do is not very complicated -- something comparable to a 
> simple VB app on Windows.
> 
> Thanks
> Patrick

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