Better is in the eye of the beholder, but I’m using Ubuntu running NetBeans as we speak, and I have no (major) complaints. Though I will admit that I only use NetBeans as a glorified editor - basically just for its syntax highlighting and occasionally for refactoring features which are pretty nice.
Ubuntu has much better user interface tuning. Centos (correct me whether or not I'm wrong) still has lots of miserable Unix-style glitches, such as a <delete> key that prints garbage in various apps - like MacOSX.
Netbeans or Eclipse
Get them both and just see which one you keep using!
Also coded a while without any IDE but I need the debug feature.
I recently switched to NetBeans on Ubuntu and it’s better than anything before, especially because Ruby on Linux is much faster. And, both are free of charge!
With ‘Eclipse’ you mean Aptana Studio? Because I couldn’t get the RadRails plugin to work with Eclipse, at least not on Windows.
that's a very personal decision. you gotta try and decide for
yourself.
personally i've been working on mac/textmate for a while and switched
back to suse/kate which is a very good combination for me. my
coworkers are using ubuntu/netbeans though.
But as mentioned before, it is very much a personal preference as to
editor.
I'm starting form nothing (I was working on Dreamweaver and Notepad++
before) , I did some coding on Netbeans but I'm not glued to it , I just
need some with the best integration with RoR , github and capistrano.
Ubuntu + Vim. Give it a shot, and if you don't like it, then try
something else. That's the beauty of the choices you have listed ...
they are all free and you can try them out and find out what works
best for you.
Better is whatever gets the job done for you. The good news is that you’re talking about free SW, so you can try each variant for a week or so with minimal risk of lock-in, and compare. (Ultimately though, you should understand that the option that you take the time to get used to will probably be the best one.)
As for tool integration, I would encourage you try things like git, Capistrano, Rails generators and console, etc. out from the command line as you get started. The act of reading man pages and typing in the specific options you want will give you a better understanding of the tools. Then if you still feel that using a full IDE will give you some productivity boost, go ahead and do it.
BTW, I haven’t checked in a bit, but I’m fairly sure neither option you mentioned is going to give you git integration… Not sure my info is up to date though, so someone correct me if you’ve heard otherwise.
RHEL is built upon Fedora, and CentOS is built upon RHEL public SRPMS.
To be more precise, Federa is something of a playground for RHEL. Some
items may be included in RHEL, other items may not be depending on how
the experiment turned out.
+1 for Ubuntu. A friend of mine said he had a lot of trouble getting
git installed on CentOS 5...I think he even gave up on it.
+1 for RubyMine. I migrated from Aptana Studio to RubyMine and I think
I'm sold. Aptana is just too bloated for my liking. RubyMine has great
code validations and helpers. I've also briefly used Netbeans...I'd go
back to it before Aptana. Also, you can try RubyMine for 90 days after
installation...fyi.