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[ProgramGamer]

Since when is programming not an employment (why limit it to business?) skill? Get a programming job!

I would, but I live in the middle of nowhere, and that would mean colaborating with people over the internet, which I have attempted multiple times and it never succeeded. I'm also kind of amateur at programming. I tried learning C++ multiple times, with books of varying dificulty, but I could never get past libraries, and my only other option is Game Maker: Studio, which is still decent, but kind of hard to argue as a skill to your parents. Although, I probably should persist leraning C++.

Another one of their arguments is that if I only learn programming, I will not learn other the other valuable skills learned by having a job. They might be right, but my gut keeps telling me that they are wrong somehow.

[ThemsAllTook]

they believe that I should find a job in which I can learn buisiness skills such as communication, responsibilities and dealing with unreasonable people.

These are important life skills for more than just business. They can be learned in a variety of situations, though, so a standard job isn't the only possible option.

Do you have a plan to become financially independent in the immediate future, and the drive to follow through on it? When I was 17, I was itching to start my adult life and strike out on my own as soon as possible. If you're in a life situation right now where parents can limit your computer time, what's your plan for getting out of that?

How's the job market in your area? Are there any companies in fields that interest you? If learning programming is what you want to do, learning on the job will give you some valuable perspective that you can't get doing it by yourself. Both are important.

[oahda]

Yeah, it's not like I've been isolated to a screen of code in my programming jobs. I've had to deal with clients both in person and especially email a lot. Sometimes phone. I've had to learn a lot of things on the go. Lots of communication in between programmers and the rest of the staff, like designers and boss. „Communication, responsibilities and dealing with unreasonable people” are all part of many a regular programming job.

[Sik]

Not 100% game/programming related, but my parents are insisting on limiting my computer time because, well, they believe that I should find a job in which I can learn buisiness skills such as communication, responsibilities and dealing with unreasonable people. I'm 17. Are they right to do this or just way too worried? I can't think straight because of frustration right now. 

Honestly it sounds like they just want you to get a job to bring in extra money right now even if it's something low paid like working at McDonalds. (but 17? aren't you still at high school?)

[ProgramGamer]

I think a slight misunderstanding might have happened. I'm 17, still in high school, going to university next year (hopefully) which my parents will pay for because there is no way I can make the money I need while studying. I do plan on repaying this dept later in my life however. Therefore, becoming a financially independant adult is out of the question, and the whole "get a job" situation is not due to a lack of money. I'm just wondering if I can get the kind of xp they're talking about while doing something else than a job in something unrelated to my main interest.

I kind of feel like this discussion is off topic. Should we move it to another thread?

[Impmaster]

Not 100% game/programming related, but my parents are insisting on limiting my computer time because, well, they believe that I should find a job in which I can learn buisiness skills such as communication, responsibilities and dealing with unreasonable people. I'm 17. Are they right to do this or just way too worried? I can't think straight because of frustration right now. 

I mean, if you're someone who's antisocial and spends all his time on his computer, then yeah, it's good to get off and learn some life skills. But seeing as your parents are helping you pay for college, you should have the money to move to a city where computer programming is a really important skill. If your parents are worried that computer programming isn't a real job, I'm sure you can show them the average income for a software developer. If your parents think you need to learn life skills, I'd say they probably know what they're talking about and you should probably spend more time communicating with people. It's not good to spend all your time on your computer, you'll never get anywhere without connections.

Of course, I'm only 17, so take my words with a grain of salt. I'm just repeating the things that the successful people in my life say.

[Photon]

If I had a dollar for every time my dad was right about something I was skeptical about... 

But seriously, just because programming is your passion doesn't mean it has to be your sole priority. Even working at fast food joints (which I did for two years while studying computer science at college) can give you valuable experience about being responsible and meeting expectations, not to mention giving you a small precursor to what you can expect when you get a full-time job. Your journey to programming as a living may involve a series of small steps, many of which may have nothing to do directly with programming itself. And don't forget that our parents often know a thing or so more than we do, even if we don't like it.

Honestly it sounds like they just want you to get a job to bring in extra money right now even if it's something low paid like working at McDonalds. (but 17? aren't you still at high school?)

Don't make such sweeping speculations with so little to base it off of.

[oahda]

this conversation makes me depressed

[Layl]

Yeah, it's not like I've been isolated to a screen of code in my programming jobs. I've had to deal with clients both in person and especially email a lot. Sometimes phone. I've had to learn a lot of things on the go. Lots of communication in between programmers and the rest of the staff, like designers and boss. „Communication, responsibilities and dealing with unreasonable people” are all part of many a regular programming job.

Personally I've enjoyed the projects with clients the most. At my school they run all big student projects with clients. Usually real projects with real users as well. There's nothing better than getting a new iteration of the project into the hands of testers and seeing it in use!

[ProgramGamer]

 
Now I can't have more than seven hours per week on the computer and I have to keep a log of the time spent using it as proof. This is getting ridiculous and I didn't do anything to deserve this.

[Schrompf]

I'm done with Linux. This is no normal rage anymore, it's endangering my hardware. I should probably be thankful that I did most of the porting in a VM. I only had to deal with the self-righteous bully that is GCC. Seriously: sorting linker libraries back and forth is SO 1988. And a static const size_t FOO = 0x123; is a constant, no need to throw around "Undefined reference". Everyone else happily binds temporary objects to non-const references, but not the GCC.

But little did I know that this was only the beginning, a means to soften me up before the actual beating. When I finally got an executable out of the linker, I quit the VM and went native. Or at least: I tried. Because trying to install Linux natively is like a bad trip back to DOS times. Booting Ubuntu 14.10 from DVD went to a black screen, just like the old times. Plus, this time, there are some shitheads in command trying to keep the working software away from me because it's "proprietary". I left the VM specifically because I couldn't create an OpenGL context there... so why do you think I should stick to some age-old non-3D graphics driver just because it's FOSS? Plus all the dialogs to actually change this were unreachable in 640x480, and I couldn't get more than 640x480 without those dialogs.

And then, after some trips back to my main system (which I luckily never put in danger of that Linux crap) and some changes to xorg.conf, I finally got a display resolution you could actually read text on. Only to end up in the packet manager that refused any install with some weird error messages "Requires foobar >= 1.10 but 1.15 is installed.". Or even better "Requires foobar, but I won't install it."

It's a digital world. Except in Linux packet dependencies, where a condition being true is not equal to true. I'm done with this shit.

[ThemsAllTook]

Sounds familiar. I went through something similar not too long ago. In case you decide you're not quite done with this shit and want to give it another try, here's some of the stuff I figured out:

• Assuming you're using VirtualBox, you can get out of 640x480 by installing VirtualBox Guest Additions. Somewhere in the VirtualBox UI (possibly File -> Virtual Media Manager -> Optical disks), you can set it to make a virtual ISO visible to the VM that contains all the stuff you need. Once you start the VM and install it there, you'll get a much better experience.
• I couldn't get Ubuntu 14.x to install natively either. In particular, I wanted to use wubi, which for some reason is no longer officially supported. I installed Ubuntu 12.x with wubi and upgraded to 14.x after installation, and it seemed to work OK.
• Avoid multiarch/multilib GCC like the plague. Use separate 32-bit and 64-bit VMs if you need to build for both.
• Package manager is frustrating and can screw things up if you install the wrong thing, or the right things in the wrong order. Use VMs as disposable testing grounds to find the minimal set of apt-get commands to go from fresh install to being able to compile your code. For example, I've pared down my setup commands to this list:

Code:

sudo apt-get install subversion
sudo apt-get install ruby
sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev
sudo apt-get install libxmu-dev
sudo apt-get install libxi-dev
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev
sudo apt-get install libasound-dev

[Sik]

The installer in the Ubuntu LiveCD doesn't work at all, trust me, even when it installs you end up with a completely useless configuration. The minimal installer (the one that's just a few MB large) on the other hand works like wonders and tends to leave the system in a practically perfect state (just be careful because it may end up installing a lot of programs if you let it o_o), the problem is that you have to be careful for it to not trash the partition table (not a problem if you'll wipe the hard disk anyway, may be a problem for dual booting though).

And yeah, VESA support is horribly broken and has been for a couple of years I think -_-' (X is OK with it but shells don't seem to like VESA for some reason)

Avoid multiarch/multilib GCC like the plague. Use separate 32-bit and 64-bit VMs if you need to build for both.

You have to anyway, there's absolutely no way to build for the other version without a VM or a crosscompiler (multiarch is not related to this), reason being that there's a "system" compiler instead of the compiler being completely unrelated to the OS (like is the case on Windows). This is what happens when you have an OS where the developers have a culture that everything has to be built from source, binary compatibility be damned.

[Boreal]

Personally I've had a lot of success on Linux with Arch, believe it or not.  I've never done it myself but it looks like it's pretty easy to install a 64-bit environment and then set up a "32-bit chroot jail" for compiling and testing 32-bit programs without multilib.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_bundled_32-bit_system_in_64-bit_system

Of course, with Arch there's the hurdle of a somewhat verbose installation and then getting X working from scratch, which may or may not be your thing.

[Schrompf]

Do you have a recommendation which distro might work better?

In VM: Ubuntu 14.10 32Bit - worked quite nicely with the VM guest additions, even though it never resized the desktop to the VM window like it used to do. Used qmake and QtCreator to set up the project structure, and after some googling I had a working build system I could commit to SVN.

Native: Ubunto 14.04 64Bit. I thought I could build my games in 32bit and 64bit like it worked for effing ages in Windows/Visual Studio. Then all these stupid monitor and package issues started, so I never even got to compile anything. But now I hear from you guys that even running a 32bit executable does not work out of the box? What The Eff?

Native, #2: Switched to Ubunto 14.10 32Bit because I knew it worked for me in the VM. Fought and finally lost the monitor fight, in the end I dragged one of my development monitors over just to be able to see something. It's like 1998 all over again. But the rest was comparably easy thanks to the VM research. QMake, compile, run - good thing indeed.

I'm not waiting for the first OpenGL bug. Being used to DirectX for more than 10 years now, OpenGL was an eye-opening experience. Shader compilers that complain that "#version" is deprecated and then complain that "feature xy only works with #version xyz and up". Shader compilers that complain on "#line" statements. And finally Intel HD GPUs, with a crash in glDrawElements which is known to them for at least 9 months now and still not fixed. And that's only the Windows drivers! I'm deeply worried in what state I'll find the drivers for a OS with a x0.02 market share.

[rosholger]

I would suggest linux mint if you want the ease of use without ubuntus shittyness

[Sik]

Today I was wondering why the command to open the folder with the savegames wasn't working... turns out that on Windows the START command (yes, the one from the command line) doesn't support quoted filenames. What the hell, Microsoft? And this isn't an old version, even Windows 8 trips on this. Um, wow. (fixed this by replacing it with EXPLORER but yeaaaaaah...)

But now I hear from you guys that even running a 32bit executable does not work out of the box? What The Eff?

Honestly I don't where people get this one either. True, to run 32-bit programs you need to make use of the 32-bit versions of the libraries... which is something the package manager takes care of for you. I guess the problem is that many old binaries expect ia32-lib (which was a megapackage including all the 32-bit libraries) but the Ubuntu repo doesn't have that anymore (these days you explicitly indicate which 32-bit libraries you need, as would be the usual).

I'm not waiting for the first OpenGL bug. Being used to DirectX for more than 10 years now, OpenGL was an eye-opening experience. Shader compilers that complain that "#version" is deprecated and then complain that "feature xy only works with #version xyz and up". Shader compilers that complain on "#line" statements. And finally Intel HD GPUs, with a crash in glDrawElements which is known to them for at least 9 months now and still not fixed. And that's only the Windows drivers! I'm deeply worried in what state I'll find the drivers for a OS with a x0.02 market share.

Actually OpenGL itself is not much worse than on Windows... the problem is the drivers themselves (with and without OpenGL). With Nvidia going proprietary is pretty much the only way to go (don't even attempt to use Nouveau), with AMD proprietary is preferred though I'm using the open driver and it works just fine (aside from lagging behind in the OpenGL version, though I need to update something anyway). Just be careful about changing drivers when you're on a multi-GPU system (laptops being the most notorious ones), better handle this before you do anything else with the distro so at worst you can just wipe the partition without losing anything important. The situation has been improving a lot the last couple of years though, for what's worth it.

Also before you get lost, remember to install the X and OpenGL development libraries before trying to compile with them =P (saying this because I had built SDL2 forgetting to install them and ended up without video support... actually there's a list of every library (as a giant apt-get command) you should install before building SDL2, do that and it should catch everything)

[oahda]

I would suggest linux mint if you want the ease of use without ubuntus shittyness

or install ubuntu from a couple of years ago

maybe that's awfully unuseful these days tho

rest in rips unbuntu my friend

[Sik]

Am I seriously the only one who doesn't have any problems with Ubuntu? (although granted I used the minimal installer and I use Gnome Classic instead of the shit that's Unity...)

[jechadwell99]

I've never really had any large problems with Ubuntu. A couple of bugs here and there but never anything disastrous.

I could never imagine going back to windows.