You’re obviously interested in open source or you wouldn’t be here - so I’m telling you to take the plunge, go all in, close this tab and grab an image of Ubuntu or Mint if you want to be just like me and become enlightened! Linux is quite often the first priority for developers of open source tools and windows support is sometimes an after thought.

I also personally recommend staying away from IDEs. and using Linux is the best way to see and learn how this works. Most people I know barely understand setting up their own C++ projects and linking to 3rd party libraries etc. Why should you use Linux? There’s a lot of reasons in my opinion but right now I am going to keep it simple. Much to my dismay this tutorial is by far the most visited page on my website, why does this upset me? It upsets me because as glad as I am to see people using open source tools like OpenCV and MinGW rather than proprietary or commercial alternatives I feel strongly that developers should be using Linux not Windows for coding, especially for C++.

Download codeblocks compiler