Whoops! In my haste to do a REALbasic Mini-Review I forgot to say much of anything about the Linux experience!The REALbasic IDE GUI builder is actually fairly sluggish in Linux in my experience. Granted, this may be because I run less than optimal Linux workstations at the office, but I should point out that NetBeans' Matisse is infinitely more spritely under the same working conditions. Still, the RB IDE loads much faster than NetBeans, but NetBeans comes out ahead when it comes to running apps from the IDE.
Other than the general sluggishness of the IDE the experience in Linux is about the same as it is for Windows. In my experience with both platforms, there's one aspect of XP work that's mercifully absent in RB Linux, and that's debugger-firewall collisions. The RB debugger stub uses a network interface to communicate with the IDE, and as a result I've yet to find a firewall under XP that didn't complain. The problem stems from the fact that even though you can generally grant permission to use certain ports and IP addresses, your firewall will still notice that the application in question (the one you're trying to debug) has been "altered." If anyone out there has a better approach let me know, but right now I tend to just disable the firewall while in REALbasic. Sub-optimal. Thankfully, Linux development in REALbasic doesn't seem to have the same hangup.
The applications built for Linux in REALbasic perform quite well, on par with a "conventional" application. There is a bit of a startup lag but it's not very bad, certainly less than that observed for a standard Java app. I've used RB Linux apps in embedded spaces for a while now and even on smallish devices the lag isn't a show-stopper. The Linux apps tend to be around the same size as their XP brethren, 2.5MB or so. Not a major problem, but they do stand out in the dynamic linking world of Linux.
If you're looking for comparisons with other RAD tools under Linux, I'm probably biased but I find the REALbasic GUI builder to be far superior to most of the other tools I've used. That's a personal choice for each of us to make though, but suffice it to say that if you're not a fan of the Matisse or .NET schools of RAD REALbasic isn't going to impress you either. If you are a fan or you're open to trying something new, it's worth a look.
All in all I stand by my earlier recommendation for REALbasic. Under Linux RB faces some pretty stiff competition (not to mention some pretty entrenched opinions about commercial closed-source applications) but I think it holds its own and will only get better with time. Since it's free under Linux, you might as well take a look even if you're inclined to disagree!
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