I am currently switching from windows to linux and am a visual c++ user. I am also just starting to use that. My Question is what software in linux is best for game and application programming and were can I get it.
thanks

Most programmers on Linux use either the super-powerful emacs or vim text editors, and the command line.

Generally integrated IDEs like Visual C++ are not needed, as you don't need wizards to generate lots of code, the APIs are designed to be straightforward enough that you don't need programs to help you write your programs.

You can write apps and games in many languages, don't assume you have to use C++. For instance, play Frozen Bubble for a bit, guess what language it's in - did you guess perl? Me neither.

The de facto games/multimedia library that is our equivalent to DirectX is called SDL, and it has bindings into many differenent languages. C++ is supported of course, as is C, Python, Perl, and probably some others. You may enjoy python, which is a high level and very powerful scripting language. It's easy to extend using C or C++, see boost.org, for times when you need to optimize certain algorithms.

For app development, check out Glade (a gui designer) with GTK+ (for C) or GTKmm which are some standard c++ bindings for it. See gtkmm.org for documentation. I've only heard good things about this toolkit.

You may also like Qt, however be aware of the licensing restrictions on that library.

Frozen Bubble is written in perl!?
Bloody hell.