I never really got into Visual Studio (even though it was required for all my classes at college; go figure), so I guess I don't know all the nice things it does that other text editors don't do. I just use vim myself. Anjuta is good too. I've heard good things about Eclipse too, as an IDE, but who knows.

Yeah, use Gentoo. Gentoo doesn't even have "versions" per se, it has non-stop incremental package upgrades. Gentoo is the way to learn your computer inside-out, and learn Linux inside-out while you do it. It forces you to do just enough where you have to learn it, but it makes the really hard tedious things (finding dependencies, blah) easy enough to make it possible to do anything. This is the first distro I used where EVERY program I ever wanted to install actually worked, because everything is pretty vanilla and standard. I can't say enough good about Gentoo, honestly.