Actually the build chain for both Xilinx and Altera works quite well in Linux, in fact I have heard that some consider it superior based on memory management issues.

Modelsim is available on Linux as well, but only their more expensive SE product. They charge a premium for Linux platform.

My experience (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/ctsrd/cheri.html, http://netfpga.org/10G_specs.html) is that both of the toolchains are terrible on both of the platforms.

Xilinx and Altera keep trying to convince us that they are software vendors, when in actual fact they are hardware vendors. Rarely is a company good at both.

That the toolchains run on Linux at all at least prevents one from being forced to use Windows, which is a plus, but yes, the state of FPGA tools is pretty horrible.

It reminds me of the days of proprietary vendor compilers where every platform vendor had their own subtly incompatible and/or differently buggy C or C++ compiler. In this way the FPGA development model is a decade or two behind software workflows.

I've explored the Xilinx tools extensively during graduate school. It was by far the most complicated thing I've ever had the misfortune of using. I remember there being far too many tools and features that overlap in function and purpose to that point that none of the tools were great.

I guess I was mainly trying to say that the Linux version was similar to the Windows version, it's not Windows-only as the previous comment indicated. But right, your other comments are all valid.