It seems that Ben Forta confirmed 2 weeks ago that
Adobe has stopped the development of Flex Builder for Linux, apparently "there's not enough requisition for the product to continue its development". Bummer.
Asses the demand of Linux versions of different pieces of software is tricky and a chicken 'n' egg situation.
There's no Linux version because there're no users or there're no users because there's no Linux version? A mix of both, but FB being based on Eclipse and Eclipse being already crossplatform, what's actually stopping Adobe from doing the port? Could it be that they are not ready to give customer support to Linux users?
Being a Flash developer on Linux is not easy, I can tell you that. But I think the biggest deal at the moment is NOT the lack of an IDE, it's the FLA format. I already have a compiler (Flex SDK) and I already have another IDEs (FDT, even Scite) but when I get a FLA file from a designer I'm screwed, there's
nothing on Linux to handle it.
I'd rather have Adobe investing time on the
XFL format (ZIP & XML based, easier to edit from any platform) rather than investing on Flex Builder for Linux. If there's an open format that the super-geeks can play with, I'm sure sooner or later they will come up with an editor for Linux. See gTalk for example, no Mac or Linux official client (boooo), but there are a ton of Jabber clients already (yay!), so no big deal. [Talking about formats,
Office 2007 SP2 implements ODF support and even allows to set it up as its default format. Great. News. Indeed.]
Anyway, if this is a big deal for you and you want to be heard, there's a
bug opened, vote for it.