With the flatpack integration, Builder really has the potential to become the Xcode for Linux.

I hope that Ubuntu starts to support Builder. Ubuntu tried something similar with qtcreator and the Ubuntu sdk, but that was a really bad experience. Let's hope that the switch to Gnome also means that Ubuntu switch their efforts to Builder.

I hope so, but honestly I feel like they are trying to keep it too general. I was looking at some of the critical components like Glade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glade_Interface_Designer) and noticed this: Glade is programming language–independent, and does not produce code for events, but rather an XML file that is then used with an appropriate binding (such as GtkAda for use with the Ada programming language)

Maybe Ada is more popular than I know, but I would think it's more valuable to spend time making the development process better for C++ devs (or w/e) than build a system so general that it can support Ada.

flatpack solves a deployment/distribution issue. distribution is irrelevant when you have nothing to distribute.

The biggest issue is the distribution.

One of the devs of the Minecraft Windows 10 edition said that it would be trivial to port that to desktop Linux but they would have to set up their own payment and distribution system, which just isn't worth it for that tiny market.

Having packaging and distribution built into an IDE goes a great length to solve that issue.

Except they could throw it on to Steam for Linux - it's a business decision not to put it on there and let Valve take 30%.

Red Hat have been sponsoring Christian Hergert (https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/) to work on Builder full-time for a while now, with a specific focus on Flatpak integration, and there are other contributors, including GSoC students working on specific features.

The missing piece is public server infrastructure for accepting Flatpak packages from GNOME Builder and distributing them to GNOME Software clients, and that is currently in development as https://flathub.org/

That looks like glib. Which is kind of nasty in my opinion. At some point they pushed for Vala, it makes the whole thing a bit more pleasent. But personally I had a feeling it was on life support the entire time. Some bindings were plain broken and impossible to fix, interop had really crappy documentation. At some point I just gave up.

(I'm mixing IDE with language/lib right now, but for Gnome it does go hand in hand IMHO)

There are a multitude of different dev environments I don't think we need a new one that will probably have less effort invested than current popular environments.