As a C++ dev working on bigger projects, you probably want an IDE with semantic code highlighting and navigation, a nice visual debugger and a good file/project overview to navigate source code.

On Mac there is Xcode (which I have mixed feelings about, but it does the job). On Windows there is no way around MSVC (which is probably the best heavy-weight C++ IDE around). On Linux there is a lot of vi and emacs and gdb and ddd and (not exactly IDEs) ... ugh ... and Kdevelop5 :) . Kdev5 is a KDE based IDE written in C++, so it's quite snappy. The previous version 4 was a bit brittle because it used a custom C++ parser and a custom CMake interpreter. Version 5 uses the llvm clang frontend as the C++ parser and CMake itself as the CMake interpreter. So Kdev5 is a huge improvement.

At work I like to use the latest LTS version of Ubuntu for convenience reasons. Most of the times Ubuntu LTS works really well and doesn't need full system upgrades every few months. Unfortunatly Ubuntu LTS 16.04 still ships Kdev4 and I'm not too keen on adding PPAs for Kdev5 and then spending a day to repair a broken system.

The devs of Kdevelop probably recognized this problem and create x86_64 linux builds bundled with all dependencies in an executable container format called AppImage. You can just go to kdevelop.org/download , grab the .AppImage file, mark it as executable and run it. This works really well and gets you up and running for C++ development very quickly without you having to mess with your system. Thank you Kdev5 devs, this saved me some time and trouble! :)

PS: Of course there are other IDEs on Linux: Qt Creator, Eclipse CDT, Code::Blocks, CLion (proprietary), Anjuta... If you don't like Kdev5, have a look at those.

PPS: Yes there are security issues with upstream packaging and built-in dependencies. But an IDE is not exactly a thing that I expect to process untrusted input.