Arduino on Debian... ARG!

Hello All. I'm having a lot of trouble with Arduino IDE for linux.

I've been happily developing for Arduino for many years now using the Arduino IDE on my Mac. Lately I published an opensource library for esp8266 mesh networking... easyMesh I've been told that the library is not compiling correctly on Windows and Linux, so I want to check this out.

I don't have windows, but I thought I can looking to things on Linux easily enough. I run linux all the time and have a development box running Debian w/ Gnome.... Easy peasy, right? Wrong.

So I installed Arduino via the "packages" utility.

For some reason, the version is "2.1.0.5+dfsg2-4" not "1.6.9" or "1.6.11" I was hoping for. I'm not able to find very much out about this version of the IDE online, but from playing with it I know it is lacking a bunch of core features!

Ooops! There is no libraries manager? Ok, that cool, I can install the libraries manually...

Ooops! The libraries are compiling differently? Turns out that in this version if a library contains another library the second library won't compile! You have to include all the libraries in the main sketch... ok, that is weird and inconsistent, but I can deal.

Ooops! I need esp8266 libraries, so I need to add the esp8266 boards to the BoardsManager... but there is no BoardsManager!!!! And I am not able to find directions on how to get the new boards into the IDE in any other way!

So now I am fully stuck.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on here? If I install a plain vanilla Ubuntu version in a VM, will I get a normal Arduino IDE?

Thanks,

Bill

The package manager(or whatever it's called, I don't use Linux) installs some non-standard, outdated version of the Arduino IDE. I think this is because there is a licensing issue with the Arduino IDE so they can't add recent versions. You should use the one available from the downloads page: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software.