I also use Dev-C++ for my windows development, I find the interface to be superb in not getting in my way, while not being dog-ugly or slow.
Conversely, I was searching for an alternative for linux (yes, I'll learn vi/vim some day, just not now), and what I found was
Geany.
It starts up at the flick of a finger and manages to look a lot like Dev-C++ (perhaps more polished even). The only thing I dislike about it is its (intentional) weak project
support, but that could conceivably be fixed with the nice plugin system. So, Geany is very lightweight and supports quite a lot of languages, it has its default settings
such that if you have the necessary compilers installed (which is basically mostly true on most linux systems, or can be done with one line at the shell), it'll work
out of the box. The same for python, perl, etc.
Then I noticed that it also has a windows port, that comes with its own GTK+ runtime (all nicely contained in Geany's folder, and nicely uninstalled if you want), I tried it
and while the first startup is not as fast (due to the GTK+ libraries needing to be loaded), all the rest is just as snappy. Ofcourse the windows version needs a little more help
to get started, but not _that_ much more. All you basically have to do is install
MingW and set your $PATH to search MingW/bin.
So basically the only problem with Geany that still remains (for me), is that it doesn't really support projects like Dev-C++ did, so for now you basically have to make your own
makefiles. This could also be viewed in a positive light ofcourse, as learning about makefiles will prove to be a good skill if you want to do some open source contribution. But
I'm sure it could get tedious as well (haven't done many large projects lately), so someone developing a plugin would be really nice, and probably not too hard as well.
Well, I've been ranting and promoting long enough now, time for Geany to promote itself, give it a spin (it's free, the only cost is your time
;) ).