Silicon Labs Simplicity Studio
Simplicity Studio is an Eclipse-based IDE available from Silicon Labs. It is specifically oriented to developing software for their chips.
One of the attractive aspects of Simplicity Studio is that it runs under Linux. Unfortunately, under Linux, Simplicity Studio appears to be a second class citizen. Installation is problematic in that it appears to be built against 32-bit libraries and older version of GTK.
Like most monolithic IDE's, when something goes wrong it is difficult if not impossible to find out what is happening. One is reduced to prowling user forums and poking around the edges. In particular, after my upgrade to Kubuntu 18.10, plugging in my EFM23GG starter kit board causes the entire graphical interface of my machine to lock up. I had to forcefully power down to recover the machine and it happens repeatably. I have no idea what's wrong and little desire to find out. Simplicity Studio never worked quite right under Kubuntu in the first place and as updates have happen it seems not to have become non-functional.
At this point I'm giving up on running it under Linux and will install it on my Windows machine. I'm not enthusiastic about having to deal with Windows, but all the tooling for embedded development does run there. We'll see what happens then.
Andrew Mangogna
I was able to get projects running for the EFM32GG starter kit that I use to test micca run-time code. It is still rather cumbersome, but I am proceeding to get other test applications to build and run. I have a Thunderboard Sense 2 (the latest model) on order and will start experiments on it soon.
Andrew Mangogna