First, I never use Spring IDE (which is nothing but Eclipse + some plguins). I use IntelliJ ultimate version which supports Spring pretty well. I wonder why you had to re-install the OS when you mess up the IDE, esp. in Linux. In Linux, Spring IDE, IntelliJ, jdk ... are zipped files. You download them, unzip them in your home directory. If you think everything is messed up and you want to restart from scratch, create a new account in you Linux machine and start again. Second, you can write a Spring-based app without a Spring-support IDE (e.g. IntelliJ community edition doesn't support Spring, i.e. it doesn't understand any Spring feature but of course, it understands Java). Many places where I worked were too cheap to buy the InterlliJ licenses for us and we were still fine (although we weer not happy at all).