[lfittl]

Personal Preference: Vienna, Austria

I'm from there, but part of the reason why I keep coming back is cause its affordable to rent, even in the hip districts (600-700 EUR for 1br) + a great city to live + good bunch of startups + cheap for flying in/out. Prague is similar.

Also heard great things about Sofia, but haven't lived there (yet). And Berlin is of course a good option as well.

[venomsnake]

I would strongly recommend against Sofia right now. There is no rule of law in my country as a whole, we are busy overthrowing the government and right now there is increasing xenophobic wave (arabo/islamophobic) due to the influx of Syrian, African and Afghanistan immigrants. Our nationalists are rattling weapons and I think the government will use the foreigners as a lightning rod for the populace anger to keep itself in power.

I suppose that during the winter pogroms over them are not out of the question. Actually we had just today a national beaten almost to dead because he is of the Turkish minority and the skinheads mistook him for immigrant.

The situation is not nice.

[lfittl]

Unfortunate to hear - although there is (less violent) xenophobic behaviour in Austria that I'm worried about as well.

[phaer]

But, in general, you don't live cheaply there especially compared to other cities of the area like Bratislava or Budapest. Prices in Restaurants, Coffee shops, etc are the same as in most other capitals of western Europe. Source: I grew up in Vienna and lived there until 3 month ago.

I am now living in Chania, Greece and it's quite cheap to live, has a beautiful old town, nice beaches and fantastic mountains around. The only drawbacks are that there is only a small Linux user group, but the next hacker space is about 3 hours by bus in Iraklio and that it's only cheap as long as you don't have too pay to much taxes.

[lfittl]

Yeah, agreed. Its all relative, thats why I used "affordable" instead of "cheap".

In my head I compare Vienna with London and the US (SF/NYC/etc) which are 2-3x as expensive, plus healthcare is worse.

[gspyrou]

Chania is a great city to live.

[huhtenberg]

+1 to this based on anecdotal data from friends. That's if considering former "Western Europe" block of countries and excluding Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and others.

Budapest is quite nice too, strong expat community, strong programmers and generally nice people. Bitch of a language though, very contrived.

[celebdor]

Salaries and startup scene in Prague are not by far what you can find in Vienna though.