Novell Suggests Linux Program Replacements

An anonymous reader writes "As a result of over 14,000 votes since the beginning of January, Adobe Photoshop, Autocad, Dreamweaver, iTunes, and Macromedia Flash are currently the top 5 'most wanted' Windows/MacOS-only applications in Novell's online survey. From comments made by the survey participants, Novell has also listed suggested substitutes for each of the five. What do readers think of these suggestions?"

Re:Why?

[Stevyn]

Yep...there it is...another photoshop = gimp statement. And wait? Bluefish? Nvu maybe, but it too has its drawbacks. Basically if you are a company who is paying some graphics guy $40,000 a year plus overhead, why have them work with inferior products? The cost of windows and photoshop may seem high to hobbiests, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what you're gonna pay someone to use it. Even if gimp was 90% as good, it still might not make economic sense in the long run.

PhotoShop 7 reportedly works with WINE

[jdgreen7]

As of the most recent release (yesterday), WINE 0.9.8 has reportedly fixed PS7 to run in Linux (obviously x86 only).

Er...this isn't Novell

[jnik]

Novell did the original survey. Desktoplinux.com (a ZD thing, apparently) is suggesting the alternatives.

Re:Dreamweaver and flash ...

[tomhudson]

Since those three conditions are only ever met under the best of circumstances, I suggest your favorite text editor as a replacement for it. Seriously. Hand coding your pages is just as fast as creating them in Dreamweaver, albeit with a higher learning curve, and what you can craft with the pure code is fantastic.

Finally, someone who "gets it." Especially since most work IS maintenance work, and its a lot easier to write a perl script and make file to regenerate 100 pages than to load each one and change it.

Audio in SVG?

[tepples]

If SVG ever becomes standard, we'll be able to do all the animation we want.

But does a solution involving SVG allow for synchronized audio? For instance, if I wanted to use SVG instead of SWF to make an animated series such as Homestar Runner or Weebl and Bob, would that work?

Re:My opinion:

[nagora]

CYMK is the killer feature.

Actually this is a bit of a myth in my experience. I send stuff to printers from Gimp fairly often and CMYK isn't an issue; they just convert it as part of their process.

What IS a killer is spot-colour usage. I have no decent method of working with Pantone or other specialised spot colours, nor is there a good system for handling product shots where a particular colour HAS to be represented correctly, such as a Coke can.

People forget that CMYK can represent less than half the contents of a Pantone swash; it is not the be-all and end-all of colour handling.

TWW

Re:AutoCAD

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one would have no problem writing checks to AutoDesk

That's good, because you'll be writing a lot of big ones. Most folks have never even been able to get close to this kind of software, because it's just too damn expensive. Too bad, because 99.99999% of the world has absolutely no way to create and share design documents. It's an exclusive club, populated by overtaxed addicts. It's a hard habit to break: if you need CAD, you need to pay the man.

And pay and pay and pay. Autodesk is notorious for breaking backward compatibility with their own products. And because designers and engineers must share their documents, once the upgrade train starts rolling, everyone in the whole connected web is compelled to upgrade also. And every upgrade comes at great expense, causes a lot of disruption, slows people down, and virtually never provides functionality that results in any real productivity increase.

An open CAD format and at least one good free reference implementation of a CAD package that used it would change the world. How many people with good ideas don't even bother trying to get them off the ground because they just don't have the tools? How cool would it be to be able to mix and match design elements the way web page authors patch together pieces of html? Mix this house with that pool, but swap out the bathroom design and add a garage. Do it yourself at home and then ask an architect to help you finesse the result to meet local building code and permitting requirements. Never mind fat rich Americans, think what might be done in the developing world. It's hard to be an engineer if you have no tools.

As with most software, the real value proposition for our economy is not the software market itself, but the markets served by that software. CAD, just like other applications, should be commoditized. I preemptively call bullshit on anyone who claims CAD is special, and can't be developed or in a F/OSS environment. It would thrive.

Death to Autodesk.

Video-editing

[jonathan_the_ninja]

And there is still no viable solution for video-editing on Linux. Sure, there's cinelerra, but its interface is unintuitive and it crashes frequently. Jashahka crashes, too. I haven't even been able to pull off any editing with it because it crashes all of the time. Now, if Novell can suggest a OSS solution for video-editing, that would be something.

My showstoppers

[Linker3000]

First, we need a coherent set of tools that let peripherals such as smartphones and PDAs sync with Linux calendaring apps as easy as they do with Outlook - something that's as transparent as plugging the device into a USB port and it 'Just Works'(TM) - that will start to make some lukewarm-to-Linux Managers sit up and take note. For the 'interim', we also need a bridge between Outlook and whatever app is being used under Linux - eGroupware (for example) is getting there with Outlook integration, but it still has some very rough edges. Looking at my desktiop needs, the only things that really stop me going 100% Linux are Outlook and Corel Draw. The other things I use regularly in Windows are easily sorted: Firefox FileZilla SecureCRT/PuTTY PSFTP (SFTP batch file transfers) Word Excel PowerPoint Looking at my users' needs there's two problems: 1) A proprietary app written in A Windows dev framework with an SQL server back-end. Our current supplier has no intention of porting to a LAMP (or Java) environment but one other has written a really good alternative using JBoss that works with a MYSQL back-end and they may get our business. 2) A spreadsheet app that copes with Macros and has 100% interoperability with Excel - we have a few complex spreadsheets with some macros and pivot functions which just choke on OpenOffice but without the Excel-specific stuff we couldn't do half the things we need. The other issue, of course, is whatever we do internally, we will always be thrown stuff (docs, spreadsheets etc.) from external sources and will just look plain daft if we cannot handle it, plus we are in a specialist medical care environment and some tools we use (or have demo'd to us) are Windows-based so we'd be at a disadvantage if we were 100% Linux.

Re:My opinion:

[crazyjimmy]

I've been inching towards moving from my WiNAZI OS to Linux since they announced that you'll have to prove you own your copy of WiNAZI to get any updates. This was furthered when I found out that Corel now owns PSP (sniffle), that M$ was doing their cheap tactics again (OEM bundling, Forced Upgrades, forced hardware based DRM, Required OEM software replacement duirng MB upgrades, etc), and...hell the list goes on and on. M$ is not ever going to be a decent company, and now that the Linux builds are actually getting easier to use, I've got precious little reason to stay.

But, to get to my point, I've been exploring lots of Open Source Alternatives like Inkskape, GIMP, Songbird, etc. And for the most part I've been pretty impressed.

The programs I like so far are:
GIMPshop (I can't stand The GIMP's standard interface, though even with GIMPshop I miss PSPs ease of use and intuitive interface)
InkScape - Intuitive Vector Editing. I adore it. I more than adore it. I highly recommend it.
Firefox - Seriously, I will never use IE again (except, of course, to download FireFox :D)
OpenOffice.Org - Version 2 is everything that Version 1 was not (functional, stable, etc). And being free of that damn paperclip (or dog..I think it's a dog now) is only points on its side.

Those are just my opinions though.

A quick question: does anyone know what the best OS media player there is? I do have a lovely music collection I'd like to keep.

--Jimmy

amaroK vs iTunes

[MWales]

I've used iTunes very briefly on my father's WinXP machine, and thought it was pretty neat. I then found out about amaroK for Linux and installed it, and have instantly fallen in love with it.

What does iTunes have to offer that amaroK doesn't match?

I'm assuming the online music store would be the biggest one, but what else?

Re:the most desired are ones I never use

[bigsmoke]

At Sicirec [sicirec.org], we've used Outlook (Express) with LDAP in the past. Outlook didn't even support LDAP autocompletion. So, basically, all the users went on to add all contacts to their local address books. The kind of synchronisation problems this caused were pretty annoying. But, even when the users ignored autocompletion, performing an LDAP search still required struggling through three to four dialogs.

Admittedly, Mozilla (and now, since 1.5, Tunderbird) has its inperfections too; why can't you globally set the default sort order for IMAP folders (bug 86845 [mozilla.org])? For the rest, Mozilla has served us great, though. Now, if Thunderbird's integration with server-side spam filtering would get a little more configurable, I would be even happier.

Re:Dreamweaver and flash ...

[ajs318]

I've always held that possession of a stencil does not make one a calligrapher, and I like to produce HTML in a text editor with syntax highlighting. My current favourite is kate [kde.org]. Dreamweaver produces bad HTML*, but it can't be expected to produce much else. It's a brave attempt to solve what is really an impossible problem. You really can't have a WYSIWYG {what you see is what you get} editor for a medium which is by definition WYSINNWEEG {what you see is not necessarily what everyone else gets}.

The best analogy I can come up with is a device with piano-like keys that clips onto the neck of a guitar, and frets and strums the strings in response to your key presses.

* I consider anything with <font> tags in it to be bad HTML.

Re:My opinion:

[MirrororriM]

Actually this is a bit of a myth in my experience. I send stuff to printers from Gimp fairly often and CMYK isn't an issue; they just convert it as part of their process.

As an estimator for the second largest printer in the world, I can tell you that CMYK isn't an issue and we will convert it for you, but we will charge you the desktop time for it. After all, conventional printing is done in CMYK, not RGB, so the conversion is a requirement. Most customers don't send in RGB files for this reason.

To be honest, I would like to see OpenOffice be able to output PDFs in CMYK rather than RGB. Any modern printing facility prefers finished PDFs over Quark as they need no manipulation. I could then convince some customers to generate their page layout in OpenOffice.

Also as an aside, contrary to popular belief, most large printing facilities do not accept word, excel, or other Microsoft files for printing. If they were stuck on using these formats, they could use OpenOffice to output those documents to PDFs and then print facilities would accept them.

Ok, ok, I'll admit that every time I get to tell a customer "I'm sorry, Microsoft Office file formats are not supported by our facility", I do kind of grin a little ;)

Re:Dreamweaver and flash ...

[mrchaotica]

2. It's an extra software requirement.

#2 applies to people who can't install it. Maybe they're running Linux on PowerPC, maybe their sysadmin refuses to install it. (Consider an office environment running thin clients connecting to a terminal server. To conserve bandwidth and server resources, the sysadmin might want to limit things like sound, animation, and unnecessary plugins.)

That's not the only problem. Having it separate from the rest of the browser also means it doesn't play well with the rest of the content on the page. For example, it's limited to a rectangular box. In contrast, SVG can (theoretically) be mixed with XHTML in the same file, so you could have XHTML inside of SVG inside of XHTML (useful for shaped borders around things (e.g. flowchart balloons with XHTML inside)), and you could have non-rectangular images (so that text can flow around the shape without dirty hacks).

Statistical & Mathematics SW

[devnulljapan]

Surprised there is so little quality statistical software that will run natively on Linux. I know there's R [r-project.org] and PSPP [gnu.org], but I'd really like to see SPSS [spss.com] or even Statistica [statsoft.com] on Linux.