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I think a much better example of a great UI in an open source application is Inkscape. It's got one tool bar on top, one on the side, and one status bar below, so you have almost the entire screen for the actual drawing. There's no floating windows. Strangely enough, everything I wanted to do was easy to find and use without the 5 levels of toolbar something like visio has. Basically, instead of having 100 controls for stroke, fill, pattern, etc these are on a dialog that is one-click away. It doesn't sound good, but it really works well in practice. Also, when you are dragging or hovering the mouse it gives useful tips like "Ctrl to scale uniformly Shift to scale around center of rotation" or "Enter completes the path" that also look slick.

Inkscape is a much better example than firefox imo, because a browser only has like a dozen common actions whereas the svg drawing program has hundreds. You just have to see it. The windows version has a few GTK related bugs, but the unix one is absolutely amazing.

Open Source software has often been acused of lacking in the graphical department. With the advent of more stable Inkscape 0.42.2 and user friendly Gimp 2.0 this has left us lacking only in the video department. Cinerella 2.0 was just released to close that gap. Coupled with alternatives such as diva , blender and others, what is linux and other Open Source operating systems still lacking?

it has been done, a dozen of times
what these Linux distros really lacks is publicitity and marketting .. ie an excellent P.R Machine.
Microsoft can afford that, Apple too, contributors already spend much of their free time helping, they dont have the cash also.

So in short what Linux distros need are millionaire patron.
Ubuntu is an example of how much patronage matters.

Many tried in varies way - maybe you could try your version?

Linspire's approach is of Click to Install, run everything as root, offer interesting goodies such as iTunes, etc

Xandros which tries to appeal to the business man, hides even the terminal, if you are a techie, it is a difficult distro to work with. But non-techies find it a marvel.

Beatrix is probably the closest you've envisage, with but essential apps and very light and fast.

Puppy Linux approach is have it micro light weight in Ram, they don't strip the techie-stuff but add lots of tutorials, wizards and follow-throughs. I have to admit I liked it, its good for old machines too.

Yoper's approach is to get you up and ready where one-CD installs everything you might need and more - very fast. The community is very helpful and friendly. The idea is that the distro should be as multi-media ready as possible on things like plugin (which are short of impossible for a newcome to install).
Wonderful idea, but we need more help with that, like all free-distros specially - we need helpers, contributors, coders, packagers.

In the Linux community, the will is there, just the challenge and obstacle is very big. Drivers and hardwares primarily set for Windows machine and nothing else .. etc

What we all need is patronage, sponsorship.

What we need is what Apple, Microsoft + etc has:
money-money-money (even if its to pay for hosting our servers).

Remember the saying: easier-said-than-done

So I would urge anyone that is really concerned to join a distro that matches your ideals and instead of criticizing offer help - there are many ways of doing that, learning being one.

If the idea of coding is really off-putting I found reading this pretty interesting and applicable to any open source project:

Q: Are there non-coding ways to help?

GIMP, Inkscape, Nvu. Fine, these products are nowhere near as good as anything Adobe/Macromedia offer, but if they stagnate the competition will eventually come from Free software like this. I doubt they'll stagnate though.

Given that Google is seriously helping Open-Source projects (I've been reading about Google's Summer of Code) ... I am beginning to warm-up again towards Google.

I hope you understand what has caused this initial argument:

You basically agreeing with the opening statement:
"Lets face it the only reason why google is getting slapped with the evil monicker is that they are good at what they do." (under the title:Jealousy)

To summary someone's indignation as just simply "jealousy" - well that is not just being naive, that is just being down-right queer.

Google has built it's success on open source; and recently appeared to be caring only about proprietory and Windows crap. Of course I should have research more
(or you could have explicitly pointed that out and closed the argument).
Still better late than never.

Anyway thanks Google for helping the good-folks of Inkscape + the rest (they are one nice lot).

PS: And just chill man, I am notorious for making people wet their trousers with the trolls.
It hope you've been potty-trained :)

I just add a bit on that list from top of my head.
Although I think the listed app goes beyond what the so called 'average pc user' wants, but there goes...

1. Konqueror ( http://www.konqueror.org/ )

2. Email - Sylpheed ( http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ )

3. I think Evolution is more like in this place.

4. Lately "Sound Juicer" is taking more attention too

5. VideoLAN aka VLC ( http://www.videolan.org/ ) and Ogle ( http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/ ) [and Goggles ( http://www.fifthplanet.net/goggles.html ) for Ogle GUI wrapper] for DVD watching.

6. There are plenty way to do this, but the typical ones could be 'Jinzora' ( http://www.jinzora.org/ ) and 'MusicPD' ( http://www.mpd.org/ ), even plain Apache does it fine too, in a way.

8. If you want easier to manage iptables wrapper, Shorewall ( http://www.shorewall.net/ ) and there are other wrappers too.

9. KOffice ( http://www.koffice.org/ ) and by individual components, Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ), Gnumeric ( http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/ ), Gnucash ( http://www.gnucash.org/ )

10. Inkscape ( http://www.inkscape.org/ ) or Sodipodi ( http://www.sodipodi.com/ ) for vector graphics.

11. Miranda ( http://miranda-im.org/ ). Windows only.

13. Hmm , Samba? ( http://www.samba.org/ ), WedDAV (Look parent post), FTP (plenty ftp daemons, ex : http://www.proftpd.org/, http://vsftpd.beasts.org/ etc)

16. GPhoto ( http://www.gphoto.org/ ), EOG ( http://www.gnome.org/ ? ), GQView ( http://gqview.sourceforge.net/ ). The latters are for just viewing mainly.

20. FreeNX ( http://www.nomachine.com/ , http://freenx.berlios.de/ ) http://www.poptop.org/ ), L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/l2tpd ), RP-L2TPd ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/rp-l2tp/ )

24. Postfix ( http://www.postfix.org/ ), Sendmail ( http://www.sendmail.org/ ), Exim ( http://www.exim.org/ ), Cyrus ( http://asg.web.cmu.edu/cyrus/imapd/ ), Xmail ( http://www.xmailserver.org/ ), qmail ( http://www.qmail.org/ )

25. Spamassassin ( http://spamassassin.apache.org/ )

26. Same as above.

27. XSane ( http://www.xsane.org/ ) for sane frontends.

30. Buzzmachines ( http://www.buzzmachines.com/ ) I could be wrong...

31. 'various GUI frontends' - X CD Roast ( http://www.xcdroast.org/ ), K3B ( http://k3b.sourceforge.net/ )

32. Don't know any opensource ones...

Productivity:

Graphics:

Media:

Internet:

Survival Kit:

Development:

What is so cool about SVG is talked about in this keynote. SVG, is vector graphics AND text, AND placed raster images, AND animation described in an open, easy to read format.

One advantage is that you can design a webpage the same way you design a printed piece. Where you have just as much control over it. MS explorer requires an adobe plugin to display it, similarly to how it displays flash. Firefox is going to display SVG natively in the 1.1 browser (actually already does with the deerpark alphas.

The code is easily visible like HTML. The desktops that use SVG for the gui, I don't know much about, but it's fantastic. Nice icons, or buttons or any visual element that is smaller in file size, breaks out of the square we are used to, and the elements can be enlarged or reduced and still be rendered beautifully.

check out inkscape if you want to experiment with svg, or the open clipart library to see some cool examples. of SVG.

http://inkscape.org/
http://openclipart.org/

Here's what mozilla is doing with SVG:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/

Use Inkscape rather than potrace directly - you get all the potrace goodness, plus you can edit the results. very nifty.
http://www.inkscape.org/doc/tracing/tutorial-traci ng.html

Inkscape
Sodipodi

daz

I've read through all of this thread and haven't found a mention of Inkscape yet. Don't know how it compares with others out there, but I've just started using it and find it kind of fun. Good for my basic requirements, anyway.

Thanks for mentioning this, you beat me to it.

The problem with SVG is that although it is an open standard and integrates with XML based web page design, can be used for charts, graphs, and animation (think Flash), and can give you a fully scalable web page (i.e. resize your page and the graphics as well as the layout scales; it is implemented in almost nothing except Opera in the past month or two.

Chicken and egg problem.

Oh yes. Unlike flash or graphics, textual and meta information content *within* your SVG can be fully searched externally with search engines.

Additionally, your bandwidth goes down if you chuck GIFs and other graphics commenly used for web page layout.

The main problem is twofold, the lack of tools to create SVG's (though you can write it up in a text editor just like HTML, and the fact that your lovely SVG graphics will display in nearly nothing.

It is worrying that Firefox and Mozilla do not yet support these formats nativly!

I don't know where to go to check if this is on the roadmap or not (someone elsewhere claims it is due for 1.5 of Firefox) but it needs to be.

As Microsoft has their own proprietary format, it is only going to support SVG under gunpoint, and now is the time for SVG to be in our Mozilla browsers (available on almost *every* platform).

As good open source users here, you should demand it's implementation in the Mozilla browsers family now!

Oh, yes. I just discovered this link yesterday:

http://www.inkscape.org/

Go visit and play. It's an open source effort to create an SVG editing tool. Looks very well along in it's efforts too.

Inkscape keeps a list of other projects and tries to find good ideas to learn from
http://inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OtherProjects

Whether that means anything to your amateur graphics file editor is another question entirely. You can often accomplish many of the same results with either a raster or a vector editor, so especially in many light-usage cases, it really comes down to preference. I like having access to both tools.

Weird, but I use it quite regularly and it crashed exactly once so far.

However, there are important issues that need to be adressed. Well, at least there is one thing that is quite a showstopper: PDF/PS export. PS export misses gradients and transparency. PDF export is missing at all. Without it, Inkscape is far from being my number one vector app.

But I am looking forward to google's summer of code (http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html). There is a task by the inkscape people to implement pdf export (by extracting the pdf export stuff from Scribus) and others. Hope some clever guy will implement it properly. Oh, well, it seems that no one will do it: http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?SOC_Accept ed_Proposals

> In any case, that's really Bad News for the future of the app.

I've seen this very attitude ever since the start of Inkscape. It's not too frequent, but it does happen with surprising regularity. "You dare to ignore my beloved Illustrator/Freehand/whatever, you're DOOMED." I try to give them our reasons and show them _our_ way of doing it, but they just won't listen.

I think by now, Inkscape's explosive growth and the tons of comments from people who LOVE its interface are the best response to such doomsayers.

You simply _don't get it_. (Luckily you are in a minority, but the fact that you don't get it still saddens me.) We're not in the business of creating an Illustrator clone. We started this project because we want to make the best vector editor in the world. If you want to help us, you're welcome. If you just want to rant or whine without (I'm sure) reading our keyboard chart even once - then I'm simply not interested, sorry.

since it assumes I want the interface to be in incomplete/poorly translated Japanese language, and doesn't seem to give me any way to change it to English.

Sounds like you want this page. First scroll down to the bottom and read "Locale Testing" to see how to set the language. Then scroll up and learn the process of making improvements to an Open Source application's translations. Remember that translations only improve when someone (such as yourself) contributes a few hours to help improve them. ;-)

If you have an SVG capable browser or the SVG plugin (from Adobe, IIRC), go here http://www.inkscape.org/doc/examples/text-on-path. svg. Then marvel at how you can select the text. Then peek at the source. It's all good.

This is the start of something big in web graphics.

Please submit your crash report:

http://inkscape.org/report_bugs.php

with as much details as possible, ideally with a backtrace.

> keyset that Adobe and Macromedia apps use?

Because there are many other nice apps that we borrow from. One is Xara X. Another is (yeah) Gimp and other Gnome apps. We can't be a monkey of a single app, and sometimes we can't be a monkey of anyone because we do some original stuff too.

> holding space should enable the panning tool

We don't have a panning tool because we have lots of other ways to scroll. The best of them are middle-drag and ctrl+arrows. Try them, you may like them better when you get used to them.

> holding alt (not shift) should make the zoom tool zoom out rather than in.

That one makese sense - alt+click is currently unused in zoom tool, so i think I'll enable it to zoom out _in addition_ to shift+click.

> Also, double-clicking on the zoom tool should revert to "standard" zoom--not open the preferences panel.

Just press '1' to get 100% zoom. And it would be horribly inconsistent to make doubleclick work different on zoom tool than on other tools.

To summarize, we welcome any feedback, and very often we honor it, but also quite often people just want us to imitate exactly their favorite app without realizing that (1) there are other vector apps which are just as worthy of imitation, (2) Inkscape's way of doing it may be actually better, or (3) we can't do that because that would break consistency of Inkscape behavior in unpleasant ways.

With as much as these guys must know about graphic design, you'd think they could make a web site where you wouldn't have to scroll from side to side... and I'm at 1280x1024... man.

Q: Is Inkscape ready for regular users to use?

Yes, while it's far from being a replacement for commercialware, the codebase provides for a large portion of basic vector editing capabilities.

Is it just me, or did they morph a woman holding a ferret into a classic "wardrobe malfunction" by using some cool filters?

Geez, I need to get a life.

-Scott

Google did bring in some $90000 worth of support through their Summer of Code project.

Not to mention the remaining 1.91M they spent on other projects. FreeBSD just one of about 40 projects mentoring 400 students. The Nmap Security Scanner project is mentoring 10 of them, who have already produced great work! A list of their credentials and projects is available here. I'll give an update on their progress at my Defcon Presentation this Friday at 10AM.

Meanwhile, many of the other SoC mentors have posted details on the projects being worked on. For example,

• NetBSD
• Gaim
• Inksape
• MozDev
• WinLibre (with pics!).

Cygwin is not free. From http://cygwin.com/faq.html

The company, whom I work for, develops and sells closed source software. I contacted redhat for the details. The "buy out" license is prohibitively expensive. We ended up using a proprietary package because it was cheaper.

I use a lot of open source at work. cygwin, inkscape, Gantt Project, umlet, and dia to name just a few. But I use open source at work only as a consumer. I do not package any of the code in the company's products. At work, I use open source as a user, not a developer. Home is a different story. I code to plenty of open source there. None of that goes into work, however.

Well, it's primarily a vector editing program, you ought to be comparing it against such tools as Macromedia's Fireworks and the like.
Or against Inkscape, which is open-source, and is getting to be a reasonably stable, full-featured piece of software. It runs on Windows and Linux.

"Then I'd like to draw. In Windows I'd normally use Corel Painter (super-realistic real-life artist tool emulations), openCanvas and maybe even Photoshop. Okay, so I try to be open-minded about this and I try for the umpteenth time to use GIMP. It's no match to Painter, of course."

If you want to draw on Linux use Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), neither The GIMP or Photoshop are drawing applications.

Re. 1, do you know of Inkscape?

For a fairly comprehensive list of editors and converters check out the W3C SVG Implementations

Actually, that list is fairly out of date. The last content dates are from 2002, and there's no mention yet of Inkscape, that came on the scene over a year and a half ago.

For a fairly comprehensive list of editors and converters check out the W3C SVG Implementations

Actually, that list is fairly out of date. The last content dates are from 2002, and there's no mention yet of Inkscape, that came on the scene over a year and a half ago.

Boy I'm glad to see this day come. Ever since we started inkscape, I keep running across little ways SVG would improve on the web experience...

For displaying data in a table, this could allow vertical or angled titles in the table header, like you'd do in a spreadsheet to fit more columns in.

You know all those spiffy graphically laid out GUI's you always see in SciFi shows? You could *totally* do that sort of thing in SVG. You'd need some sort of animation support (which Inkscape lacks currently), and clipping regions to do it right.

A while back I wrote a tool called rackview for browsing the machines in a data center, starting with a top view, then 'zooming' in on a rack, then down to the individual machine. The problem is that rendering the screens using HTML tables looks like ass. Being able to have the database tool generate SVG directly (rather than some hacky svg->png->imagemaps) would simplify the tool greatly. I can imagine there are probably other MANY other such needs for graphical, web-driven interfaces out there.

Depending on how good the SVG support in the browsers is, this opens up fertile ground for game developers. True, they're doing this with flash already, but being able to mix SVG and HTML together opens up possibilities that aren't feasible with Flash alone.

Downsides? I phear what advertisers figure out to do with this... We're going to have to go through another round of figuring out techniques for ad blocking pretty soon. ;-)

http://www.inkscape.org/

I would suggest trying Inkscape: http://www.inkscape.org/

I'd suggest looking into using SVG for game map creation, because there's getting to be a lot of Open Source tools out there (like Inkscape, that I help develop) that can edit, convert, etc. them. I've done some map making with it and while it lacks many of the advanced features that commercial map tools have, it's got the basics, plus if you can code, you gain the option of adding the feature in yourself. ;-)

Making maps with Inkscape / SVG is different than using CAD-style software like Campaign Cartographer, but you can achieve pretty much the same things. With features like alpha blending, text-to-shape, layers, grouping, shape fills, tiling, and infinite zoom, you can make much "prettier" maps in much less time than it'd take to do in a CAD-like program. See the screenshots to get some ideas of what can be done with these features. It has a fancy calligraphy mode that could be quite handy if you need to hand-write calligraphic text on a map. There's also a nifty bitmap-to-vector tracing tool that might help in converting hand-drawn maps to vectors. Also comes with several useful tutorials (in the Help menu).

There's also a site for sharing SVG clipart (like map symbols), the Open Clip Art Library. Not a lot of RPG art yet, but there's some and it's likely going to grow a lot. Plus, since all of its content is Public Domain, there's no restrictions at all placed on your maps if you use it. I could *easily* imagine this being a way for RPG mappers to collectively build an open library of RPG map symbols and artwork.

I'd suggest looking into using SVG for game map creation, because there's getting to be a lot of Open Source tools out there (like Inkscape, that I help develop) that can edit, convert, etc. them. I've done some map making with it and while it lacks many of the advanced features that commercial map tools have, it's got the basics, plus if you can code, you gain the option of adding the feature in yourself. ;-)

Making maps with Inkscape / SVG is different than using CAD-style software like Campaign Cartographer, but you can achieve pretty much the same things. With features like alpha blending, text-to-shape, layers, grouping, shape fills, tiling, and infinite zoom, you can make much "prettier" maps in much less time than it'd take to do in a CAD-like program. See the screenshots to get some ideas of what can be done with these features. It has a fancy calligraphy mode that could be quite handy if you need to hand-write calligraphic text on a map. There's also a nifty bitmap-to-vector tracing tool that might help in converting hand-drawn maps to vectors. Also comes with several useful tutorials (in the Help menu).

There's also a site for sharing SVG clipart (like map symbols), the Open Clip Art Library. Not a lot of RPG art yet, but there's some and it's likely going to grow a lot. Plus, since all of its content is Public Domain, there's no restrictions at all placed on your maps if you use it. I could *easily* imagine this being a way for RPG mappers to collectively build an open library of RPG map symbols and artwork.

How many open-source graphics packages are there? One (Gimp).

Actually there are two others that turned up in a simple google:

http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.sodipodi.com/

Without OSX and Windows, there is only one operating system left.

There are in fact several open source OS's besides linux, some based on unix some not:

http://www.reactos.com/
http://www.freedos.org/
http://www.netbsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/

It is true that certain packages tend to dominate if they are clearly better than the others (such as Gimp or Apache) However in some areas their is still no clear 'winner' such as the battle between KDE/Gnome. This is just natural evolution in progress.

From an Inkscape developer:

I think it's good news for us. There will be people scared or disgusted by the forming monopoly and looking for alternatives. Also, it seems likely that Freehand will be either discontinued or at least downplayed so as to not hurt Illustrator, which means a lot of users will have to migrate. All this gives us a certain opportunity.

> In fact, I do find myself needing to do stuff that Inkscape doesn't have, and doesn't appear to even be on their roadmap. Tablet support? Color management? Usable layers support?

Why are you spreading FUD? Not only are these things on the rodamap all right, but one of them scheduled for 0.42, and we may in fact even have them ahead of the roadmap schedule.

Stop your badmouthing and join us to help make Inkscape the best vector editor in existence. We're well on our way there.

screen

Now this is real cool stuff. And they don't make it a secret. Just download a recent CVS snapshot and give it a try.

Inkscape is getting there pretty quickly. I'd go as far to say it's the best open-source graphics program I've ever used. Not only that, but it's interface and tools are much more intuitive than even Illustrator or Corel Draw IMO.

Yeah I like this.

I use the inkscape editor for it. Its fun having a wallpaper size image at 1k (For a simple image.)

using SVG icons for no real reason which look ... crap when you actually use them (@ 16x16 or 32x32 ... as they just don't scale properly

Umm... you know that the `S' in SVG stands for scalable, right?

I've done quite a bit of work in SVG under Inkscape and I must say that I think the format is wonderful. Whether it's appropriate as a native icon format or not is pretty much a matter of choice, but it's *great* for designing them.

I don't think you are looking for an image manipulation program, but a drawing program. Gimp is good for messing with photos etc. : try Inkscape for drawing, it is really very nice.

Not perfect yet, but getting there quick.

http://www.inkscape.org/

For vector... no idea.

For your vector drawing needs, let me point you to a program called Inkscape. While it is not yet as fully featured as something like Corel Draw, it is rapidly improving, and much, much better then a program like Xfig I believe.

First, what I love about Photoshop is that I just have to hit F twice to enable real fullscreen. Then I can pick my tool and the options I need and hide the floating dialogs with Tab. The only thing missing from photoshop is to be able to work at the edge of an image in the center of the screen.

Second, you should have a look at the interface of Inkscape . IMHO it is much clearer than the one of GIMP.

And third, please enable voting in bugzilla. There might be a lots of cool ideas hiding.

XnView
InkScape
Blender
Wings3D

Indeed. I think it'd be better to perhaps compare Paint.NET to Inkscape which is also a free drawing program.

Well, for that kind of stuff you really should be using a vector-based editor like Inkscape.

Well, for that kind of stuff you really should be using a vector-based editor like Inkscape.

Making fluxbox and its kin usable winds up requiring I run half a dozen other apps. Xfce is those apps, bundled together. You can think of it as Gnome done right.

Incredible! Does this mean a base installation of XFce includes Firefox, Abiword, Emacs, GVim, The Gimp, GPhoto, Inkscape and Scribus? These are the apps I require in order to make Fluxbox usable.