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I usually use Krita, which is really really good, supporting several different colourspaces, as well as having a more Photoshop-like interface than most open source editors. It also integrates really nicely into KDE, which is a big plus for me.

That's why you should use Krita http://www.koffice.org/krita/ - Yeah!

What about OpenOffice Draw? It works fairly well for light DTP needs and it has a nifty built in PDF export feature.

If you don't believe me have a look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OOo_Draw_Screen shot.png

Whatever you decide, stay far away from GIMP. It's a POS. If you have access to KDE try Krita: http://www.koffice.org/krita/

By all means, show me where I've gone wrong.

At this point you're not wrong, however the GIMP developers have just re-written the entire engine behind GIMP. It's called GEGL and is a compositor (allowing those non-destructive layer effects you were talking about), it can also do CMYK. The reason the GIMP is so behind is because they've been waiting for this, version 2.6 will see a re-write of GIMP internals to use GEGL (we're currently on version 2.2).

Alternatively, you can try Krita, which is also not professional-ready yet but is possibly closer than GIMP. Either way I believe thick client FLOSS apps have far more to offer than online thin-clients.

Sorry, he said, "one of the reason".

If it also had a program like Indesign, photoshop and their subsequent ability to use CMYK properly, I would.

Sorry, he said, "one of the reason".

If it also had a program like Indesign, photoshop and their subsequent ability to use CMYK properly, I would.

Linux seriously needs a good image manipulation tool such as the GIMP with 16-bit or even 32-bit per color channel support built-in. This is particularly important for operations like sharpening.

The point is that there is a decent image manipulation tool for Linux that does work in 16 and 32 bpp mode.

--- SER

Thankfully we have Krita which has much more potential to be a Photoshop replacement (especially since its interface is very similar to Photoshop's unlike GIMP). Come KOffice 2.0, we'll have a native Windows port, so then it can gain some more mindshare and people won't have to think that "free image editor == GIMP" all the time.

... doesn't have a single decent image-browser ...

Gwenview, Picasa...

... dc++ client ...

Is in production. Check the CVS for latest builds.

... office suite ...

I really don't understand why you included this. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord; all more than comparable to MS Word.

... Not to mention decent looking fonts ...

In Debian based distros, sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Rather simple. Other distros have packages of their own.

In short, I'm under the impression that you haven't really tried to use a modern Linux distro for more than the five minutes it took you to stereotype it, say, "This sucks because it's not what I'm used to!", and go back to Windows.

• flpsed
• PDF Edit
• KWord
• Scribus
• Inkscape
• GIMP
• pdftk
• Jarnal
• Multivalent

Use TIFF or RAW, as these do not use lossy compression. The files are much larger, but they don't use lossy routines (LZW is lossless compression, and RAW doesn't compress at all.).

If you're at all serious about digital photography, particularly if you're leaning towards scientific applications like astrophotography, I'd recommend giving TIFF the flick. TIFF supports many different compression schemes including LZW (lossless) and JPEG (lossy). A number of cameras I've seen supporting TIFF are actually using TIFF/JPEG because they can use the same CODEC for generating their JPG files. TIFF is also limited to 8-bits per channel. Stick with your camera's RAW format, or if it has it FITS (unlikely).

What you use to edit your pictures will directly affect their quality as well. Sure, GIMP is free and I like it, but it is also limited to 8-bits per channel and so is again useless for quasi-scientific stuff. Photoshop still reigns here, but there are other free applications coming out that support 16-bits per channel like Krita (which actually supports up to 32-bits per channel in some color spaces).

If you use Photoshop day in and day out you would know that Gimp isn't acceptable.

There is no longer a necessity to use photoshop or other commercial/proprietary programs. I switched to using only Free Software in my webdesign company almost two years ago, and though I spent some weeks in transition learning the new software, I now work a lot more efficiently. This is partly thanks to CLI applications like ImageMagick, but I also find that for most work, the FOSS counterparts of Adobe's applications are much more efficient to use; they are a lot faster, handles larger files, are not cluttered up with un-needed functionality, and are more easily customized. Another advantage of using FOSS is that a lot of proprietary software tends to lead the user towards a more or less predefined goal as to how the final output should look, resulting in, amongst other things, a lot of templatish pages on the web.

My recommended line of design tools are:

GIMP (Who needs Photoshop?)
Krita (For those rare moments when CMYK are required)
Inkscape (For vector graphics and experimenting with layout)
Quanta (For making the actual webpages)
Scribus (For making professional PDF's)

Unfortunately, there are no FOSS applications able to make flash files like Flash does, but my needs have been well served by SWF Tools and OpenOffice.org's ability to export presentations to swf, and I expect to see some great development in this area now that Adobe has opened its action script engine.

OpenOffice is just one of many contenders. Try Star Office, OpenOffice's commerically supported brother. Or KOffice, the office suite from the KDE project. Or for a less mature option, there is Gnome Office which is just a wrapper for AbiWord and Gnumeric for the most part.

Windows has many superb applications (like photoshop) which Linux as yet cannot match.

People WANT TO BUY Photoshop.

They do not want to learn GIMP.

People want to buy nvidia and ATI video cards.

They do not care about binary blobs.

And they do not want to be educated about how evil closed source is.

They will never look at the source. If they did they would never understand it.

OS/X gives people the choice to buy the stuff they want instead of hoping that someone will write it.

Just what percentage of people compile FireFox for Windows?

What is the ratio of source to binary downloads?

Probably not. Krita used to be called Krayon, but the name had to be changed due to some trademark reasons. SUSE even got sued in Germany over the name -- which was in the KDE menu, although the application wasn't shipped with the distribution at that time. Must have been a couple of years ago (SUSE 7.x, I think).

Before it was called Krayon, the name was KImageShop. AFAIK, it was never called "The KIMP" ;-)

Does GIMP support 16-bit color/CMYK separation?

Does Thunderbird interoperate well with our exchange server?

Does Firefox work on most webpages?

Does OpenOffice interoperate well with MS Office files?

I checked out the changelog and I see there's a new icon set for the "too", which sounds promising...

That's harsh. For dumb uninformative comment which even doesn't link to the ChangeLog.

KOffice 1.6 ChangeLog . It's pretty damm long for minor release. Search for Krita: it take 2+ PageDowns of my screen. That's pretty much for overview of changes and fixes. How ignorant you have to be to ignore all other improvements and pick that "icon set" change deep down. Which is probably simplest change of all.

Coincidentally, version 1.6 of KOffice was released today, with a lot of new major features for Krita.
Check it out here: http://koffice.org/announcements/announce-1.6.php

Development has certainly been active lately. Cyrille Berger has a blog where he talks about some of the new features that have gone into Krita lately. http://cyrilleberger.blogspot.com/

They need to get this integrated before http://www.koffice.org/krita/ runs them over :)

I also fear that the code base for OpenOffice.org is too heavy and difficult to work with. I foresee a long time when almost nothing will happen while they rewrite the core. This is exactly what happened to Netscape and for the same reason: The code base was so convoluted that it wasn't possible to work with.

Seriously, I think that KOffice is the future of free office suites. It is developing incredibly fast and they have far more apps in the suite already. I read an article at the KDE news site that some students had implemented pretty advanced stuff in just some short Google Summer of Code projects, and I don't believe that could happen for OpenOffice. When they release 2.0, it will run on Windows AND OS X and from then on it's just a matter of more features. Mark my words... You read it here first.

Krita is the bitmap graphics editor software included with the KDE based KOffice suite. Designed to be both a painting application and a photo editor, Krita is Free Software and distributed under GNU General Public License. It was released for the first time as a part of KOffice version 1.4.0, on June 21, 2005. Before any public release, it was called Krayon and before that KImageShop, but legal matters motivated a change from these names.

Kubuntu 6.06 has also been released and is fully supported by Canonical. You can download it and order free Kubuntu CDs through Shipit.

Kubuntu features the latest version of the ever popular and advanced K Desktop Environment, which has killer apps such as the AmaroK music player, the Kaffeine movie player, the Konqueror file manager and web browser, and the KOffice suite.

The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice

Micro$soft is lying through their nose. They know very well that KOffice, the Free & Open Source office suite that comes with the KDE desktop environment also supports the ODF format. In fact, they were publically informed about KOffice's capabilities last year in a open letter sent by the KOffice developers.

Yet they continue to spread the outright lie that only OpenOffice and its derivatives support the Oasis Open Document Format (ODF).

KOffice has a much cleaner architecture and a leaner codebase than OpenOffice, making its startup faster and facilitating the addition of new features. Because improving KOffice to meet the usability needs of governments, businesses and disabled individuals can be done with much less effort, KOffice is an even greater threat to Micro$oft.

The ODF format is limited to the features and performance of OpenOffice and StarOffice

Micro$soft is lying through their nose. They know very well that KOffice, the Free & Open Source office suite that comes with the KDE desktop environment also supports the ODF format. In fact, they were publically informed about KOffice's capabilities last year in a open letter sent by the KOffice developers.

Yet they continue to spread the outright lie that only OpenOffice and its derivatives support the Oasis Open Document Format (ODF).

KOffice has a much cleaner architecture and a leaner codebase than OpenOffice, making its startup faster and facilitating the addition of new features. Because improving KOffice to meet the usability needs of governments, businesses and disabled individuals can be done with much less effort, KOffice is an even greater threat to Micro$oft.

how much could the Office product be worth if 90% of the most-used functionality is available for $0.00?

It is

At this point I think the main reason GIMP is still the gorilla of open source graphics apps, is simply because of the first mover principle. It was capable of good stuff (horrendously bad gtk interface not-withstanding) before any other similar apps were available. And now we are only slowly recovering from that (unfortunately GIMP doesn't seem to be recovering along with us though). This is something that happens a lot in software... not just open source. Look at windows...

What I find odd is that KOffice now uses ODF which is native to OpenOffice.org. But according to the KOffice 1.5 import/export filters the support for the format is not quite there yet. http://www.koffice.org/filters/1.5/

OpenOffice Writer Import: The filter generally works well, however some features might be missing or might not work correctly yet.

OpenOffice Writer Export: The filter generally works although it is not finished, and it may suffer from some instability.

This certianly raises some questions.

Anyone who's ever complained about the gimp needs to check out Krita, the paint application in KOffice. As of 1.5, it now has support for adjustment layers and layer groups, 2 of the things I missed most in the gimp. It also has CMYK support and does not have separate windows for all the tools (something that never bothered me but soooo many people complain about it). The difference between 1.4 and 1.5 of Krita is absolutely amazing, I figure give them 6 more months and they will have passed gimp in functionality. Too bad Krita is KDE only though, so no help for windows users looking for a good free photo editing suite.

> In KDE, there is still no real drawing program like The Gimp written in Qt. If you have to load gtk in KDE than you'll slow down, and if you have to load Qt in Gnome you'll have a slowdown.

I use Krita.

adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support

Applications don't have to have big costs associated with them.

And if the lack of a mail program is a real problem, then just package it with Kontact and you have almost an equivalent of outlook too.

I thought these were great concepts myself:

http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/mor itz_zimmermann.pdf

If anyone else was looking for the guy's actual proposal that was submitted to the competition, this is it:

http://www.koffice.org/competition/gui1results/mar tin_pfeiffer.pdf

Frankly I think a lot of what he suggests strike me as rather "duh" concepts -- things which ought to be rather obvious but are ignored in some of the major office suites. I'm not sure how I feel about an application having a "desktop" which is separate from the actual OS' desktop; it seems like it would lead to a situation where every application has its own desktop, possibly with conflicting UI metaphors, and that's not a good end result for the user.

I suppose you've not heard of Kivio. Pretty much a clone of Visio, but they don't yet have the Visio format reverse-engineered.

What about Kivio from Koffice?

Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed by how fast it's growing.

Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice is probably a better alternative to Adobe Photoshop on the Linux desktop. It is nicely integrated in KDE and its codebase is cleaner than that of GIMP, so it is easier to add features at a fast rate. In fact, even GNOME devs have been amazed by how fast it's growing.

http://www.koffice.org/krita/
It looks like its closer to the photoshop interface. Though it does look like it has fewer features right now.

Last I checked, you could run KDE {which includes Kivio} on OpenBSD. If not, have you tried using a pencil and paper?

Where are leading audio apps like jack, ardour, sweep and audacity? Where are Blender and Wings3d? How about dumping Gnome, using a better performing desktop and using the extra space for koffice libs so they can include krita and the drawing utility.

This appears to be a poorly conceived distro.

How about KOffice as alternative? Is there any comparison between OpenOffice and KOffice published? When I looked into the OpenOffice code a while ago I was discouraged by the original StarOffice code and the amount of Java code. I guess Sun added the Java code, thanks, but no thanks. As far as I can tell there is at least no Java dependence in KOffice. It would be nice to compare two comparable OpenSource projects directly instead of making general statements based on just one example.

There are at least two other open source suites out there. Its too bad that they only run well on Linux, but they are being ported to Windows and OSX.

If you are going to make comments on Open Source ability to make office software, you would need to comment on those. Especially since they are both open source right from the beginning, unlike OO which has commercial origins.

In my experience all the components of Koffice work really well. Gnumeric has many advanced features and continues to be intensively developed. AbiWord still needs some polishing IMO.

KOffice is the Office suite developed as part of KDE, and from personal experience I can say that it is a whole lot snappier at boot-time, requires less memory, and needs far less hard-drive space to install.

KOffice developers are also quick to note that they find it a whole lot easier to work with a codebase that was designed from the beginning to be lean. Staroffice (the commercial, closed-source predecessor of OpenOffice.org) was initially designed to be completely self-sufficient so as to run without many dependencies. That accounts for part of OpenOffice.org's current bloat.

GIMP and those other applications you mention are at /best/ only Consumer/SOHO, VERY SOHO. They are NOT "On the higher end side of desktop publishing in Linux". Though maybe is seems that way because that is where the line stops and you are not really familiar with the better quality products on Windows and Mac.

IF you think that things like Photoshop is the 'Higher End' of what is aviable for Mac or Windows.... Then I don't think you've experianced high end much yourself.

Now get ready... think "custom applications" and "in house development" and "User interfaces that would make a goat cry".

I remember fondly the day that I was talking to a retired (medical reasons) owner of a publishing company. I asked her why Quark (this was before OS X version of Quark was released) was so popular since it so obviously sucked and it was ass to get running properly in classic mode on the 30 or so Macs that I was responsable for. Why weren't people using stuff like Indesign?

She said basicly "Have you ever had to use those big German presses?" and talked about the years of custom software built around using Quark as part of the proccess.

Then she refered to photoshop and illistrator (by name) and the like as "those damn mickey-mouse programs"

The Gimp is what it is. It's a high quality application for 8bit per channel editing of images generally geared for computer/web illistrations. It's not a uber-full photo editor, but it gets the job done. It has python scripting support, which is probably much more usefull then you think it is. Nice things like lots of filters, lots of brushes. Much stuff aviable from non-gimp sources. Things like that.

It's a image editor. If you need high color resolution for certain operations you can use Cinepaint/Glasgow with it's 32bit per channel color editing capabilities. Not 32bit like truecolor 32bit, but 32bit like 128bit RGB color... which is something that Photoshop can't touch.

Although it's more aimed for the 'high end' movie editing market. 35mm motion film that's been ditigalized sort of thing.

Think: "arrows and drawn special effects in the 2nd two movies of the Lord of the Rings movies".

Now think: "was done on GNU/Linux on KDE desktop using Cinepaint"

Now you get the idea.

If you want a paint program, gimp sucks. Gimp is nice for editing, not so nice for image creation.

You want to paint check out "Krita"
http://www.koffice.org/krita/

Designed to make painting easier. Supports 16bit per channel if you like to get boners thinking about that sort of thing (just kidding!!! I am just trying to be a bit silly).

It'll end up part of the Koffice suite. Fucking-a Koffice suite kicks MS Office's ass, thank you very fucking much.
(and this is coming from a Gnome guy). When you take price into account.

If you realy realy need 16bit per channel color then I suppose you could use Krita for editing photographs... just like a nerd can justify stealing copies of photoshop and not make themselves feel guilty or stupid about it.

Now if your going to tell me that all this stuff sucks... you can suck eggs. Seriously.

It is what it is. It's usefull.

Think about it:
You can make as many copies as you want. You can use it professionally. You can use it for school. You can give it to your mom. You can install it on every computer in your entire fucking town.

It's FREE software. Not just shareware bullshit.

I got.. Gimp (raster editor), Krita (raster painter), Cinepaint/Glasgow (movie image editor), Cinelerra (NLE and compositing program with professional aspects such as render farm support and support for Floating Point RGB (better then YUV! But it can do YUV if you want.), Blender (Full animation and 3d modiling suite), Wing3d (low polygon modeler editor/creator), Scribus (desktop publishing application of fairly high quality with a eye on modern PDF-based workflow), Inkscape (SVG image editor)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Krita ended up superceding GIMP at some point in the future. It's had a troubled history, but development seems to have really taken off - for example, they already support the 16-bit images and CMYK that many of the posters in this topic are asking for. Plus, they're collaborating with openuseability, so perhaps it will even be relatively easy-to-use!

Like kexi

(Disclaimer: I've never used either so I may be way off)

You should try Kexi, the Access replacement in KOffice. If you don't want to install all of KOffice, Kexi can be installed stand-alone as well.

Go to http://www.koffice.org/kexi/ to find out more.

Btw, KOffice is coming out with a new stable release, 1.4.2, very soon.

People might be interested in Krita (http://www.koffice.org/krita/screenshots.php) as an alternative to GIMP. It has an interface similar to PaintShop Pro where all the interface windows are contained within one main window and it integrates well with KDE.