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This post is full of FUD.

Nope. There's also more supporting details I neglected to mention.

At the point when the feature freeze came along before the release of KOffice version 2.3, Nokia wanted to continue developing some features.

The most significant of which being a major restructuring of the code that touched large parts of the codebase for the benefit of Nokia's mobile app, yes. I even read the "testing done" bit on the review request and it didn't even mention any testing of the actual KOffice apps, just of Nokia's FreOffice.

As good citizens in the community this is being done in a work branch in SVN.

Which, as best I can tell, has become effectively the "real" trunk, with the actual official SVN trunk being relegated to backported bugfixes and few developers even testing it except when they encounter a bug in the work branch they need to test.

Far more of the mailing list discussion (and the vast majority of review requests) seems to be about FreOffice than the desktop UI, the apparent consensus amongst developers is that mobile is the future, and KOffice is having huge issues actually getting a release out because most of the developers are working to Nokia's release schedule and goals.

This said, It's not impossible that team B (being almost all of the previous KOffice community) will continue to work from the work branch as the new trunk

Which is what they were effectively doing already, except that bugfixes got merged into the 2.3 development branch and pulled from there rather than vice-versa. They'd already largely abandoned the "official" KOffice development and release process in favour of what Nokia wanted - I suppose at least this way they might actually make the change official.

Inge Wallin
KOffice developer

You also appear to do a fair of PR and announcements - and even the odd conference session and demo - for Nokia's FreOffice...

Very few people will run into limitations, and even few know what those typical things like "48-bit-colour" or "cymk" or whatever is quoted as major shortcomings of Gimp really mean. If you really need those functions - then Gimp is indeed not for you, just stay with Photoshop or whatever

Actually, anyone running into those limitations should investigate Krita instead of the GIMP.

http://www.koffice.org/

TFA is light on details. As someone who has done semi-professional newsprint production with FOSS, I'd be interested in how they found its color support (CMYK separation, color profiling, etc.). Newsprint presses are very picky about these things, and most FOSS software has very limited support. My version of the GIMP, for instance, doesn't even seem to know what a color profile is, though I seem to recall hearing that this has been added in a more recent version. Myself, I use Krita to CMYK-ify RGB photos and apply color profiles to them.

Also, I assume they used Scribus for page layout. One problem we had with that, and the single most important reason we ended up ditching it in favor of Indesign, was that it mounts PDFs (ads, for instance) as bitmaps (thereby rasterizing and color-separating them, which lowers the print quality of, for example, black text).

I still use Krita, OpenOffice, and a whole bunch of other FOSS software, mostly under Linux. But the page layout stuff I now do in Indesign, in a virtual machine running Windows. All this works well, but I'd prefer not to have to mess with the virtual machine part. Not to mention all the stupid issues that always seem to arise with Indesign license keys.

Yes, we are: interim results at http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Krita/Benchmarking and weekly updates at http://www.krita.org/ Boudewijn Rempt -- Krita Maintainer.

krita ?
joking, mostly - a gimp user here, and as such, i'm quite used to gimp interface and not having huge problems with - at least for the simple tasks i'm performing.

Where did the parent mention Gimp? In my experience, the professionals always use Photoshop, but many casual users (at least those who don't know to use Bittorrent) seem to use Paint.NET - for those people Krita is worthy alternative. It even supports CMYK, something that Gimp still (AFAIK) doesn't. Yes, it might take some relearning, but let's face it, most people simply crop images or do some light retouching, one will learn to do that in minutes with any program.

So I guess the question remains, why would the average consumer choose a Linux netbook, given that they will need to learn to do things slightly differently? Currently the consumer will most likely go with Windows, but when comparing a 300 netbook on x86 running Windows 7 + the price of applications (let's face it, the average consumer is either law-abiding or oblivious to file sharing) to a 100 netbook on ARM, which includes all sorts of applications with many more downloadable for free, the latter may be very tempting. Most people are not gamers, they couldn't give a flying fuck about running $LATEST_AND_GREATEST_FPS.

(Yes, I'm aware the 100 ARM netbook doesn't exist yet. It's only a matter of time IMHO)

No, they won't see the inside of the box because Apple doesn't want them there. They provide users a huge amount of functionality, games, apps etc. without paying Apple for the privilege.

That sounds just like my MacBook Pro, almost all of the software I installed on it is FOSS, Free and Open Source. Just like HP, MS, and others Apple got it's money when I bought my Mac. Now I don't have a lot of games installed, OS X installs Chess, but a therapist I was seeing suggested I get some. She suggested they could improve my memory, speed, and other things. Otherwise for an office suite I use the native Mac port of OO.org NeoOffice and for an IDE I use Eclipse. What I am missing is a photo editor like Photoshop, so I plan on installing K/Ubuntu to dualboot and try out Krita before I have to buy Photoshop.

Falcon

Obviously you cannot think of kword, which approaches this, almost everything is in the sidebar - except load / save / print. But that can be moved in one click. see: http://www.koffice.org/kword/

Everyone always talks about the GIMP, and about how it doesn't measure up to Photoshop. I haven't used Photoshop, so I can't really comment on that, but every complaint they bring up seems to not be an issue with Krita. Just to comment on the issues you mentioned, it does support write-protection for layers, and it has a wide variety of colour-space options. It supports:
- CMYK (8 or 16 bit integer per channel)
- Grayscale (8 or 16 bit integer per channel)
- L*a*b* (16 bit integer per channel)
- LMS Cone Space (32 bit float per channel)
- RGB (8 or 16 bit integer per channel, or 16 or 32 bit float per channel)
- YCbCr (8 or 16 bit integer per channel)

Is there something I'm missing that makes Krita unusable for professional work, or is it just not widely known?

Hi,
Firstly if you're looking for opensource app replacements you can always try www.osalt.com.

Personally I'd try:
Photoshop: GIMP or GIMPShop or Krita
Illustrator: Inkscape or XaraXtreme
InDesign: scribus
Dreamweaver: KompoZer or Aptana or seamonkey or Amaya or href="http://net2.com/nvu/">NVU

I also found this website which might help: www.thefreesuite.com

Here are the relevant OSalt links:
photoshop
illustrator
indesign
dreamweaver

I'm sorry. Who said OpenOffice is "good"? Maybe you cut them off while they were saying "good enough". OpenOffice is horrible software, but it works. Personally, I use Gnumeric for a spreadsheet program as it has the main advantage over OOo Calc of not sucking. I don't do word processing (my text is all LaTeX edited via gvim, so I am not a normal user in that area), but most people I know use AbiWord if they want a word processor. Both have support for ODF.

The point of pushing OOo and ODF usage on Windows is not because OpenOffice is some amazing office suite. It is so there can be real competition for Office suites. If everyone uses open formats -- including MS Office -- then I don't care what office suite you are using. Everyone could use whichever office suite they liked best, which very unlikely to end up being OpenOffice.

KOffice's 2.0 release which adds support for Windows and OS X is on RC1. Perhaps it is worth looking into? It has a real chance of displacing OpenOffice as the flagship open source office suite. The Go-OO project may also be worth looking into.

That may be the case for you, but the fact is there is nothing along the lines of Microsoft Vizio in OpenOffice

It's not in OpenOffice, but since people are recommending Dia, Kivio in Koffice works well for me, and 2.0 RC runs on Windows (I haven't tried it myself, but I did install KDE on Windows). It comes with a good number of sets of shapes, and can also use Dia shapes. It has a sane 1-window interface like Krita, compared to Dia and the GIMP's mess. And no, I'm pretty sure it only depends on kdelibs, not all of KDE. The windows installer seems to do fine at dependency checking anyway.

And for those who say "but people should just use the GIMP" I say, "perhaps". If folks need a photomanipulation program and don't already have one or know how to use a particular one, then the GIMP might work. But I can't count how many people I've heard talk about how hard to use the GIMP is. I never agreed, but other people think it is challenging to use, while Adobe PS is a breeze. If the person is using the software for personal use, why make them choose the one they consider hard to use?

Krita 2 under KDE4.

http://www.koffice.org/krita/
http://dot.kde.org/2009/02/09/krita-20-host-new-features

Easy to use. Powerful. Free. Enjoy.

More than enough capability for all users excpet perhaps professionals (ie. good enough for 99% of users).

If a person is using the software for personal use, why make them choose one that costs an absolute fortune?

Or Koffice.

Do you know is there alternative for MS Visio?

Choices include Dia, Kivio and Umbrello. See the other answers, too.

(And don't bother replying about the GIMP until it has proper CMYK support.)

What if I reply about Krita? They do claim support for CMYK colorspace, though I don't know whether that's good enough of an implementation compared to Adobe products.

I hope they'll make it more usable as in Krita.

Some devels were posting shots of KDE running on Windows.

Qt4 made major improvements which allowed for KDE4 to be easier ported to Windows.

For KOffice to function, you have to have KDE4 installed. And the installer from RTFA is essentially alpha installer for KDE4 for Windows - now also including KOffice. Even if you would select only KOffice, most of KDE4 would be also installed since KOffice depends on it.

If you are not sure, just give it a try - http://www.koffice.org/releases/2.0alpha8-release.php. You can always simple remove KDE4 from your hard drive. it doesn't yet integrates with Windows deeply: simple removal of directory would do a trick. After installation, go into bin/ directory and launch kword.exe. It's alpha quality - but it works somehow already.

P.S. My personal favorite of KDE4 is Mahjong with SVG graphics. Install kdegames package to get it.

Invalid comparison. OOo is also encumbered with 20+ years of bad code. See for yourself. Then go get KOffice.

http://www.koffice.org/krita/
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.gimpshop.com/
http://www.getpaint.net/

You can even get an Alpha of Krita 2.0 for Windows these days. All of those are free.

Linux has a Visio Clone: Kvivio.

I'm using whatever the default window manager comes with Ubuntu when using desktop effects (compiz).

There has been a shift (at least a decade old) of applications using a single window rather than multiple windows.

I think your average user would be better served by other applications. And for all the times I hear "but they won't have Photoshop", I have to wonder how many people actually use PS in the first place. Outside a handful of graphic designers, no one I know has it installed.

The way existing ODF implementations achieve interoperability here is that they look at OpenOffice's implementation, and copy it.

Actually, there's already an available UI patch for GIMP.

Where FOSS fails and fails hard is in the creative space - and I don't mean grammar checking or forty different ways to parse text. I mean, ultimately, FOSS alternatives for applications like the Macrodobe MX

and CS suites

the Final Cut Studio suite

3d Studio MAX etc.

The areas where the major ISVs are still raking in buckets of money.

I'm talking about the hard, nasty, horrifying shit that nobody wants to program without a fat salary and plenty of fringe benefits. The kind of functionality that keeps creative art nerds who can't program paying thousands - or tens of thousands - of dollars a year for the aforementioned applications.

Your grandmother will care when it's as easy to use as the Mac you insisted she get

Your 3d modeling geek friend will care when something MAX or Maya compatible comes around. Fortunately, .obj seems to be pretty useable, and interchanges between Blender and Max, so (for modelling, anyway) it's down to learning curve and individual application features.

Your video editing friend will be a real challenge to convince. FOSS is not renowned for being user-friendly, and it's really, really hard to top Final Cut Pro and its interaction with the Quicktime API. For what it does and the users it's aimed at, the Final Cut Studio is cheap.

Your gamer geek friend wouldn't care either way, so long as it runs all of his games.

Joe Average - who doesn't play games, doesn't use photoshop or big 3d suites, doesn't use AutoCAD.... if it looks like and functions like whatever he's used to, you could probably switch his computer, change the desktop wallpaper on the new box to whatever he's using.... and see how long it takes him to notice.

You can't have those particular proprietary programs. But with the exception of iTunes, you will find programs which do the same things exactly as well. The ones you are looking for are:

• Flash player and PDF reader are available direct from Adobe. Additionaly, there are several open source flassh players, and PDF renderers are everywhere. Open source Action Script compiler here. Blender can directly generate Flash movies as good as anything produced anywhere, while lots of other Linux programs can produce some Flash output;
• Open Office; KOffice;
• granted, there's no equivalent to iTunes which will talk to the iTunes store;
• Freewheeling, SooperLooper, Audacity, Rosegarden...;
• Starry nights? Hell! you know the professionals use Linux, don't you? Start here and stop somewhere beyond the horsehead nebula...
• As for GPS software, the list is so long I don't know where to start. Anything you want to do with more or less any GPS - from professional navigation for shipping (although that's proprietary and expensive) to mapping your walks in the woods - is available. What is it you want to do?

Openoffice and AbiWord don't matter because they aren't "office." They're plenty useful, but they don't have 100% Office format compatibility, and therefore aren't good enough for Mr. Average Joe.

Same with the Adobe products, really. GIMP is still not good enough for print work, but really it all comes down to industry standard formats and applications. Go into a graphic design interview with GIMP/Inkscape experience but no Adobe experience and see where it gets you.

None of the listed applications hold a candle to the iLife apps for "just getting things done." They aren't as slick, as easy to use, or as integrated.

What are the colour depths of Photoshop and GIMP? PS CS3 has 32 bits per colour change whereas GIMP only has 8. Can GIMP work with CMYK? Only with a plugin. Does PS? Natively. So, if you want print then you need PS as GIMP won't do.

True. s/Abiword/KOffice/ or you can use Abiword with Agnubis and Gnumeric

Have you tried out Krita yet? As of the latest KOffice 1.6.3 release, I know for a fact that Krita supports several colour spaces including RGB (8-bit int, 16-bit int, 16-bit float, and 32-bit float per channel), CMYK (8-bit and 16-bit per channel), greyscale (8-bit and 16-bit), L*a*b (16-bit per channel), LMS cone space (32-bit float per channel), watercolours, and YCbCr (8-bit and 16-bit per channel). Apparently, Krita is designed such that supporting different colour spaces (and profiles along with each one) is trivial and thus supports all the common ones (as far as I can tell).

Oh yeah, and the bit Krita has going over GIMP when it comes to competing with Photoshop: its interface is remarkably similar to Photoshop's.

How about Kivio?

What about a Vector graphic editing tool?

That would be Karbon14. (KDE seems to have gone through a few iterations of vector graphic tools, or maybe the same tool under different names. I know KIllustrator was renamed because of pressure from Adobe, to Kontour. And there was a Krayon in there too. I don't know how many of these may actually have been different codebases.)

KOffice already has Kivio for flowcharting. QCad strikes me as a bit of overkill for this. It (kivio) could stand to expand its stencil library but it's supposed to support Dia stencils too.

It can't handle more than 8 bits per color, which is a serious limitation for me. Most, if not all, D-SLRs can save in a RAW format which typically stores more than 8 bits per color, often 12 to 14 bits. This preserves more detail in the shadows which can be brought out with the proper software. Similarly, it is best if at least some of the image processing can be done in the raw data before converting it to RGB. On a digital camera, a pixel is not RGB*, but red, green, or blue (or sometimes even a different color) and must be processed to find out the actual color of a pixel location. Photoshop and other professional packages are able to handle this just fine. I think Krita can also deal with this, though I haven't played with it much. The last time I used it it was too slow to be usable.

In the past I found Gimp's user interface rather awkward to use. I have not used Photoshop, but I do use Bibble Pro on Linux, which has excellent raw photo processing support and is great for workflow processing.

* Foveon makes a sensor where each pixel is RGB, but its light sensitivity is not very good and hence is not widely used in cameras.

There's already Krita (part of KOffice, KDE) which uses Qt and looks and acts quite like Photoshop, so come KOffice 2.0, perhaps Krita will become the most popular open source image editor since it'll have native Windows and Mac ports.

You should also note that GTK stands for GIMP ToolKit as it was written as a widget toolkit for GIMP in the first place. I doubt they'll be changing it anytime soon.

Does anyone remember Krita? URL: http://www.koffice.org/krita/ It's UI is consistent and easy to use - esp. from a newbie pov. What else? a name change? No. GIMP gets advertising from the tonnes of people who TALK ABOUT GIMP and about its 'wrong name'. Tabs - maybe. Add it as an optional feature. Opening multiple instances of an image may tax your resources too much. Make it pleasant - like Visual studio is. No joke. It's intuitive, you get 1 window (add tabs if you want to), menus on top, icons, left panel dividing into sections, with a right one dealing with properties. Hey, VS.NET-UI-like GIMP may be cool. But I welcome any new UI when it comes to GIMP. It's about time. (*Expecting new KDE4 UI effects* - just a thought)

Better suggestion: fix the underlying engines; 16 bit support, proper cmyk, non-destructive adjustment layers, better text handling. While they're at it, ditch GTK for QT for better cross-platform behaviour so that Mac users can ditch X11 and Windows users can have better reliability. The nasty interface can be lived with, and while not Photoshop is better than some (many?) of the alternative commercial packages. Even on Windows, it works pretty well as an image-VI, when you need to quickly whack out a web graphic and don't feel like loading PS.

Alternately, admit that GIMP has run its course, and start porting the interesting bits to Krita

And while we're at it, rename the bloody thing. "The program formerly known as GIMP" would be a step in the right direction, since the average user community thinks it refers either to cripples, or a submissive in a zippered leather suit who's kept on a chain in a box most of the time.

This days krita is a very good (if not better, as it supports colorspaces) OSS alternative to the GIMP, without the user interface problems the GIMP has.

Personally, I'd focus on Multimedia authoring, it's always been Linux's weak point.

First, audio composition and editing, as well as a Virtual DJ studio. The backend (ALSA + Jack) is brilliant, but the lack of synths, mixers and whatnot of the caliber of Absynth and Traktor (from Native Instruments) and Live (from Ableton) makes ALSA/Jack fairly useless.

raster graphics. As much as people keep repeating that Gimp is as complete as Photoshop, it isn't. CMYK support, 24 and 32-bit colour support, support for excessively large files, better tablet support, are all very much needed in a bitmap editor. I'd certainly throw much resources in Mr. kanzelsberger's direction, for work on Pixel Editor, which is a truly brilliant application.

Vector graphics. There really hasn't been a truly top-tier vector drawing application for Linux since Corel Draw 9 was briefly ported. Inkscape is neat, but it's far, far more useful as a GUI frontend to SVG editing than a full fledged Vector drawing application. Xara Xtreme has promise and potential, the Windows version of Xara was ever even quite close to being on par with Illustrator, Freehand, or Corel Draw, but it has promise and it's probably the best bet right now.

Personally, I'd focus on Multimedia authoring, it's always been Linux's weak point.

First, audio composition and editing, as well as a Virtual DJ studio. The backend (ALSA + Jack) is brilliant, but the lack of synths, mixers and whatnot of the caliber of Absynth and Traktor (from Native Instruments) and Live (from Ableton) makes ALSA/Jack fairly useless.

raster graphics. As much as people keep repeating that Gimp is as complete as Photoshop, it isn't. CMYK support, 24 and 32-bit colour support, support for excessively large files, better tablet support, are all very much needed in a bitmap editor. I'd certainly throw much resources in Mr. kanzelsberger's direction, for work on Pixel Editor, which is a truly brilliant application.

Vector graphics. There really hasn't been a truly top-tier vector drawing application for Linux since Corel Draw 9 was briefly ported. Inkscape is neat, but it's far, far more useful as a GUI frontend to SVG editing than a full fledged Vector drawing application. Xara Xtreme has promise and potential, the Windows version of Xara was ever even quite close to being on par with Illustrator, Freehand, or Corel Draw, but it has promise and it's probably the best bet right now.

Right here.

Honestly, if this outfit can't be bothered to Google (the keywords I searched for were "openoffice" and "roadmap"), let 'em have MS Office. They deserve it.

(Also, OpenOffice is not the only alternative. I use Koffice, but YMMV.)

I just made a quick check and found a download site with 1000 image editors. How many open source applications do you need? There's GIMP and Krita and... honestly, I can't think of a third one.

• POV-Ray
• Blender
• Xara
• Krita
• Inkscape

I've got a few more bookmarked. As for why there are so many, some are meant to do specific things, run in specific environments, or to edit specific formats. Some, like POV-Ray, are vector graphics editors. Some are bitmap editors. Some are 2D and others 3D. Some only run on Y OS in Z like Krita is for KDE. There are a number of reasons there are so many different FOOS image editors.

How should future development efforts be prioritized?

They have it in Krita. Due to the years it has been around, Gimp has more bells and whistles but Krita has the advantage of being designed with 32bit colorspaces from the ground up. Now Gimp is supposed to be refactored around a library called GEGL that will address that and some other issues. This has been "coming soon" for a number of years now. I bet Krita reaches feature parity with Gimp before Gimp's colorspace limitations are fixed.

Come KDE4, it will be easily possible to run Krita in OS X and Windows. That increase in userbase usually seems to draw more developer attention.

You know that Linux is ready for governments and businesses when a 30 day review points out DVD and photo editing as the main weaknesses -- and not because there are no Free Code replacements, but because they aren't quite good enough yet. The reviewer only tried two applications, GIMP and Kino. I share his feelings towards the GIMP photo editor, which I regard as an "old school" Free Code project where the developers would rather tell the users why their program is, in fact, highly usable than conducting serious usability tests and making improvements. To be fair, the existing GIMP user base, which is used to the current implementation, may also resist significant changes.

That is not to say that the quite remarkable GIMP functionality could not be wrapped into a nicer user interface. GIMPShop is one such attempt, which I have not tried. I hope that it will become a well-maintained fork; I don't have much hope for GIMP itself to improve in the UI department. I am personally partial to Krita which, while still young, seems to have generally made the right implementation decisions, and is truly user-focused (as is all of KDE -- I love those guys). I am not a professional photo editor, so I don't know how mature Krita is for serious work. It is good enough for everything I do.