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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.

I installed GIMP to many users that never used a drawing program before.

The first thing they do is maximize the toolbar window, and the second is close the layers window. This results in a completely useless application. Users are by default not used to use applications with multiple windows.

Inkscape's predecessor Sodipodi (http://www.sodipodi.com/index.php3?section=screen shots) had a similar interface as The Gimp has. Inkscape's developers managed to make a usable singlewindow interface, so I think this is the way Gimp's interface should be headed.

I heard many people liked Sodipodi over Karbon.

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...

Inkscape
Sodipodi

daz

One of the main reasons I found Inkscape in the first place was because it was a branch of Sodipodi for what I felt were "the right reasons" -- Frankly, Sodipodi's interface is dialog hell. However, I still feel that Inkscape has too many dialogs that "hang around" on the screen. Why have a big dialog that takes 1/7th of the screen to handle color selection when it could be done more effectively with a temporary window that is half the size?

I also couldn't stand the fact that Inkscape didn't have named colours (e.g. colours that you can define, use, then change later and affect the entire drawing) although maybe that's changed now. I also know all of the previous versions I have looked at in the past literally take 10-15 seconds to open a file dialog window (no hyperbole here. Seriously); while my interest in Inkscape has been primarily to get me using a package that looks and works the same on Linux (so I can finally make the switch on the desktop -- Neither Xara X / Xara X2 run on CrossOver Office, unfortunately) I can't help but notice it will save me money from upgrading Xara X every couple of years, too. As a little aside -- I even went so far as to contact Xara Corp. and ask if they had any plans to release a Linux version of their software or even contribute assistance to getting Xara X to run on Wine/CXO. Their response was "No, we're too busy, and anyway people who use Linux seem to expect everything to be free." Well, that put me in my place...

Anyway, thanks to the original poster for pointing this new release out; it's worth taking another look to see what these guys have been up to. The new features look great; I hope stability and improved GUI design are some of the "unsung heroes" of this and future releases.

One wonders why inkscape was started when we already have sodipodi which is a pretty good GPLd SVG drawing package already.

http://www.sodipodi.com/

For a fairly comprehensive list of editors and converters check out the W3C SVG Implementations list http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/SVG-Implementations . My favourites are AMAYA http://www.w3.org/Amaya/Amaya.html, Virtual Mechanics' webdraw (for simple work) http://www.virtualmechanics.com/products/dwarf/ and Sodipodi http://www.sodipodi.com/.

SodiPodi is a native SVG editor. ImageMagick and the Gimp also have some SVG support.

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.

I think these Adobe guys will raise the already exorbitant prices* of their new Adobe Freehand/Illustrator/Whateverthefuckitisnamednow and make Flash even more of a tycoon-only market. That will make my personal favorite format, which shall SVG remain nameless, even more visible via Inkscape, Sodipodi, OpenOffice.org, and even MS Office's Visio and the like.

Thank you, Adobe and Macromedia, for enlightening us with thy holy matrimony.

*as if people actually purchase *cough*othermeans*cough* Adobe software

If I find an application worth using, it seldom has to do with the UI in itself.

You've obviously never used Sodipodi, Inkscape's parent project. Its interface is enough to make mothers abort and milk curdle; it's why Inkscape exists at all.

My question is: where's Kuark or gInDesign?

I've gotten used to using Docbook, but a nice InDesign clone of the same quality of SodiPodi would make many people overjoyed.

(/me quitely mulls over how long it would take to program)

I'm rather impressed with Sodipodi. Not exactly an Illustrator killer, but good nonetheless.

From what I've seen, they're standards used on web pages.

Then you're be wrong. Both Inkscape and Sodipodi are tools along the lines of CorelDraw, and guess what, they use SVG as their format! SVG is designed as one thing: a format for specifying vector-based images (along the lines of, say, PostScript or PDF). Nothing more. It can be combined with CSS, ECMAScript, and other technologies for doing other things (eg, displaying graphics on a webpage, or even doing flash-like animations). But SVG is most definitely *not* used just for "web pages".

I agree about the originality of Apache and snort (sodi-mumbo-jumbo-podi I am not familiar with).

Oo - perhaps if it was different people would complain. But also:
a) if it was different and better, people wouldn't complain (I never hear people complain about Apache, although it's different from IIS, or Firefox)

b) if it is indeed the same, then it's a clone (and bad at that, since it's not better)

Most OSS aren't clones (on the other hand, one possible reason is that Microsoft and Apple were never that focused on office or creative desktop software), but many apps are clones, and bad clones at that.

It's same like with commercial software - some of it is good, some of it is shite.

Good names really do help grease the wheels.

When we forked Inkscape from Sodipodi, we gave a lot of careful thought to branding, and over the course of the project it's paid off in a lot of small ways.

Of course branding doesn't determine the long-term success of a project; there are a lot of successful projects which are even agressively BADLY branded (e.g. GIMP, or (IMO) Sodipodi). Long-term a project stands or falls by its technical, legal, and organizational merits.

But in the short term branding is often the thing that gives you those little critically needed boosts at the right times.

Don't think that cuddly penguin hasn't helped Linux.

Yes, and speaking of other open source vector graphics programs someone should also point out that Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi. And if I understand the story correctly, Sodipodi was based on earlier efforts called "Gill" for GNOME Illustrator. I'm not sure why the Inkscape team forked Sodipodi.

A good test of desktop self-sufficiency could be if an OS can make it's own high quality SVG icons.
Linux is getting there, but not quite yet.

Ok, name one thing you can't do in Inkscape that prevents us from making high quality SVG icons?

Until Sodipodi 0.20+, there was an argument that there was no decent Free Software SVG editing tool.

Until Inkscape (a fork of Sodipodi with more refined goals and using C++), there was an argument that there was no decent Free Software SVG editing tool with a good UI.

Now, there really is no argument that we're missing something. As of Inkscape 0.38, we have a stable, well-featured SVG editor. And it's fast catching with Illustrator in termsof features.

From the Sodipodi tips and tricks page:


Object rotation

When in Select mode, click on an object to see the scaling arrows, then click again on the object to see the rotation and shift arrows. If the arrows at the corners are clicked and dragged, the object will rotate about the opposite corner. If you hold down the shift key while doing this, the rotation will occur about the Rotation Point (nominally the center of the object).

The Rotation Point can be moved by clicking on the very center of the object and dragging the center point to where you want to pivot around. Then if you shift-drag on a corner point, it will rotate about that point.

Compare the respective UI's of Sodipodi and Inkscape. Inkscape is a fork of Sodipodi.

I've seen some great artwork produced with Sodipodi, but whenever i've toyed around with the program I found it frustrating. I could never get going with it. I only recently discovered Inkscape (last week, to be exact), but from the beginning I found it to be very intuitive, and was quickly able to produce some neat looking graphics. Furthermore, Inkscape was actually fun to use right from the very beginning, showed no loss of Sodipodi's power and options, and now I plan to use it alot in combination with Photoshop.

I think that the Gimp developers could learn something from the Inkscape project. The 2 biggest knocks on Gimp, IMO, are: #1) the interface; and #2) features. In that order, with most emphasis on #1

I downgraded to GTK 2.2.4.2 revision C and went back to GIMP 1.25. I'll give GIMP 2.0 another try when GTK+ 2.4.1 is released.

Please try these desktop enviornments! The developers have bent their back over backwords to achieve usabillity! I am using KDE 3.2 and it rocks! Much better than Windows XP! Combine with Mandrake 10 and its the perfect match. Printers just work as well. My Epson Stylus printer just worked, as well as my Digital camera, Scanner, Sound card, Graphics card, TV card and RAM card. The only people who think that open source is hard are ignorant ones! Check inkscape vs sodipodi for example, same job, different interfaces!

Gimp 2.0 is a super step foreward but it is moving very slow and does not fill the need for a pure DRAWING app specifically a vector drawing app like corel draw.

Hmm. Sodipodi is a free vector-drawing program that is cross-platform and quite functional. It's not perfect or feature-filled. But what it can do is great. I made all my NetBSD logos using Sodipodi. I think Corel will have a difficult time getting even a vector drawing program to have traction on Linux (although it would certainly do better than Word Perfect).

As a developer who just participated in a large fork of a GPLed project (Inkscape from Sodipodi), I would concur it most certainly does permit (and encourage) forking.

I do generally use the GPL on my own code as well; I figure if someone can do a better job managing a project built around it than I can, they should go for it.

Forking at some level is actually very common, but a lot of the little forks are more civil and come and go, and generally get re-integrated.

Emacs/XEmacs and gcc/egcs are just the most famous and "hostile" (and actually, egcs was re-integrated after a fashion ... it effectively ended up replacing the old gcc project and took its name). I can think of a _lot_ of other examples too.

There is several native SVG Graphics Tools
- Sketsa
- Sodipodi or Inkscape
- Jasc WebDraw
- XStudio

What, if any, SVG based graphic tools are there?

The only one I am aware of at the moment is a Corel Product. It costs about 15 grand (USD), or it did the last time I checked.

SVG is much different from Flash. Flash is currently primarily used for two things: (1) to provide crummy interfaces (an ugly wart from designers coming from the "multimedia era" when CD-ROMs came out and later the ".com era" when people thought that novelty was what made people keep coming back to websites). (2) To provide an efficient format for vector-based graphic animation.

SVG is lousy at both of the above. I have a friend that looked into the feasibility of SVG as an interface medium, and came back pretty depressed. At one point, I got a bit interested in using SVG for animation, and took a look at the format. I'm reasonably comfortable making the claim that it would be extremely difficult to make an efficient rendering engine for animations using SVG. Furthermore, SVG does not provide functionality for synchronizing audio and phases of an animation (which I believe Flash does).

SVG is good, IMHO, for the following:

1) Tagged diagrams. SVG allows tagging elements with data. This could be a big benefit for CAD and diagram usage.

2) More complex webpage layout. I've never seen it actually done, but it seems that SVG could be used to define arbitrarily-shaped regions in a webpage...up until now, the only regions designers have had to work with, the only thing they could flow text around, was rectangular regions

3) Vector graphics. Plain and simple, it's a standard format for storing vector graphics. This is good for both standalone files and for efficient web-based transmission of graphics.

As for your question about what SVG-based graphic tools are out there -- take a look at sodipodi. It isn't Illustrator (yet), and it isn't going to be for at least a while to come, but it's usable for basic work.

There is Sodipodi for editing SVG.

Why not save yourself a gazillion bucks and export it into the excellent (and Free) Sodipodi.

It's a fantastic vector graphics editor, one that reminds me slightly of Draw on the old Acorn, but more powerful.

Yes and no.

The Gimp has had for some time (since version 1.2 IIRC) some support for vectorial drawing: you can define paths using bezier curves, which may be adjusted, saved and restored, and drawn on the current layer using the current brush. But drawing (and selecting the layer) must be done manually.

The next version of The Gimp adds the ability to save and restore paths as SVG paths (before, it used an ad-hoc simple textual format), and also the ability to import an SVG image by rendering it on a bitmap (like it did with PS images).

That's it: a useful thing to have, but it has little to do with vectorial drawing.

There was a GNU project (which apparently failed) that was trying to create a vector art authoring tool. I can't remember the name of it.

You are talking about GYVE: its developement has stopped in 2002.

OTOH, for Free vectorial drawing programs, check out sodipodi (and its IMHO nicer branch Inkscape) and the good ol' Sketch (now called Skencil).

I like it..but GIMP always has been and still is quite lacking in the vector department. Combined with sodipodi, though, it's everything I could wish for.

Is SodiPodi, the famous vector image editor. It is a GTK program that uses the KDE file and print dialogs.

That stuff is interesting.

I really wish they used vector formats instead of Jpeg's though (SVG anyone?). Then you could scale them as needed without messing them up.

Sodipodi
Inkscape
Sketch

There's a new SVG editor under development called Inkscape - http://www.inkscape.org. It builds on the Sodipodi codebase but is focusing SVG and similar standards

It's definitely worth looking over. I had been checking out Sodipodi's last release last spring, but there still were enough rough edges to block my main needs. But with what was in CVS last month, they both jumped up to 'very handy'. And the Inkscape work has jumped things up even more.

SodiPodi is an SVG editor for Linux and (recently) Windows. It's not complete yet, but from the look of it it should be pretty good when it is.