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A single web site with all the programs I want to download sounds ideal.

Looking for computer programs? This is your web site, provided that Linux supports your hardware. If not, Windows ports of many Free apps exist.

Or are you looking for TV programs? In that case, trust me, you don't want to be programmed by your TV.

How can you introduce to FOSS the largest user base ? Port your OSS app to windows !
"Once people are used to apps, it doesn't matter what OS is underneath."
In fact this is the most efficient way to spread the world !
Let them try WinLibre or TheOpenCD and they'll switch soon or later to Linux..

You could make a completly free computer by mixing ReactOS and WinLibre or TheOpenCD on an Xbox hardware.

But if you want to compare, you got to take in count that open source distributes openly. 10 million is far less than the real number. Think of all linux distros using their own packaging system and copies (gentoo, debian, mandrake, etc.), the openCD, people installing for friends and familly (take me, I installed it for 9 other people) and all sort of distributed downloads.
In open source, things are different.

What you do is buy one of those spindles of 50 blank CD-Rs, they'll cost you, what? 50 cents a disk or less.

Download the ISO of TheOpenCD, and burn it onto some of those CD-Rs.

Hand them out to all your Windows-using friends and relatives, pointing out that it's not only Free Software, it doesn't come with any spyware.

Urge them all to duplicate the CD for all their friends and relatives, and point out that such copying is not only legal, but encouraged, as I'm sure is documented in ReadMe files on the CD.

If you don't feel you can afford the cost of the blank CD-Rs, you can ask for a donation of a dollar or two to cover the media and your time.

All I needed to get started helping home users and small businesses (like my dentist) was:

invoices

and

a CD from Microsoft

I also put together a boot CD to scan and clean virri

I charge $75 an hour to 'fix' windows PCs here in California using these two CDROMs and an invoice book.

If you want to be really nice give people a copy of The Open CD (it has good software for home and office users)

We need you to GIVE OUT CDs to friends.

The Open CD is an excellent choice for giving to Windows users (however, they need to update to Firefox/Thunderbird instead of Mozilla for the next version).

What we'd need would be something as easily managed as #define _HAVE_SDL, only at runtime. There is no way to ensure its adoption if you don't make it as efficient to use as possible.

Ask and you shall receive

2) Agree on a common set of libraries -- think DirectX, only system-wide, not just for games

Ding ding ding! This man wins a prize, he has exactly nailed the problems in a way most people in this thread have not. It took me a long time to reach this level of insight into the issue. Go read the NOTES file to get some more ideas for such a Linux desktop platform. Nothing solid has been started yet, there are other tasks that need to be done first. But this is one of the most important ones.

That file also touches on the security updates problem, at least peripherally. The idea is to use the PAL to allow for generic upgrade scripts/plugins to be run. You'd have one for apt, one for autopackages, others for custom installers etc all abstracted by the PAL.

It's basically just put it in your CD drive and 1 minute later it's up and running a full GUI with your browser connected to the internet and solitaire ready to play. Not to mention having a _full_ office suit ready to use. Still think it's not something you want to find in your XMas stocking?

Well, let's see... if it doesn't automagically find and properly set up the printer on the first pass, they're fucked. Ooh, and where do they save the document they created?!? I suppose they could email it to themselves, but then what will they do with an OOo file? (And don't tell me they can rename it .zip, unzip it, and extract the text out of the XML files. Oh yeah, that'll go over *really* well.)

Besides, they probably *already* have a web browser, an office, suite, and solitaire. Why do you think they already have the machine?

Bonus question: how do they get online if they don't have a high-speed connection? Can I have them call you to ask how to find their username, password, and ISP's phone number? 'Cause you know they threw that info away the day after they got DUN set up. Bonus bonus question: what if they're on AOL dialup?

But I'm not one to gripe and not offer any solutions. If anything, the submitter should be handing out something like The Opeen CD.

While it may seem like a nice thing to give out live cd's for linux, you might go fruther giving out a copy of the The OpenCD instead. It's a compliation of open source software for windows. You can also compile your own, I like to give out CDs with Firefox, Open Office, GIMP, Gaim, and a few free games. A bootable linux distro is just likely to confuse people, but software that they can use on their computers all the time without having to boot into a new OS is useful. As a side bonus, most people don't know about OSS or realize that the software is free, so it seems even more valueable ;)

Why not give them The OpenCD instead? Non-techies aren't likely to switch to Linux easily, but you can still promote open source by giving them programs they need for their current (Windows) operating system. It's much more likely they'll use this than a Linux distro.

Give out a CD with OSS Windows apps, first.

If somebody's already tried and approved OOo and Firefox, it'll be a lot easier to transition to a whole new OS.

Very media centric multimedia system for linux: http://mms.sunsite.dk/

I certainly was using computer networks during this time frame. Early 80s is when TCP/IP became popular and Telnet, FTP and email even predated that. In school (mid 80s) almost all the computers were networked.

Windows, or PCDos or whatever it was called at the time may not have had networking then; but not all computer users at the time would have been aware of it. (I, for example, wouldn't know - used computers since 82; but didn't try PCs til the mid 90s).

a couple of things to think about:

the open cd: Free apps for windoze

ubuntu livecd - if you try the cd in windoze it lets you install OO.o and a couple of other Free apps :-)

Now, to decide which to include in all my xmas presents this year....

-Leigh

Anybody tried CRUX PPC?

It is small and neat. BSD like /etc/rc.d scripts. The ISO disk is only about 280Mbyte

I've downloaded 3 different versions of OO.o as new versions come out, and those get distributed to the 30 or so computers at my office.

Also, last x-mas I gave out copies of the open cd to family and friends, each containing a copy of OO.o.

Perhaps I'm not alone, and that others who do this balance out the figures for downloads that don't result in market share.

There must be some margin of error, but in lieu of a comprehensive survey, download quantity gives a good representation of how widely used a software product is.

BTW...

Seehund's Recent Submissions
Title Datestamp
Yellow Dog Linux 4.0 (for real!) 2004.09.30 21:27 Rejected

I have no idea where people got the idea that the serial number is a text field. It is a simple 32 bit integer. However, it is supposed to be compared using "sequence space arithmetic". This has been defined in RFC 1982. Basically it means that overflows are fine, as long as no secondary nameserver keeps really old revisions around. So if you make a secondary for the .com zone now, unplug it for 40 years, and plug it in again, it may fail to get the latest zone.

Is a port to Windows. Indeed, switching people to another OS entirely would be ideal, but sometimes change requires a transitional phase. And it would allow Scribus to compete with the big boys.

• FooBillard - OpenGL pool/snooker with stunning good looks
• Scorched 3D - OpenGL turn-based tank shooting game

Both are currently available in Debian/testing.

Chicago, IL - The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) announces their forcible entry into the Soulseek filesharing network. This action was tasked to faggot tar baby Lysol, who created the GNAA's first slsk chatroom.

This development is expected to make thousands of gay nigger converts as nigger-seed-virus laced mp3s and FLACs are injected into rooms Underground Hip-Hop and Jazz (Full CDs), among others.

GNAA member Lysol commented, "With our new slsk chatroom GNAA we will be able to spread our holy nigger seed to copyright violating music pirates the world over!". He then proceeded to fuck Jazz (Full CDs) founder Lamig with his massive nigger dong, making her the third human female (after the Olsen twins) to be impregnated with the holy gay nigger seed.

Already, signs of niggerdom are spreading. Last Measure is being distributed on the network by persons not directly known to the ghey darkies.

GNAA software development branch have created trollseek, which is a Microsoft Windows-only proxy server, which connects to SoulSeek network, and translates SoulSeek protocol into RFC1459. This allows connecting to SoulSeek network using an irc client such as mIRC. Development of this software greatly improved GNAA's ability to troll Soulseek chatrooms.

About SoulSeek :
Soulseek is a free p2p tool, available for the Windows and LUNIX operating systems.
The majority of Soulseek users are in the United States and Brazil, with many users on the European continent.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowl

http://quark.sunsite.dk/

Chicago, IL - The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) announces their forcible entry into the Soulseek filesharing network. This action was tasked to faggot tar baby Lysol, who created the GNAA's first slsk chatroom.

This development is expected to make thousands of gay nigger converts as nigger-seed-virus laced mp3s and FLACs are injected into rooms Underground Hip-Hop and Jazz (Full CDs), among others.

GNAA member Lysol commented, "With our new slsk chatroom GNAA we will be able to spread our holy nigger seed to copyright violating music pirates the world over!". He then proceeded to fuck Jazz (Full CDs) founder Lamig with his massive nigger dong, making her the third human female (after the Olsen twins) to be impregnated with the holy gay nigger seed.

Already, signs of niggerdom are spreading. Last Measure is being distributed on the network by persons not directly known to the ghey darkies.

GNAA software development branch have created trollseek, which is a Microsoft Windows-only proxy server, which connects to SoulSeek network, and translates SoulSeek protocol into RFC1459. This allows connecting to SoulSeek network using an irc client such as mIRC. Development of this software greatly improved GNAA's ability to troll Soulseek chatrooms.

About SoulSeek :
Soulseek is a free p2p tool, available for the Windows and LUNIX operating systems.
The majority of Soulseek users are in the United States and Brazil, with many users on the European continent.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowl

Chicago, IL - The GNAA (Gay Nigger Association of America) announces their forcible entry into the Soulseek filesharing network. This action was tasked to faggot tar baby Lysol, who created the GNAA's first slsk chatroom.

This development is expected to make thousands of gay nigger converts as nigger-seed-virus laced mp3s and FLACs are injected into rooms Underground Hip-Hop and Jazz (Full CDs), among others.

GNAA member Lysol commented, "With our new slsk chatroom GNAA we will be able to spread our holy nigger seed to copyright violating music pirates the world over!". He then proceeded to fuck Jazz (Full CDs) founder Lamig with his massive nigger dong, making her the third human female (after the Olsen twins) to be impregnated with the holy gay nigger seed.

Already, signs of niggerdom are spreading. Last Measure is being distributed on the network by persons not directly known to the ghey darkies.

GNAA software development branch have created trollseek, which is a Microsoft Windows-only proxy server, which connects to SoulSeek network, and translates SoulSeek protocol into RFC1459. This allows connecting to SoulSeek network using an irc client such as mIRC. Development of this software greatly improved GNAA's ability to troll Soulseek chatrooms.

About SoulSeek :
Soulseek is a free p2p tool, available for the Windows and LUNIX operating systems.
The majority of Soulseek users are in the United States and Brazil, with many users on the European continent.

About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.

Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?

If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!

Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website.
• Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership.

Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE

So what do these new colours look like?

Bright, vivid, and rich. A standard LCD panel looked positively gray and washed out next to this thing. Think about the blue you see on iridescent butterfly wings: this display can reproduce that colour.

This page gives a good overview of what the color gamut is and just how little of it a monitor can cover. By using six primaries instead of three, the Irodori team was able to cover almost the entire color volume.

This is the first projector I've ever seen that could do justice to something like a Maxfield Parrish painting.

So what do these new colours look like?

Bright, vivid, and rich. A standard LCD panel looked positively gray and washed out next to this thing. Think about the blue you see on iridescent butterfly wings: this display can reproduce that colour.

This page gives a good overview of what the color gamut is and just how little of it a monitor can cover. By using six primaries instead of three, the Irodori team was able to cover almost the entire color volume.

This is the first projector I've ever seen that could do justice to something like a Maxfield Parrish painting.

Rumor is that Thunderbird and Firefox are hidden away somewhere on the soon to be released version of TheOpenCD. This special edition (1.4.1) will be handed out to an unsuspecting public at 17 different locations around the world (and counting) on Software Freedom Day, August 28th along with a custom version of Knoppix. About 10.000 copies are being produced. The new edition might even be out by Tuesday ...

I'm really getting sick of people trashing the GIMP based on version 1.what-ever. We all know why you don't like it, and there's a reason the development team upgraded it and came out with something much better. Go get version 2.something instead. The menu items are fixed. Things pretty much behave like normal. All the tools you need and expect are there. You also have to realize that GIMP isn't trying to be an exact Photoshop mirror. There are some analogies to FireWorks and PShopPro hidden in there as well. With the exception of being able to assign effects to layers (something I admin is a very powerful capability in Photoshop) you can pretty much do what you need to do in the GIMP. If you really want to give yourself a kick in the pants, go visit the gallery section over at the GIMP User Group site. If you really dig in, I think you're going to be suprised to find there are some things that GIMP can do that Photoshop can't.

Who needs photoshop when the GIMP can do Aqua Buttons!!! :-)

• Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications

There aren't many linux ppc distros, and all have been mentioned so far, except:

Crux PPC

From the site:
CRUX PPC is a lightweight GNU/Linux distribution targeted at experienced Linux users. The primary focus of this distribution is "keep it simple", which is reflected in a simple tarball-based package system, BSD-style init scripts, and a relatively small collection of trimmed packages. The secondary focus is utilization of new Linux features and recent tools and libraries. CRUX PPC also has an innovative ports system which makes it easy to install and upgrade applications.

It wouldn't be the first time somebody implemented an April fools RFC.

Let's start with the shell--zsh is by far the best one I've used. It has everything.

Moving on, Links (web browser) and Naim (AIM/ICQ/IRC client) rock. The only issue with the former is that Links doesn't support cookies, so I have Lynx in case I want to post on /. or something.

I don't have a console mail client on my machine--I have other methods of getting my email. For accessing my email account with my uni, I ssh into my uni's shell account and use pine from there or I use Links to access the Squirrelmail setup on my web server (over HTTPS, of course). To access my fastmail.fm account, I just use Links to access their web interface (they support both web and IMAP access for free).

For downloading stuff, I use giFTcurs, the btdownloadcurses.py BitTorrent client, and the venerable wget, depending on what I'm looking for and where I'm downloading from.

And, for the part that will generate the most flamage, my text editor of choice: Joe! Its interface is just as simple as nano, but with more features, such as find/replace and decent copy/paste, using text selection. On a related note, I use most as my pager--coloured man pages are good.

And, finally, who could forget NetHack?

Hmm...now I have an urge to find out how to make live CDs, so I can make a ``CLI survival kit'' live CD. Well, maybe not, as I'm too bloody lazy, but it's an idea...

linkage

Just look at all the valuable information available on the MFS Wiki. Lots of useful information suggesting hours and hours of labor by Minix users everywhere. I predict this will be the Next Big Thing. Minix installations everywhere, sweeping the nation, sweeping the world, while Linux fades into obscurity. With BSD dying and Apple beleaguered, Minix will become the next major competitor to Windows.

Now if only YahooPOPs could update their project to be compatible with Yahoo Mail I would be using Thunderbird again.

I just recently rebuilt my g/f's computer, removing IE, MSN, etc, and installing OO.o, Firefox, and the like. (Thank you the open cd ) She liked how fast her computer was now that the spyware was gone, but she could NOT stand how Firefox rendered the fonts on the Yahoo Mail page "incorrectly" (dear God! What will I do now!). Thankfully I ran across this nifty little project on source forge called Yahoo Pops which acts as a SMTP/POP3 server on localhost and bridges the gap between your favoriate email client and the Yahoo Webmail service. That evening I VNC'd into her computer, installed YahooPOPs and Thunderbird 0.6 and hooked her up with a cute theme with a rotating penguin in the top right (She's all about some Tux racer). I showed her how to use it and she loved it. No more ads, no more waiting for the web pages to load, spell checking, the whole 9!

But just when I thought I had sold her on the wonderfullness that is Open Source (I'm on my way to getting her to suse) Yahoo decided they are going to try to compete with G-Mail and offer 100MB to their free customers, as well as a few other minor "improvements". To make a long story short the upgrade broke YahooPOPs and thus Thunderbird. We were both very disapointed.

Now she found a way to open IE by typing "iexplore" on the run line and is using Yahoo Mail again. Its going to be hard to get her to try open source again, but for some reason she cant keep off Tux Racer. (PS: Go neverball!).

Any advice on ways to keep her using Thunderbird? Its really a great product and if my company wasnt tied religiously to MS Outbreak I would be putting it on every desktop in the place.

Do you have any evidence for that, or are you just guessing?

I'll assume you're just guessing, because anecdotal evidence from my life suggests just the opposite.

The first thing you should understand is the that people I hang out with and work with in the digital realm are all fairly hard core geeks. These are not geeks as in "wrote a website that used Perl once" or "enjoys fiddling with kernel compile options", these people are hardcore in terms of "knows 6 dialects of assembly language", "programs satellites", "reverse engineers Windows for a living", "knows and uses 8 different languages" etc. They all use either Gnome or fluxbox/kahakai/whatever (sometimes both). I'm a geek. I get a kick out of writing programs like this. Yet I use Gnome, and I like it. What gives?

From what I read on Slashdot, I would believe that anybody who is even remotely geeklike would hate Gnome and run away from it. All I see is bitching about whatever it is the Gnome developers have done now, whether it be adopting a HIG, changing the button ordering, spatial nautilus or whatever. Yet all around me there are geeks using Gnome. In fact, only a few I know use KDE, and the ones that do tend not to be the serious coders as such but more the ones who enjoy fiddling with their computer, perhaps know a bit of scripting etc.

OK, so having countered some anecdotal assertions with even more anecdotal evidence, let me try and explain what I see.

The thing is, Nautilus prior to Gnome 2.6 was not very useful. At least, I never used it, and from talking to other people they seem to be pretty much the same. Why use the slow and cumbersome GUI when the command line was so much faster?

With Gnome 2.6, that changed. Once people got used to it, they found it was in some cases actually faster to use the spatial GUI than it was to use the command line. Not for everything! I'd never use spatial Nautilus (or, for that matter, any GUI file manager) to manage my source code trees, which are enormously deep. I do use it to manage my desktop and home folder, which is not that deep.

So, for me and it seems many others that I know, spatial Nautilus is a win. Even for those who don't like it, it's not a big deal because almost universally when questioned they did not use Nautilus before.

Now, all this would be academic if spatial file management did not solve a real usability problem. Does it? I don't know 100%, it's too early to tell, but I do know one thing: I've met many, many Non-Geeks who don't really grok directory/folder hierarchies.

My mother is a classic example of this. She uses computers as part of her office job, but she does not grok file management. She knows how to go through the motions, but if anything changes, she is stuck. She doesn't really use directories, at least, not in a meaningful way. I've explained it to her of course, but she does not grok it (by "grok", I mean to have a zen-like understanding of something) in the same way we do.

Does spatial Nautilus solve her problem? Yes, I think so. I've seen a lot of evidence both from HCI texts I've read and real world experience watching friends and relatives use computers that many people don't connect with tree structures. Presenting a tree structure is a bad plan, they won't really understand it, and it's all too easy to end up with people saving files in the "wrong places" because they don't have any concept of where places are relative to each other.

So spatial Nautilus is about trying to help these people. It might well piss off some other people, but I've found that very few of these people really used GUI file management before - they were almost always shell users, so it's no big loss. And it's fairly easy to revert back to the old way, for those who did.

Free software isn't just for geeks anymore. There are some people who are trying to write software for whom computers are not a natural thing. Don't flame them just because it's not what you would want! Instead, understand their goals, and think critically about whether they are good or bad. I wish I saw more of that here.

true, but if you use a real download manager like CLI based wget for win32 (Site found here, direct link here , getright or download accellerator that directly downloaded to a directory of choice, you could get around that.

Yes, people aren't going to want to use wget b/c it doesn't have a GUI, but I'm working on a plugin for IE, mozilla and opera that enables a GUI w/options etc for the windows and nix platforms.

-z

I've been in touch with the OSS people at the Shuttleworth Foundation about distributing TheOpenCD. They may have made some modifications (as they are free to do). Thomas Black of the foundation even helped us squash some last minute bugs. Thanks :)

Rumor is that the CD in question is TheOpenCD 1.4.

That's the general idea of these CDs:

k12wincd
The OpenCD
Gnuwin II

Burn copies, share them with your friends, tell them to make copies.
Get People familiar with the software first, then the migration to linux is easy.

Here's a quick list ofmirrors that appear to have the new ISO.

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pc/OpenCD/
ftp://ftp.sunsite.dk/projects/TheOpenCD/pub/releas es/1.4/iso/
http://www.tw-fileserver.de/mirror/TheOpenCD/

I made some torernts too, just in case...

here

If you want the new OpenCD, use the torrent--no mirror yet (just the overloaded site itself)

but just in case...

torrent

we [TheOpenCD] currently do not find The GIMP 2.0.x on windows to be quite siutable for our target audience yet, doesn't mean we're going to exclude it, it just isn't the recommended option.

TheOpenCD is aimed at fairly non-technical users, if they need to delete several fonts before they can use GIMP2 then it's not quite ready for them.

and here's a quick demo

so let's examine some font rendering options with The GIMP

i'm posting this link in another comment as well, so mod me redundant if you must.

very much with you there, i find the Photo$hop UI absolutely hellish and unintuitive, of course this is because i've been using The GIMP for a while and find it's UI to be far more efficient, i right click and from any point in the image and i can dive through the submenus to the item i want rather quickly.

it's not that i've never used Photoshop, i started out with Paint Shop Pro initially, liked it, i still haven't seen a change colour depth dialogue as nice as the one in PSP3, a few years ago i started doing bits and pieces with PS, used it for a while, then moved on to The GIMP, i haven't looked back.

as for everyone wanting 16bpc colour for their digital cameras, and CMYK for no apparant reason, i'm sure the features will turn up eventually, and granted, some users need them, but for the most part these terms seem to be used by PS users to score points against the GIMP.

anyway, back to the article, i see the author doesn't like the font rendering:

The quality of typesetting is equally lacking. Compared to Photoshop, or just about any other graphics program I've seen in the last ten years, this just can't be taken seriously.

now, when i look at the image he uses to illustrate the point i can't say i'm exactly impressed by the P$ text he claims to be superior.

so let's examine some font rendering options with The GIMP

Sure, commercial users who are able to purchase $3,000 worth of hardware without bumping up the mortgage probably 'can't understand why anyone would want to go to so much effort for so little reward'. They probably do honestly think that at $99 Photoshop Elements is 'cheap, painless and produces high quality results'.

So who cares about the unwashed personal use throng?

The cost of obtaining a great quality Digital Camera has made all the difference over the last couple of years. It's one of those cases (like digital music) of people getting a chance to take a part of their real life and combine it with their interest in computers or email or the internet or even just a penchant for electronic wizardry, at a price and personal cost that really is cheap and effortless. My point here is that personal users do matter - more each day in fact.

Whilst I know I am not a GIMP zealot I have used the WIN32 off shoot (The GIMP windows version incidentally, doesn't have to be compiled in an end user sense it comes as an installer executable). As an end user however I am relatively motivated by the general ideas and beliefs of the open source commnuity and in that domain the GIMP is the anti-candle.

Then there is the issue of breaching the User License. For all you folks who don't taint your pure selves with the concerns of warez and all that - Adobe (for as long as I can remember) has always produced software that seems to be notoriously easy to crack. So I guess, sadly, that gives users such as myself another option, that no-one ever seems to acknowledge.

Hmm.. I guess no image editor war is ever going to start here (for the time being), right? Let's be honest - it's like comparing a foot massage with a ho down in the holiest of holies. Everyone knows that.

The article mentions the problem with the help system. (I vaguely remember discovering a fix at some point.. can anyone help?) In any case look no further than here for what I consider to be a remarkable effort, all things considered. It really sums up to me why I (but more importantly GIMP developers) go to all the effort for 'so little reward'. The author of the article says in respect of the MacGIMP that he thought he'd have a look. I guess then he thought he'd wipe his MacNIKEs on the hard and thankless labour of others. Have some respect fulla...