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WordPerfect Office 2000 - Now Shipping
Corel has announced that Corel WordPerfectOffice 2000 for Linux is now shipping. You can find all the details about what each version includes at the URL above. Here is a link with a review of Wordperfect 2000 for Linux. Oh, they also include in the package this little cute bean-filled penguin. I read the review and I'm not sure if this shipping date isn't a bit too early though.
Actually Corel Draw is a vector based drawing package, and Photoshop is for manipulating bitmap images. Not really comparable at all, as they are for totally different purposes.
Gimp is probably the closest competitor to Photoshop on Linux. Gimp is pretty good, and fairly comparable overall to Photoshop, and getting better all the time. From what I've read the two areas that Photoshop still has over Gimp are mainly in printing support and support for color seperations. If you aren't doing high end work, especially if you are doing mainly work for web images, Gimp is probably already good enough for what you need to do.
I don't know what usability you are talking about, but I haven't seen anything useful that Word 97 at least can do that WordPerfect 8 can't. And some of the things that I do just plain work a lot better in WordPerfect 8. Table editing, for example, has always driven me batty in MS-Word, WordPerfect isn't totally perfect there either, but better than MS-Word. Multicolumn layouts, maddening in MS-Word (no matter how I try to drag them around, they never space out the way I want), also better in WordPerfect. Multilevel bulleted lists, absoluetely horrific in MS-Word, works the way I would expect things to work in WordPerfect. I actually often do mulicolumn layouts with multilevel bulleted lists. I'd go insane if I had to do that with MS-Word, but I can get WordPerfect to do what I want without a lot of problem.
For my money, even if I had to use Windows at home, I'd pick WordPerfect over MS-Word, and I personally hated WordPerfect prior to WordPerfect 6. I've used both 6 and 8 and been quite happy with them.
There is no significant performance penalty for using the PE (.EXE) binary loader vs using winelib - the *only* difference is that WINE is doing the work of loading the binaries instead of ld.so.
.so libraries directly within our apps, rather than indirectly via WINE.
In fact, the binary loader can be *faster* than using g++ compiled native ELF code, for a couple of reasons:
1) code produced by g++ isn't generally quite as optimized as code generated by MSVC. Things are evening up with the new intel backend on gcc, but it hasn't been in an official release of gcc yet as far as I know.
2) Inter-DLL calls in PE binaries are generally just direct branches. The only work the loader has to perform most of the time is mmaping the binary into memory. In ELF, by comparison, all the symbols have to be looked up by name, and calls are made through indirection tables.
These are both really minor speed impediments, but they server to demonstrate the sillyness of declaring something 'native' or not based on what binary format it uses.
That said, we do plan on moving to g++ compiled binaries as soon as possible, since it will give us somewhat more flexibility for using
-Gav
After playing with the latest builds of WINE over the weekend, I'm not surprised Corel was able to ship so quickly. Now, with an install of WINE with access to a real Windows system directory and a Truetype font server, I not only got Excel 97 working pretty decently(!), but I also got IE 5 to load a few pages. Properly. WIth DHTML working.
These are interesting times. Native apps are always best, but it's clear x86 Linux is heading to a place where you'll soon also be able to run most Windows software cleanly. Not a Terrible Thing for desktop penetration.
I suspect Corel WP Office 2000 doesn't suck, or at least doesn't suck any more than StarOffice 5.1a does. Corel can't market its way out of a paper bag, though. At least they pushed the WINE project ahead nicely.
The first version of WPO at least is a specially modified Windows .EXE that runs on a modified WINE (the WINE mods eliminate windoze drive letters and make the widgets look like KDE/Qt). They had planned to make it a WineLib application, but g++ has some problems with large C++ apps (you've heard them before - no precompiled headers, no incremental linking) that made going the .EXE+WINE route much more painless.
(if there's other reasons that Gav or Zygo or any other Corel/Macadamian dudes want to correct me on, feel free.)