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Sneak Preview of CorelDraw 9 for Linux
A reader writes "Michael Hall of LinuxPlanet wrote a pretty nifty review of CorelDraw 9 for Linux. He's a mondo GIMP fan, but he's still saying nice things about CorelDraw, kinda sorta."
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Rumors of Wine's slowness are greatly exaggerated. The latest version plays Half-Life and Counterstrike at high frame rates on my TNT2 card with the latest NVIDIA drivers :-)
I used to think the same thing, until I saw them contributing to the Wine project. Now they've also put together a great distro (or so I hear) and are bringing new applications to Linux.
:)
Say what you want about their motivations or business savvy; they're definitely contributing, regardless. Wine has gone a long way, no one has forced them to take any patches, but many of them needed to be done. (the "boring" stuff--it might help you run MS-Word instead of StarCraft
I'm sure Corel will provide support for their products, too. (now that people charge for that...) Heck, they might do that for their distro, I don't know...
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p ress release
they are coming along. Just very slowly.
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1995: Microsoft - "Resistance is futile"
If the GIMP's real competition is Photo-Paint, then the GIMP has already won. Photo-Paint has all the ease of learning and use of Photoshop, with all the features of older versions of Paint Shop Pro. Even in the Windows World, Photo-Paint is almost always acquired with CorelDRAW. It's just not worth getting separately. Someone doing only web graphics, or editing and printing their digital photos, can do quite well with Paint Shop Pro or Ulead's PhotoImpact, and anyone doing serious pre-press work will still want Photoshop.
CorelDraw is a vector drawing program.
The Gimp is a bitmap drawing program.
The Gimp cannot edit vector graphics; CorelDraw cannot edit bitmap graphics. The two products simply do not compete.
The Gimp's real competition is Corel's Photo-Paint, which, interestingly enough, will be available for free once released, or at least so says the article. Evidently Corel feels that the Gimp is good enough a free competitor to make selling Photo-Paint alone useless! However, while CorelDraw is definitely the king of vector drawing programs and one of the missing key apps still holding back Linux (no, xfig really does not cut it!), Photo-Paint is far less popular than Adobe's PhotoShop. PhotoShop is one of the few reasons I still boot into WinNT, and I don't see this changing unless Adobe ports a recent version or Gimp 2.0 makes good on its claims.
Cheers,
-j.
See their FAQ for details.
"All shrink-wrapped Corel products come with an unconditional money-back guarantee effective for 30 days from the date of purchase..."
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A quick check at CompUSA Onlineshows that full suite price to be $1980.95 and upgrade price is $931.85.
Doing my own search, I find $225 for the stripped down version, and $490 for the full version of Corel Draw alone.
High, but not nearly as high as the figure you quoted.
This is typical of office software, and quite reasonable when compared to the cost of the machine it's going to be used on or of the employee who's going to be using it.
There are almost certianly student versions available for a much lower price, too (around here, student versions are half off or better).
Also, your hyperlink seems to have been munged. Further inspection reveals that they're using some kind of bizzare scratch keys to encode query data, making linking to specific results unreliable.
I have to give this pretty good marks, all in all.
Not much to add to the review, I've had good results with it, though. I like some of the features in photopaint, even though I'm still a big Gimp fan, I think photopaint is a good complement to it. Draw is good, also. I don't do a great deal with vector illustrations, though, so I didn't wring it out like it did photopaint.
As for running under wine, I've seen no significant performance issues. Some of the screen updates, etc., could be quicker, but I've found nothing that affects the usability of it.
For comparison purposes, I'm running it on a 400M celeron with 256M ram, and Mandrake 7.1
Wine does seem to be a bit finicky about XFree 4.0 though, but I haven't pursued this enough to find out what's really the issue.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.