Slashdot Mirror
The Most Desired Linux Ports
zenboomerang writes "It looks like Novell is trying to hit the hammer on the top of software developers heads and try and get them to port their applications directly to Linux. With help from the public they will try to pursuade the management of the most popular programs picked to get into the 21st Century and do some Linux testing. It seems to me to be a good idea and all it needs is a little help from the community."
Port 80.
Everyone wants that sweet sweet http.
How about Microsoft Bob first?
From TFA:
Also, I think a nice attention-getter for the survey would be to get it slashdotted. Generally, I give about 75 points for a great article. If someone can get the survey on Slashdot, I will give you 250 points. As you all know, we have some incredible stuff for which you can redeem your points.
Convince Adobe to bring Photoshop to Linux and I know dozens of people who'll switch in an eyeblink.
Hmm, seems that the article redirects to itself when you block cookies, essentially causing the page to reload forever and ever. Can you say "automatic slashdotting"? :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Come on, who doesnt want a cute purple thing talking to you while you recompile your kernel?
And it has to be said: In soviet russia, linux ports you!
*hides*
Menya zovut Shnur
"Of those top 10 applications, two of them are financial management packages. Looks like there is quite a demand for that. It looks like there is a huge interest in the AUTOCAD arena, as well. Something that is very well worth noting is the demand for multimedia applications."
/. knows that there's a pretty large community of gamers that keep that one Windows box around just for gaming.
I imagine this is probably because of the fact that they suggest all of those top ten applications in their dropdown menu (leaving an "other" option at the bottom in case you don't want any of their default applications). Anyone whose ever worked on survey or statistics theory knows this is an obvious bias. That's not to say that's its a bad idea to do this if they have an agenda, I'm just pointing out that the results should definately be taken with a grain of salt here. There may be more relevant programs people would like to see ported to Linux. I imagine lots of people can think of specific games they'd like to see ported. Anyone whose ever reads
Anyways, I say best of luck to Novell. I'd love it if they were able to make some ground with Adobe on porting some of their apps.
Wouldn't hurt to have a client for Webex, either. Never mind what they say, their putative Linux client still seems to require Red Hat 7.x
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Nobody? Come on, you know you miss him...
That said, I don't think you'd ever see iTunes for Linux (and I was amazed it was on the list, I would have never guessed it).
And then there is Visio. That will never be ported either. If Visio is there, why isn't Office? That said, I've never met someone who liked Visio in the two years or so I've been exposed to it. What Visio needs first is a good Windows port. OmniGraffle is much better. How about a Linux port of that?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
iTunes? hah!
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
It actually surprises me that Lotus Notes has never been avail for linux. Since it's heavily Java based it should be easily portable and with IBM backing it in their Pro-Linux state... why hasn't it been? Maybe because it's a hunk of junk.
:)
The only ones on that list that I'd care to see are Visio, Autocad and Photoshop.
But I do agree that there's a serious need for business/money/finance software. GNUCash and a few other's that are out there just don't cut it. I just hate Quickbooks with a passion
It's just Crap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh, come on. There have got to be a ton of other people that want their CS:S fix without having to keep around a Windows box. And don't start with that Cedega crap. I want it a real Linux installer.
It's not on the frontpage, but rather in linux section, so zenboomerang, did you get 250 points?
/.) that now it's much easier to spot non-frontpage linux stories (thanks to CmdrTaco ;)
:)
some luck for linux-interested people (whole
nice followup will be about the results from this slashdotting. Will Autocad get to the top? I really hope so. CAD people in big companies really are tech-saavy, and really need reliable software to work with. Autocad running under windows is a misunderstanding, that currently lasts about 12 years (since they switched from dos, I still have v.12 running on dos, and v.13 running both on dos and windows). Heck, I remember working with some CAD software on on Amstrad/Shneider about 15 years ago, aww memories
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
One of the things I miss on Linux is PF. I like OpenBSD for other reasons, but PF is the only thing I can't do without, so I keep another box around for it.
Once I've got one of those chips with hardware-supported virtualization (AFAIK, OpenBSD doesn't get along with Xen), I'd like to try putting both together on the same box.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I've never used it from a client perspective, but from a file, network, and multiple user perspective it's really quite a terribly designed program. I sincerly hope that Quickbooks is NOT ported to Linux, and someone else designed a different program that's designed with the Internet and multiple users in mind.
Just to give people some perpsective, quickbooks is used by a lot of small businesses. The problem is that these people need to access the books from more than one place. Usually home, and the office. Also, it's quite common for multiple people to want to use the same quickbooks file at the same time. Or, say you want to give access to your quickbooks files to your accountant. Quickbooks was never really designed for the Internet age, and it shows. People solve these problems with ad-hoc solutions like emailing quickbooks files back and forth. Please don't port quickbooks to linux, let this crappy program die the horrible death it deserves.
AccountKiller
I think Duke Nukem Forever would be great on Linux!
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
C'mon ????Lotus Notes....I wish they would unport it for Windows....I'm forced to use it at work and I hate it. Give us Google Earth for Linux. That needs to be on the list. I set up dual boot on my home PC which is normally just Linux, just so I could get on Google Earth. Before anyone tells me to Wine it, I have tried to and it's just not going to work on my preferred distro. I've heard of spyware, malware, abandonware, shareware, freeware, and all that. Lotus Notes should be labelled crapware.
Beer! It's what's for breakfast!
I've heard several times that offices could switch to Linux, and even tolerate OpenOffice, but they simply cannot do without Outlook+Exchange.
Yes, there may be better solutions (such as using separate applications for e-mail and calendaring, possibly web applications) but none are as polished, easy to use and comprehensive in just the areas people like this need.
-- Sig down
That's right, they are all propriatery. The groups who use this software are so bound into it's usage that the very idea of trying to substitude one of these programs for a Free one makes people scared. It won't matter how closely Free software can mimic those programs, as long as they aren't *EXACTLY* the same, they won't touch'em.
Also this article sounds way to much like begging to me.
"please sir, can we have these program ported! Please!". "All our money will belong to you if you do!" etc. Why do we need these programs so badly? Might it be because now there is some value to be found in using Free software?
I'm sorry if I sound a bit bitter about this. I worked at a small firm where everyone was using popular propriatery software, always without any proper licenses. If I talked about it or sugested a substitude (gimp for photoshop) people would just say that it didn't matter and that everyone did it, so why shouldn't they.
If people were actually forced to pay for all the software that they used (that they can't get for free legally) there might be a serious effort put into trying alternatives.
Just let me ask you one question.
How often in the last month have you been asked for a copy of a propriatery program that you know you aren't legally allowed to copy and distribute to others?
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver.
Ximian was a small outfit and Novell bought them out, maybe they're considering a similar move with CodeWeavers?
In any case, for comparison here's a list of top most wanted apps for Crossover to support next.
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
I use OpenOffice and I have yet to find a single Word document that it cant open and read. The formatting may not be pixel accurate to what Word would display but so what, its accurate enough that I can understand what the document is saying.
As for exports, I can save in PDF.
Even where I do need to save as a Word document, I have yet to find an OpenOffice document that, when exported as a Word document, cant be opened, read and used properly by Word.
Someone should make a site hosting a pile of testcase documents in word format that, when loaded into OpenOffice, do not read & render properly, preferably with screenshots of what they look like in Word. Such a thing would enable the OpenOffice team to improve their import filters to render the documents correctly.
Also, someone should post documents (in OpenOffice format/ODF) that, when exported to a Word document with the latest filters, are unusable in Word (along with a screenshot of what they look like in Word to demonstrate that they are unusable). Such documents would enable the OpenOffice team to improve their export filters to produce better output.
Here's how I deal with this. I use OO.o and send them in native (.odf?) format. THen I let the word victims figure it out. When they email back that they can't read my file, I wait 24 hours before sending an rtf. Then I politely suggest that they upgrade to more modern software that can handle this format. ;)
And the reality in my little world is that most people are running a couple years behind on their Word updates anyway and so the filters work fine.
man, I feel like mold.
Isn't going to happen until Microsoft starts being a platform neutral software company again. I have an older pre-Microsoft version and it rocked. Too bad Microsoft killed (oops, integrated) it with Office.
/. patrollers, ask upper management if its worth selling me nothing or selling me a $40-$100 standalone version of Visio for Linux? I'm not a thief and I won't upload my copy.
Dia http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/ as replacement works for me. Windows port available.
Hey Microsoft
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Quickbook's is one of the worst written programs out there.
It's based of IE 5.5, and is made of swiss cheese.
It requires administive privledges (or local standard user) to check a balance.
The database is propritary, and very easy to corrupt.
It's reporting functions are pathetic at best.
The $3000 "Enterprise Edition" won't work off a DFS share.
You need to buy a new payroll file every year, or a yearly version.
Hell, Microsoft is going to include it's clone of QB in Office for Small Business, and they're more open then Intuit.
I think one of the problems with CMYK is that every CMYK output device (printers, imagesetters, plotters, printing presses etc) needs its own translation logic/tables to translate the colors into CMYK that will look like what the artist wants when the CMYK is output to the device. Device makers will give this information to companies like Adobe but would be reluctant to give it to developers of an open source program (especially under a licence that is open-source friendly)
1) Chemdraw
2) SciFinder
3) Endnote ported to work for OpenOffice,ODF under Linux
SciFinder can be tortured into working under wine, but it would be nice if it would work natively. Especially since a lot of the people who use it are physicists/physical chemists who do use *nix.
LaTeX or RevTeX (with BibTeX) are pretty sweet and most journals will accept one or the other, until you need to colaborate with someone on a paper and then a plain text file with backslashes and braces everywhere suddenly becomes extreamly confusing, (try to explain that \begin{equation} \exp(x)=e^x \end{equation} will look just fine once it's been processed to someone who doesn't realize that there are alternatives to wysiwyg) so some way to interoperate with the MS addicts and still conveniently insert references would be nice.
Finally, the FOSS offerings for drawing chemical structures are pretty pathetic compared to ChemDraw. Cactvs and XDrawchem are a nice start, but that's all they are ... a start. For crying out loud, they have an OSX version ... so they're about 75% of the way there already.
So, from my particular niche, that's what I'd like. Another option would be to port a useful free equation editor to MS office, then I might almost be tempted to try windows again.
I need Macromedia's suite, Photoshop (I love GIMP, but it just isn't the same), Illustrator. My husband is a commercial artist and he really needs Quark. Most of the other stuff I use on a regular basis has acceptable open source equivalents.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Last time I checked it worked okey for me, though the Netmeeting client needed an extra audio codec installed... and I remember having video issues at various times when using gatekeepers.
AutoCAD used to be offered as a UNIX program. Like the "Photoshop for UNIX" that Adobe offered, it was distributed as a binary for Sun Solaris, I believe. A quick Google search didn't turn up any definitive information on whether or not it's still being offered (I'm thinking no) but there's one university that still has it available for students to use, and you can read the instructions for using it here. Based on the list of packages installed on their UNIX systems, I'm going to guess they're older SparcStations.
This doesn't do us modern Linux users much good, since it means the software was probably distributed as SPARC binaries only. So unless you know of a good way to emulate/virtualize a SPARC (which shouldn't be impossible, given that it's an allegedly open architecture) system from within x86 Linux, I'd say we're SOL there.
There are some people in South Africa who have AutoCAD running (apparently) to their satisfaction under Debian WINE, according to this page. They mention a "German GNU/Linux clone of AutoCAD which is quite impressive and very cheap" in the article, but sadly don't give a name.
LinuxCAD, which rather hilariously describes itself as "the Best application program for Linux. Period." claims to be an AutoCAD replacement, but just from first glance the site seems questionably maintained (as in, '1995 called, they want their web page back'). The company behind it has also been alleged to be behind some Usenet spam. On that last site there are several "alternatives to LinuxCAD" listed, including VariCAD, which seems like a pretty polished (it ought to be, for $500) product from a company in the Czech Republic.
Anyway, I thought I'd throw those options out there. If anyone has any experience with any of them I'd be interested to hear them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Different strokes, I guess. Lilypond's superiority (to me, at least) over Finale and Sibelius was one of the things that pulled me away from the Dark Side. I could never get braces quite right on Finale and they just work with lilypond.
Have you tried denemo? It's a really nice GUI front end to lilypond, with the added benefit that when the morendo isn't stretching out exactly right you can just edit the markup to make it do exactly what you want.
All's true that is mistrusted
Because it's not true.
A few years back, it was "I'd switch to Linux if (insert game) ran on Linux." Or "I'd switch to Linux if Word ran on Linux." Or "I'd switch to Linux if it was easy to set up stuff that I need on Linux."
Not "Microsoft Word", just "Word", so these are probably people who would be fine with OpenOffice. And yes, there was free StarOffice back then.
All of these have been fixed. Microsoft Word does run on Linux, even if you can't deal with OpenOffice. Quite a lot of decent games run natively on Linux, and if you go nVidia, it's not hard to set up. I mean, alright, you don't have AutoPlay -- which is a GOOD THING, remember that rootkit stuff? But I think people can handle typing "emerge quake4".
Plenty of games now work out-of-the-box on Wine, and more work out-of-the-box on Cedega, from the insanely popular (WoW, Counter-Strike) to the unheard of (NexusTK). Drivers come with distros, usually, or are quite easy to find/install.
More recently, there've been other reasons, other things that aren't compatible, but the most commonly cited is "I don't want to learn a new system, and I'm afraid most of my stuff wouldn't work on it." Which is the same old FUD.
If you are hearing that a lot, make a bet with someone. Get them to switch to Linux. Most of the technical stuff is close enough, what we need now is the marketshare so that the FUD can't hold. Making it "cleaner" (native versions instead of Wine) can come later.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive. I have prayed for this for most of the years I was working in graphic arts.
But if they don't come to the party - that's OK: We'll just keep polishing GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape etc until they start seriously eating into Adobe's monopoly (same way M$ lost the server market). Your move, Adobe!
you had me at #!
FileMaker is a BAD IDEA for the same reason Quickbooks is. Look at the other comments. It does work in Wine, though, and has a Linux server.
DreamWeaver? Hire a web designer. There are web development tools for Linux, and there are web-based development tools for anything with a decent browser, but honestly, if what you're doing requires something as complex as DreamWeaver, it really requires a professional web developer comfortable with Linux and Vim.
I have no idea what InDesign is or what it really does, so I'll give you that one.
Timbuktu -- did you TRY to Google? SSH has been around for years, and it'll do X11 forwarding. There's also VNC, which has plenty of decent Windows clients. And there's rdesktop, for connecting to Windows remote desktops. It would take a lot of trickery to show only part of your screen, but is that a big issue for you? Or anyone? I would hide things on another workspace if I didn't want to show the whole desktop.
Netmeeting -- again, are you serious? Ok, there is GnomeMeeting to connect to actual Netmeeting, but there are so many replacements it's ludicrous. Normal IM has webcam support, and there's a program that does this. And let's not forget Skype.
Outlook -- Thunderbird and Sunbird. Yes, you can make this work easily enough in Sunbird, if you know how to run a webserver. Is it stable yet? I've only had one bug, and that's been fixed already... No crashes...
In short, ask Google before you ask Slashdot. Google won't insult you for not knowing something.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
First, Linux users are used to free (beer) software. There are a few money-makers running on Linux, but for the most part the software doesn't cost anything except maybe the occasional Paypal donation. Secondly, Linux users are used to Free (speech) software. If the software is not licensed under the GPL (or a GPL-compatible license) there will be hell to pay.
Stop right there. You're basically saying that there's no money in the Linux desktop market and there never will be. Which is simply wrong and a harmful way to think.
Open source is a software development tool, not a religion or a marketing strategy.
Are Windows or Mac users really used to buying every last separate piece of software? Do they really do that? Do they never pay for anything and pirate everything (like some corporate drones already say they do)? Aren't these just extremes?
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. People will use free (beer) applications if they're Good Enough (well, duh, who wouldn't) but will pay sensible amounts for their own copy of a piece of quality software, with support and love put into it.
As long as a state of balance is kept -- ie. the free stuff is of decent quality, and the payed-for stuff doesn't try to screw you with spyware or claiming you don't really own your copy -- everything's cool and everybody's happy.
On a personal note, I wish Microsoft wasn't a world-wide monopoly. They omnipresence blurs and distorts everything. They superimpose their double-standards and medium quality software over everything. Imagine a world where platforms like Mac, Linux, Solaris, OS/2, BeOS and whatnot occupied fairly equal market shares. There would be a lot less misguided passion and hate, IMHO, and more quality and consumers getting their work done on the platform of their choice.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
1) - EndNote.
I'm keeping a WindowsXP partition on my lab PC and a copy of Office installed on it only for this purpose. I looked into Pybliographer but it's simply not good enough (pretty unstable, cumbersome bugs) and too much LyX/LaTeX oriented (I'd LOVE to use LaTeX at work, but I can't,alas), I also spent some time looking at the code to improve it: it's good Python, but uhm, I don't like it. I'm seriously considering writing a replacement.
2) - FruityLoops, Reaktor, Traktor etc.
There is no music-generating and mixing software for Linux that AFAIK comes even *close* to proprietary windows solutions. However seems FruityLoops 4 COULD work on the latest versions of Wine. The audio output on my machine is horrible, but I think the problem is my audio setup on the Linux side.
I also can't see why people who write Windows apps can't recompile them for Linux against the Winelibs. This would give 99.999% Linux compatibility (at least on x86) with very minor tweakings to the codebase (AFAIK). Can someone explain me why can't this happen?
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
This may interest you:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8722
LAMP and Web-based solutions are all well and good, but unfortunatly they're not (yet) the rich interactive environment that Access is. For simple apps yes, but for the kind of business application which I need to handle with multiple rules, validation, lookups etc. then you'd be looking at cutting-edge AJAX to replicate to a similar level of user experience, and the amount of effort required compared to creating Access forms simply isn't feasible.
And that's leaving aside reports. Access is very quick and powerful for creating these. It can be done with LAMP, but it's much slower and more kludgy.
There must be hundreds of thousands of small 'database' applications out there written in Access. Virtually everytime I get referred to a new client I find one, either written by a consultant developer such as myself, or more often kludged together by the office clerk who's had some 'Access Training' - in those cases I'm generally getting called in because the business recognises that the app needs to be sorted out and put on a professional footing because it's become business critical. Some can be replaced by a web app, but most need Access itself for the reasons above. On many occassions the user is only using the PC for the app and the standard office wp, spreadsheet and email functions, so could easily migrate to Linux if the app could be recoded in an Access clone.
The real problem is, it's human nature to ignore the Principle of Equivalence, which states that: All means to the same end are equally valid. However, human beings frequently confuse the means with the end, especially when there is one means which is more generally accepted than any other. So people confuse the means, Microsoft Word, with the end, "rich text editing". Or Adobe Photoshop with graphics editing.
From what I can tell, it's an evolutionary/survival thing. Human children are {warning: poor or predictable analogy coming up} born with just a simple bootstrap loader and receive constant, incremental firmware upgrades for the first few years of their lives. We don't "get" abstract concepts at first; we learn to do something by blind, unquestioning imitation and treat it as though it were magic before we understand it fully. And even by the time we reach the stage of abstract thinking, we often stick with whatever we learned by repetition.
It seems that some total n00bs with computers often learn the way children learn, never quite grasping the abstract concepts but content to treat them as inscrutable mysteries.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Nedit is a notepad on steriods. Simple UI, very clean window layout, open source, but with all the toys under the hood: syntax highlighting, rectangular moves, autoindent, macros, the works. (Unfortunately based on Motif/Lesstif, but about the nicest Motif UI I've seen in a long time).
other games too, but a native World of Warcraft client would be sweet.
They can still sell the boxes in stores with cds for texture, sound, all the platform independent stuff, and the all-important account activation code.
These two will really push Linux into the enterprise, and theyre 2 out of 3 reasons why we're not 100% Linux. Lotus belongs to IBM which has been pushing Linux for a while. Its a wonder why they wont compile a Java app for Linux at all. I know the Domino server exists for Linux, just why not the client??
AutoCAD and the likes of Photoshop are also really important. Acrobad reader exists thankfully, but theres a huge userbase for each of AutoCAD and Photoshop, who will be tempted to switch.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
More likely it's the same reason why people say "Sun" and not "Earth's Sun"; that is, when there is no significant possibility of a misunderstanding, qualifiers tend to be dropped. Human language is a compressed communication protocol :D.
I must have just lousy luck then, since the only program I've ever gotten working well under either is Morrowind, which crashes all the time (but it does that on Windows too, so that's not Wine's fault).
And so many of them are so frustratingly close - Arcanum's graphics are just corrupted enough to be unplayable, Poser works perfectly but doesn't display any text, etc.
Oh well, can as well ask it here: does anyone know any way to make Poser 6 display text in labels under Wine ? I've found nothing from Google... This might be some kind of font problem (there's a file called "ASIFONT.FON" in Poser's main dir), but neither Wine nor Cedega show any error messages whatsoever.
And, failing that, does anyone know any Poser replacement that runs on Linux (no, a generic 3D editor isn't a replacement, since they tend to have user interfaces that make edlin look sane) ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Together with InDesign and Illustrator, this would round out a complete Linux publishing solution that any professional could sit down at and get productive.
Well, OK, but look at this from Adobe's perspective:
-- Adobe already owns the lion's share of the "creative professional" market, virtuall all of whom use Mac or Windows.
-- Adobe could decide to spend millions of dollars, and man-months (or more likely, man-years) of time doing Linux ports... which, at best, would get customers currently using Mac or Windows to switch to Linux.
-- This may be great for Linux, but helps Adobe not at all. In fact, they have now blown money and time to do ports which probably haven't affected their marketshare in the slightest (but most certainly would increase their tech support costs).
Bottom line: Adobe's in business to make money, not to promote Linux. I guarantee you that if Linux ports made it likely for them to increase their profit, those ports would be underway tomorrow.
Omigod ... let's hope they never read my post then! I had no idea of the danger I was in!
you had me at #!
Hi Janek, I just got a reply from Novell an hour ago telling me that they have given me the points. It wasn't the reason I posted the article (my first), really just wanting to help push some popular software developers into writing their code for Linux as well as the other two main OS's. Though the points are nice as well :)
Andy aka zenboomerang
Thanks.
You have an excellent point about the demands of tech support.
I have actually done Linux product support for a living: Shrink-wrap Linux applications, along with Windows versions. And the vendor actually did target Redhat specifically... 6.x, 7.0, and 7.2 were supported. Redhat 7.1 was never supported because of an incompatability introduced with libpthreads that was rectified in 7.2. The introducion of Redhat 8 made the largest app nearly impossible to install, and 9.x just blew the whole thing out of the water.
I have several major programs which worked on Redhat 7 but a couple years later couldn't work with current Linux distros: WP Office 2000, Rational Rose 7, VMWare 3.2. Tux Racer is the only independant program I have older than 2 years that still runs.
Why have this lethal environment? Distro architects say that a constant flow of architechtural changes is easier on them than major revisions after 3-5 years. But I am inclined to think this amounts to cutting corners where flesh exists.
I thought I remember reading awhile back AOL was experimenting with a Linux version, but then realized that more and more windows people hate AOL. Anyway if you goto aim.com right now you can download an offical AIM client for Linux.