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Novell Suggests Linux Program Replacements
An anonymous reader writes "As a result of over 14,000 votes since the beginning of January, Adobe Photoshop, Autocad, Dreamweaver, iTunes, and Macromedia Flash are currently the top 5 'most wanted' Windows/MacOS-only applications in Novell's online survey. From comments made by the survey participants, Novell has also listed suggested substitutes for each of the five. What do readers think of these suggestions?"
Because then we linux fans can also churn out web pages that are an eyesore, full of bloat, proprietary ...
Yeah ,,, whatever.
this is so going to be GIMP-vs-Photoshop all over again, with doses of Flash-sucks, Vi-rules, and the usual dose of propietary-app-is-THE-standard and even worse, those OSS-app-must-behave-like-commercial-app trolls, which are the same OSS-doesn't-innovate trolls... for heaven's sake, can't we just have a WEEK without these flamewars? I think it was better when we had a new story every week hailing our new Google overlords...
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Novell did the original survey. Desktoplinux.com (a ZD thing, apparently) is suggesting the alternatives.
Photoshop: No substitute is available. Even if we filter out all the whiny bullshit that some of the graphic artist weenies expect (I want all 4000 commercial photoshop plugins too!), we're still left with things that really matter that Gimp can't do. CYMK is the killer feature. And it's apparently nothing that can be hacked in so easily. There are still some usability issues that need to be addressed (though again, some of the weenies will never be happy unless it matched pixel for pixel). There are undoubtedly major issues that a non-photoshop user like myself aren't even aware of. For now we have Gimp, but it is no substitute.
Autocad: No substitute is available. Again, it's a case of all the commercial plugins... if they really make photoshop worthwhile, well, then they basically *ARE* autocad. They make all the difference. This is going to be a tough act to follow, and worse, there are 100 graphic artist wannabees in open source for every engineer wannabe. I'm not familiar with any of those suggested by the article, but I expect they are pretty much to Autocad what Gimp is to photoshop. No real substitutes available.
Dreamweaver: Nvu. It's pretty damn close. It could be Dreamweaver with not an incredible amount of work. But I hope that we don't do that. Mozilla/Firefox aren't just IE, they're better than it is. That's what Nvu should be, or some branch off of it (know it's Mozilla Composer at its core, but is it OSS or proprietary? I never really checked it out). The best part is, that it shares some heritage with Firefox and Thunderbird, and that means in theory, writing plugins for it should be possible. I think that could be really useful in an application like that.
iTunes: Didn't we just see an article about Songbird here recently? The screenshots look pretty slick. Again, based off of mozilla code, I think this could end up being a replacement, even if it isn't yet. Though nothing would ever satisfy the mac weenies, I suspect.
Flash: Inkscape. It's not there yet, animation isn't ready. They're actually trying to design the interface correctly, rather than just imitate all the other animation software we've seen over the years. Also, they do seem to sort of be waiting for software that can view it (for most purposes, this means browsers that support SVG/SMIL). This will probably be every bit as powerful as Flash... there will be those who disagree of course, but who wouldn't have laughed if you'd suggested that mozilla would be the superior of IE in the beginning?