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Local Newspapers Use F/OSS For a Day
An anonymous reader writes "The Journal Register Company owns 18 small newspapers, and in honor of the July 4th holiday and Ben Franklin, the company's newsrooms produced their daily papers using only free software. The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.' I applaud the company for undertaking such a feat, but I hope their readership's impression of free software won't be negatively affected by the newspaper's one-day foray into F/OSS."
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.
Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day... of course they're way less efficient.
Certainly some software might lacks polish, but the conclusion that if they didn't adapt in ONE day the software isn't as efficient.. that's really quite flawed uh.
I bet if they switched from their Windows software to a Mac OS software, they'd experience similar results. It's inevitable that when you jump from one style to another style, you'll experience some slowdown in the work.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
So, lets throw some fairly complex software at some people for a day and see how they do. Surprise! They prefer the stuff they've been using *since they know how to use it*. Just throwing a piece of software at someone doesn't mean they know how to use it. Fuck, if they managed to get that newspaper out at all, then that means the free software was so efficient and easy to use, a bunch of people who've never used it before could get the job done with it.
It seems the whole point of these stupid exercises is just for retards to justify how much they've spent on expensive proprietary crap.
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
July the 4th
Day of Gimp Fractal Eye Candy
If the reporters wrote up the specific problems they were finding (such as what was slow, what was particularly difficult, etc) and submitted them to the developers, the developers would have a potentially very rich mine of information to work from. Sure, some of the issues will be ones of "X doesn't work the way Microsoft does it" - annoyances that slow adoption rates but not really bugs per-se. But there will likely be other comments along the lines of "in reporting, it would be very useful to do Y", or "as an editor, back in the cut-and-paste days I could do Z but this is so hard to do in software" - things neither FLOSS nor commercial WP/DTP does well, that FLOSS could potentially overtake on.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Damn that Googled Docs! It's so darn slow.
FTFA:
...and the reporters have filed their stories in Googled Docs instead of Microsoft Word.
I guess they meant they used free-as-in-beer software for that edition -- or whatever Googled Docs are. (Perhaps you get them when you type TheGoogle into a Word document?)
Since when is Google Docs considered free and/or open source software? I thought most of the free software movement agreed that cloud-based solutions were a big threat to software freedom. RMS must be rolling in his—er, make that Ben Franklin....
While the summary states that they used free and open source software, the article only states that they used free software. Their writers used Google Docs, which is free but not open source, instead of Microsoft Word.
The reporters were quick to note that 'the proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relatively fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper. The free substitutes, not so much.'
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I believe we're in another "free" vs. "Free" situation here. The summary implies that it was an experiment to transition to F/OSS software. But the word "open source" never appears in the article.
In the associated video, they call it a "Ben Franklin" experiment and make reference to the "A penny saved..." quote. In the article the only software projects they list are Scribus, which is indeed open source, and Google Docs, which is gratis but not open source. (I have no doubt Google uses plenty of open source to run Google Docs, but it is not an open-source product from the user perspective.)
The article doesn't go into enough detail to really say much else. No doubt they ended up using lots of open source to satisfy their "free" (gratis) requirement, but I suspect they used plenty of freeware, and ad-supported stuff as well. Without much more information I don't think we can say much (positive or negative) about how well open source tools can replace proprietary tools in publishing.
I got to say,the last thing i think about is what software a news paper company uses to print out the papers. And i would guess 99% of there customers wouldn't care as well unless it makes the news paper bill cheaper.
Jack of all trades,master of none
When we moved at our office from one ERP system (novell based) to another (SCO unix based ha!) we too cursed and yelled at it first. After using the program for a year we got the hang of it. Some years ago the system was moved to (Suse) Linux (at my advisal) and now we would not know what to do without it.
When I decided to go from the Atari ST to PC in 1994 I had the choice of Windows, OS2 and something called Linux.. I switched to Linux and have not regretted it. Now at the office we run some Windows only stuff on Windows Xp in Virtualbox instead of native, almost all computers are converted to Linux. No one complains about lack of features. Open office does the job nicely, Firefox is standard issue and Thunderbird is our mailclient of choice.
You can not expect people to switch systems in a day without hiccups but people will adapt.
They proved a newspaper can successfully be made using only F/OSS. One day? Imagine one year with a programmer or two tweaking the software to work just how they want it. It could blow away the existing stuff and enable a resurgence in amateur newspapers.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The readership are not fools. They know about one-day experiments and transition costs. They're more likely to be negatively affected by the touchiness of the F/OSS community, which so often treats even implicit criticism as a heresy against its religion.
I set up the computers and provide technical support for a small publishing company that prints two weekly classified ad papers (place your classified ads for free, the paper is sold at gas stations and convenience stores); about 15,000 physical papers are printed weekly. Plus there is an online subscription available for people to purchase
The software is a combination of stuff that I wrote myself (the ad database, the program to create the plates for the press, etc) and Scribus, Gimp, and OpenOffice. LTSP is used to support thin client terminals for the staff that enter the ads into the database. Apache and sendmail for their web/email server.
The whole operation runs on Centos 5.
No worries about Windows viruses and everyting runs on automatic pilot as far as I'm concerned, most of the time.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
These guys have been using their proprietary software for decades, they're used to every single button.
Decades? Quark Xpress, one of the more popular packages, fell out of favor after just over a decade and changed considerably with each release. Adobe CS (along with Quark's lethargy in going to Mac OS X, insane software license activation, and always-buggy releases) drove Quark virtually out of business; they've barely survived. CS's UI was completely different, but people still loved using it.
And you do realize that Adobe CS is updated almost yearly, right? The interface is *mostly* the same, but things do change- a lot of new technology is introduced.
Then they switch over to radicaly different software interface (hi Gimp!) for a single day
Wrong, actually. You think a bunch of professionals in a production environment did it with no preparation whatsoever? Wrong. If you read the original article, they did it first for ONE, WEEKLY publication. Then did it for ONE *daily*. Then they did it for all the papers at once.
Sorry, but I've used inDesign to public a monthly 30+ page newsletter, and tried to use Scribus because the organization couldn't really afford CS. There's no comparison whatsoever. Why? Well, it probably has something to do with Adobe spending quite a bit of effort working with their users and doing everything possible to make the software do what the users want.
Like it or not, the open-source community has proven to be relatively horrible at listening to its user base; half the time, you're told "if you don't like it, fix it yourself." Can you imagine getting that kind of response at a restaurant when your steak is undercooked? At your mechanic's when he says "that rattle, it's not harming anything"? You may like to tinker. Much of the world just wants something intuitive and that WORKS.
Please help metamoderate.
So, staff at The Saratogian have used Windows software for years and years and years. They moved to Linux for a day and found that things were different, and "different" was hard to learn. Why am I not surprised?
Here's what they said in TFA:
That sure sounds hard. Tackett had to spend days to reproduce templates and layouts that have been built up over years. Yes, doing that kind of work would be hard for anyone. I give this guy huge credit for accomplishing it. But I also give kudos out to Scribus for being able to support it.
You know, moving from one environment that you know really well to one that you don't - it's always hard. We Linux users have trouble, too, moving from Linux to Windows. Don't believe me? I did it for my work, and I'm constantly finding things in Windows that "just don't work right" or "work stupidly".
Linux is just easier for me. But I've been using Linux at home since 1993, and running Linux at work since 2002. Until 2009, that is, when I was "asked" to move to Windows for work.
This whole "move to Linux in a day" thing is a neat "publicity stunt within the journalism industry" (their words) but migrating in that short a time is very very hard to do. If you're going to move an organization to Linux, there are ways to do it so you won't stress your users too much.
Considering how much needs to be done in such a short amount of time, newspapers tend to use massive collections of templates and integrated scripts if it will save even a few minutes during a production night. Even if the new templates and scripts were prepared in advance (bug-free and fully-featured, I'm sure), those doing layout would be put at an incredible disadvantage, even if they knew how to use the new programs at the same technical proficiency as their current ones (which I'm guessing they didn't).
A copy editor (who spends most of his job laying out a paper, not finding typos, despite his title) at the Montreal Gazette, a daily in a large city, describes transitioning from QuarkXPress to InDesign over a month or so, in stages, with certain staff and sections learning how to use the new system each week. Anyone who thinks trying new specialized software for one day will result in anything other than total chaos is kidding themselves. ("Hey, we switched from Drupal to Joomla for one day and it was much less efficient and took a lot more time.")
Also, the headline and summary are not completely correct: the paper used free (as in beer) software, some of which was libre and open source, some of which was not (Google Docs, likely the video site).
It could blow away the existing stuff and enable a resurgence in amateur newspapers.
They're called, blogs.
There is a version of the GPL which specifically addresses this. It's a loophole in the spirit of the GPL, though not the letter, just like Tivoization.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The article mentions Scribus and Google Docs by name but dances around the GIMP, saying only that they used "free software instead of Photoshop." The GIMP's ridiculous name has cost it some valuable media exposure. How can the GIMP expect to be taken seriously by professionals when they don't even feel comfortable using the name?
To me, this is a good example of how free software development being divorced from dependence upon market success is sometimes a bad thing. A proprietary program with a name so bad that professionals avoid using it in print would rapidly be renamed. In fact, the name would probably be developed by a marketing team and focus group tested first to avoid the problem in the first place. But in the free software world the developers are free to stubbornly hold on to a frankly terrible name because there's a much weaker market success feedback loop.
But I find horrifying problems every time I try.
Make an image with two layers. Set one to 50% transparency and put it top. Now try to move one on top of the other and resize it to line up a few points in the images. I for example was trying to line up the wheels in two car silhouettes.
In the GIMP, the layer you made 50% transparent turns opaque while you try to resize it, so you can't see how to line up the layers. What a mess.
I went home later and did it in Photoshop CS3 (that own, but only at home) and it worked fine, remained transparent during resize.
I know it's free and all, but if you make your living doing image editing, the GIMP is absolutely no substitute for Photoshop. You'll easily waste more money in labor than you saved not by buying Photoshop.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Exactly the two things that come to mind with I think of F/OSS...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
The name The GIMP is ridiculous. It should be called Ogg GIMP. That'll fix it right up.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
GIMP has only 8 bit channels. You have to go to Cinepaint for 16.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Odds are they will be met the same way my father was met by the GIMP developers, i.e told to fuck off and do the changes himself,
As well they should.
That is the source of open source software. Open source software is developed by people who use it for themselves; they do not develop it for other people. (Well, a few do, if they can make $ at it). If you happen to be in the same business, then you luck out and have a product that you can use.
Do newspaper companies develop software for their use? Sure! See djangoproject.org. I use that software to make software for my local pool. I do not expect the django developers to do anything special to please my needs and wants. Likewise, if I were to release my pool software, anyone who uses it gets it as is. If they want something different, I do not have time to change it. But they have the ability to change it themselves, or hire someone who knows how to change it.
Why did I develop my pool software out of django rather than buying a commercial product? Because I could not find a commercial that did everything I wanted it to. Now I have one.
The bottom line: If you want a product to do specifically what you want you have to do it yourself. (Or hire someone to do it for you.)
It bears frequent repeating that the organized effort to create FLOSS for ethical reasons preceded the organized effort to create FLOSS for pragmatic reasons, i.e., the Free Software Foundation preceded the Open Source Initiative. It required a lot of effort by people who, because of an ethical commitment, were willing to put up with software that wasn't as good as proprietary software, before you had a foundation of software that, as it turned out, worked better than proprietary software.
If there were newspapers that were ethically committed to FLOSS, and were therefore willing to commit to its use, and to commit to supporting FLOSS development by hiring programmers to improve the available software, then before long, you'd have FLOSS packages for newspaper publishing that were superior to the available proprietary packages.
Awesome! I would compare, but I can't ever find the layer resize button in Photoshop. I really do hate it's layout. Whenever I do use it I have to ask where everything is D:. Yes. I am 100% serious.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
...sent to me where I do my voodoo and make 4 color post script files and PDFs and generate plates for the presses.
I have this image of a chicken coop in the cube next to you, a zombie that gets you a chicken whereupon, you slaughter it while inciting incantations, writing your scripts to create the PDFs and saying in a deep sonorous voice. You after work? -> "AH HA HA HA."
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Yes, "PC" has come to be sloppy shorthand ... as a counter to the dapper "Mac". Just hours ago, someone ranted about use of "arduino" without suggesting a solution. And while we are at it, let's solve the problems with the terms "server", "memory", "disk" and "battery". Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
This made me wonder what it would be like now if Paul Revere and or William Dawes had said, after a short ride, 'this is hard and hurts my butt. My throat hurts from yelling so much so thanks but no thanks. I'm done with this freedom stuff.".
Or how about if the citizens decided it would be easier to just stay home instead of risking life and limb, and many giving up their lives, instead of fighting the British army.
Life can be difficult but you almost never get anywhere without change or some effort.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but it takes me quite a bit of time just to find the right software package. I have to look at what's available, what each is intended to do, then dry run the candidates.
I wonder if that was done in this instance, before using the package(s) for a single day, and deciding they lacked merit.
Look at many places where familiarity with such nuances of EN is practically nonexistant. GIMP is still barely used.
One that hath name thou can not otter
At least they gave it a try. It can be good to shake things up once in a while. Perhaps some of the maintainers will take note of some of the subtleties.
Without the disadvantage of expecting it to work like Photoshop I would immediately and naturally just drag over a few guides to help me with the resizing...
I'm not even a regular user of Gimp.. but I'm certainly glad that I've invested the time in familiarizing myself with it over other programs as I have access to it from anywhere! If I lock my expectations into Photoshop I'll often find myself frustrated often when it's not available... hmmm..
You know why it lacks polish? Because developers work on FOSS projects mainly as a means to prove their skills, and nobody who cares about open source contributions gives a crap about UI. There's also a few devs who do it for fun, and UI development is probably the least fun part of development.
-
DON'T whine - talk to those who can change it!
Then Gimp will overtake Photoshop to the good of us all ( with the exception of the US trade deficit )!
Will save us all.
Truly it will
"The proprietary software is designed to be efficient, reliable and relative fast for the task of producing a daily newspaper."
This is not true. Proprietary software is designed, first and foremost, to make the author money.
If it happens that the best way to make money is to make what the customer wants, then that is what they get. But the best way to make money isn't to make the product the customer wants, the best way to make money is how proprietary vendors make money now: by using IP laws to keep competitors away, and create arbitrary limits in the products, to force users to buy the same product again at some point in the future.
Software does not wear out like physical goods, yet proprietary software is sold like physical goods. Technically the buyer is only licensing the product, but unless you are an IP nerd you probably won't realise this. Proprietary vendors take advantage of this misunderstanding.
Proprietary software products have to be limited to get future sales. Vendors do this by purposely limiting compatibility (knowing that most users will never know), EULAs, and hiding behind limited support statements. Things like a product will only be supported until a certain date, and then, even if it opens your computer up to attack, the vendor will not fix the problems. And no, you don't get access to the source code so you can fix it yourself, if you want. Remember, you don't own the product you "bought".
FOSS does put the user first, but it is usually designed to be the most powerful implementation of something possible. This means that the user needs understanding of what they are trying to do, and how the computer will do that. If users have used proprietary software all their life then they probably don't have genuine understanding, but only knowledge of how to use a proprietary product. Proprietary software must not actually empower the user, but only make the user think that the software is empowering them. If the user was empowered, he would be able to easily switch to an alternative product, which is bad for the business of the proprietary software maker.
This is why proprietary software, more and more, is trying to hand hold the user. Get the user dependant, cut support, sell them the same product again.
I got sick of this pattern, even though I was pirating software for years. I haven't legally had a copy of Windows since 95a, yet gave up on the platform with XP. Free software has shortcomings, but I feel the ones that proprietary software have are ultimately much worse.
And if you are still doubting, look at the mad foaming that is happening with web applications or web 2.0. That is really proprietary software 2.0, yet with the user having even less control over the application and their data. Proprietary software 1.0 made the world's richest man, so the prospect of lock in with proprietary software 2.0 is much worse. Avoid it all costs, and don't fall for the hype.
Roughly place guidelines where you want to align the image, grab what you want to drag, and align it using the guides, which are always on top. Simple, and as irrational, as pi. Just a matter of learning the GIMP.
PS, I just tried your experiment as you specified and IWFM.
Let me see, here's the list of stuf gimp is still missing: Native CMYK work and output - crucial for print ability to add spot channels (again, for print - used for special dyes and lamination) native 16 bit per channel support - crucial fro digital imaging and some esoteric tasks Clipping layers - use one layer to mask another vector masks on raster layers Layer groups - introduced in latest beta Layer effects - shadow, glow, storke - that change in real time according to layer data vector layers (not paths - layers with vector data filled with color/pattern/gradient) adjustment layers - layers that do non-destructive editing smart objects - add external files as layers, scale them while keeping the original data single, do-it-all transform tool strong text tools (being addressed currently in gimp) automatic layer boundary management that's just off the top of my head, and I'm not even talking about interface, just functionality! I know both gimp and photoshop inside and out, know where every command is on both - Photoshop is so much ahead of Gimp it's absurd to even discuss both in the same article. Comparing Gimp and PS on simple tasks such as overlaying a couple of images is like taking a Lamborghini Gallardo out to the local corner store and back at 25mph and then claiming it performs just as well as your used Toyota Yaris.
Why aren't newspaper come together and build or enhance an open source software, just for the need of the newspaper industry? Like Google is doing with Android, car manufactures doing with Linux, supercomputer engineers doing with Linux, etc.
The license should be GPL so nobody can just take the work and get an advantage over the other. But if then every newspaper pay the developers the costs should be just a small fraction to the costs they need to pay now.
It's like with Linux, where a lot of companies are paying the developers, but the cost per company remains very small, comparing to paying for licenses or build an own operation system.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
All of the F/OSS types are going to fixate on their using it for one day to reduce the impact of their criticism.
Yes, there is a requisite amount of time to learn any process, but there's also sometimes where you can just tell a thing won't work well for you. Not all criticism is based on a lack of familiarity. Not to mention the times where it is important to appear familiar.
The there is a reasonable implication that free alternatives are better, all things being equal - which includes, interestingly, the amount of time spent using/learning it.
I noticed GIMP guys rely on 2 individuals trying their best to bring GIMP binaries to nr. 1 design OS on planet.
Result? GIMP latest version with that feature built in is OS X 10.6.4 only while Photoshop which has considerably larger code and dealing with a lot more issues manages to keep OS X 10.4/10.5 compatibility.
Sad thing is, they didn't even notice most of "home" scanners are capable of 48bit or at least 36 bit colour and they kept claiming that is a professional need for ages. No it is not a pro only need, even home users would benefit from it.
Now, for me, capability finally introduced with PPC support and OS X 10.5 support dropped. Open source guys really think everyone runs out and buys new operating systems the day they were shipped right? That is something to learn first: Professional users always tend to use "1 earlier" Major version of operating systems, not the latest. If they somehow managed to break OS X 10.5 compatibility (lets forget PPC CPU), it means most of professionals won't even be able to try it to begin with.
Just because I solicit suggests does not mean that I have to implement them. The fact remains that people develop the open source software primarily because they want something that they can use themselves.
And quite frankly, I doubt anyone on the Gimp development team actually wrote, "Fuck off."
As I figured my $50 scanner can indeed do 48bit colour or 16bit gray scanning, I went to official (note:official) channel of GIMP to ask if GIMP finally has the capability, some idiot replied "no it hasn't because you didn't code it" and I found myself at Adobe online shop to buy Photoshop Elements with that anger.
I was just lucky that Adobe didn't offer online sales to my country.
Not that I am some colour elitist or something, I was trying to master and basic colour fix some real old photos to DVD and wanted the best I could handle. Now just imagine what kind of questions actual photo professionals would ask and what kind of answers they would get before getting kickbanned by those idiots.
I work in the newspaper industry - first as a graphic designer/web dev, and now as systems manager. I grew up on OSS, and learned the Adobe suite later on.
I try to regularly check up on how OSS is doing regarding my industry, but sadly, it IS lacking. We require so much in the industry, even beyond the obvious stuff (excellent type support, CMYK support, etc). For instance, our RIPs (raster image processors, taking the digital art and burning it to film) require specifically prepared PDFs. We print to postscript files and run them using a specialized preset in Adobe's Distiller to make our PDFs.
As well, we also frequently have to work with artwork provided by clients using a variety of software; not just Adobe, but Publisher generated, and more. Also, we use a software/database combo that allows us to integrate storage of photos, articles, and page layouts, with a slew of features that streamline our work to an extreme (which uses MySQL, though).
There ARE some great open-source programs out there; I love RAW Studio for processing raw photo files. Gimp works fine for web graphics, but I hesitate to use it for print processing just because Photoshop gives us such a great level of quality control and color processing in the CMYK environment.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
TFA is light on details. As someone who has done semi-professional newsprint production with FOSS, I'd be interested in how they found its color support (CMYK separation, color profiling, etc.). Newsprint presses are very picky about these things, and most FOSS software has very limited support. My version of the GIMP, for instance, doesn't even seem to know what a color profile is, though I seem to recall hearing that this has been added in a more recent version. Myself, I use Krita to CMYK-ify RGB photos and apply color profiles to them.
Also, I assume they used Scribus for page layout. One problem we had with that, and the single most important reason we ended up ditching it in favor of Indesign, was that it mounts PDFs (ads, for instance) as bitmaps (thereby rasterizing and color-separating them, which lowers the print quality of, for example, black text).
I still use Krita, OpenOffice, and a whole bunch of other FOSS software, mostly under Linux. But the page layout stuff I now do in Indesign, in a virtual machine running Windows. All this works well, but I'd prefer not to have to mess with the virtual machine part. Not to mention all the stupid issues that always seem to arise with Indesign license keys.
"Until 2009, that is, when I was "asked" to move to Windows for work."
It's way past time then to find a new job. Users have a hard time with Windows, too. It's just that once they mentally also become Windows Users, they just get used to not being able to work efficiently or productively. I've seen it happen many times. Formerly talented people get forced to run Windows along side their Work machine, then more and more tasks are loaded by MBAs onto software that is brought in intentionally as Windows only. The M$ UI is kind of hypnotic and soporific, so it is kind of tranquilizing even if nothing proper gets done.
Out of curiosity what kind of threats, veiled or open, did they make?
Of course they're not PS filters. Then again, you can't use Inkscape filters or Script-fu filters on Illustrator either. And this is worse because those filters are open source, so it's entirely possible for Adobe to use them.
I use both Linux and Windows since the 90's, and in fact I'm writing this in Mozilla on a SuSE 11.2 machine. I'm anything but new to most of the common tasks in Linux. Yet I found myself increasingly dual-booting to Windows even in my Linux fanboy years, and by now I only use Linux for web browsing and work stuff.
For a start, probably not a fault of Linux per se, but Novel sure did a great job of dispelling the myth of OSS being stable and bug-free. I used to be a fan of SuSE, well, mostly because that was the first distro I used for my "OMG, I'm going Linux and thumbing my nose at MS" years. (Yeah, I was younger and dumber.) And old loves die hard, as they say. But 11.2 is a fucking mess. Half the time it can't even shut down properly and ends up just logging me out instead. (I can only assume it has some kind of race condition, the way it's unpredictable.) Once in a dozen logins, it seems to get a brainfart and get a screwed up colour scheme instead of what I selected. The toolbars seem to crash and restart every time I exit Opera. Evolution regularly locks up when I try to open an attachment. (They sure copied that feel of MS products, huh?)
Granted, that's with Gnome. I wouldn't know if it works better with KDE.
It also doesn't help that even some common tasks seem to be crippled. E.g., they removed every single codec, so basically you can't even play some music on the headphones while you work. Granted, they can be downloaded separately... if you're the kind of user who understands that kind of thing, and if you don't happen to be separated by a proxy from the Internet. (Another thing they seem to have broken, although it worked in previous versions.)
It's the kind of distro that'll put a normal user off Linux for good, briefly. I wonder if they're at least getting paid by MS for that.
Then there's the ever present library hell. E.g., you can't just download and install Winamp like on Windows. Downloading and trying to compile, say, XMMS off Freshmeat quickly runs into the fact that the libraries aren't the versions it expects, and the ones it expects don't seem to compile on an x64 system without some editing. Sorry, but that's one aspect that Windows got a lot better.
It also doesn't help that the defaults at least in SuSE are to exclude everything that isn't strictly needed for the minimal set of apps it wants to install. If you're Joe Clueless and didn't know to go and check more checboxes, you're in for some swearing very very soon.
Then there are the interface issues. Everyone seems to just love writing their own widgets, while MS thankfully seems to do that only in IE, and working like everyone else's so the user can focus on the actual problem instead of the interface seems to be anathema.
E.g., to pick an example other than GIMP for a change, I recently tried my hand at Blender. I was trying to make some weapons for Dragon Age. The whole GUI seems to make a point of not working like Windows, Gnome _or_ KDE, regardless of what system you run it on. The menus, the load dialogs, everything works differently and everything becomes something to struggle with instead of just using your existing skills. (And again you run into library hell if you have an older system.)
And let me qualify that: the whole idea of a common user architecture is that it's not just "I'm used to program X instead of program Y," but that you can learn program X and then carry at least some of those skills over to program Y too. We're talking at least stuff like the menus working the same, the right click doing the same general thing, and stuff like that.
Then come the various little annoyances/surprises like that if you import a .obj which has UV coordinates already, you still have to tell it to UV-unwrap. Or for that matter that following the tutorials and assigning a material only works for when you render, but otherwise the texture is held and set in a totally different place, and basically if you want any chance of WYSIWYG you have to set it in both places.
Not as much a Linux problem per se, but a case of now understanding why some people still buy 3D Studio Max or at least Milkshape instead of the amazingly free OSS alternative.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When I was an unexperienced driver at 18 years-old, and had never owned a car, I bought one with the first manual transmission I'd ever touched. The first day was nearly a disaster, stalling repeatedly, lurching and shaking about, and requiring multiple attempts get moving from stops on hills. Simply driving was inefficient and slow (despite the car being a pretty nice old sports car), and required all of my attention. But I got used to it -- so much so that the next four cars I bought also had manual transmissions, and one was a newer, nicer version of that same car. Like the free and open source software mentioned here, manual transmissions take a bit of practice, but they are cheaper and can be at least as efficient (more mpg than older automatics, less maintenance), and being more in control is nice. A one-day test is a nice start, but that is nothing to make a decision on.
A car analogy! Thank God! Suddenly it all makes sense to me!
I use gimp pretty much daily in my job it's a piece of software that I already am quite comfortable with and I don't have to bother the bosses to get me a photoshop license. Most of what I do is either 3D textures or icons and user interface design. The GIMP handles these sorts of tasks perfectly adequately
I have previously used it to do print work and photographic work. It is fine for doing small print runs (too small to bother with offset printing) though I could see photoshop being a lot more useful in a heavier prepress environment.
The main problem that the gimp has is lack of man power. There are only a few people working on it and doing so in their spare time. Krita recently asked for donations to get a programmer to work full time on stability, speed issues. I have been quite impressed with the improvements that have been made.
a lot of users either want a free Photoshop clone which is not going to happen (creative problem solving is one of the more enjoyable aspects of coding and following cloning somebody else's work doesn't really allow for that). There is also the issue that if you create a free Photoshop clone you are just inviting trouble from Adobe's lawyers. Another group comes from Microsoft Paint and is looking for something considerably simpler with tools to draw rectangles and straight lines. This may a legitimate complaint though I personally find Inkscape better for these sorts of tasks.
The most bizarre complaint is the name - which happens to be an american slang word with negative connotations, I guess that means that people in the religious right might be a bit embarrassed using it... If you are that prissy then that's your problem. Meanwhile get a dictionary and look up the other non slang meanings of the word. You might be suprised
If they are able to use FOSS stuff after a few hours, without training, and without having a document to point out the equivalents, that is just great. It shows how far FOSS stuff has progressed over the years. I would like to know what software they were using. Was it BSD or linux based, or was it FOSS stuff under windows? It would be very nice to know,
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada