One major barrier to the adoption of Linux on the desktop is the percieved lack of familiar applications, and Photoshop and Word are high on the list
Already on 2003, and we still read people wining about the unavailability of Word on Linux. Jeez...
Me and my whole organization use StarOffice/OpenOffice for a long time ago, and we don't need MS Office. When we want to send a document outside the company, we convert it to PDF. Whenever we receive a MS Office document from outside, we open it it StarOffice/OpenOffice. When we need to check if the conversion was well done, we open the document in Microsoft Word Viewer, Excel Viewer and Powerpoint viewer, which:
Are freeware
Run fine under Wine
Open MS Office documents from versions 97 to XP
When will people realize that if compatibility was so crucial, then we would still be using Wordstar or an even older wordprocessor?
Regarding Photoshop, Corel Photopaint and Gimp are excellent replacements. I know they don't have all the prepress features of Photoshop. But most Photoshop users don't use prepress features!
You people seem to be forgetting about Real Video 9, which is the best video codec nowadays. It's proprietary, but Real Networks has been making clients for many OSs, UNIX family included -- something that neither Apple nor Microsoft have done.
Real Networks has open sourced some of its code, creating the Helix Community. Also, the Helix Server is able to stream RealVideo, Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG-4 from a single server running on a Linux box! Try that with any other server.
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Me and my whole organization use StarOffice/OpenOffice for a long time ago, and we don't need MS Office. When we want to send a document outside the company, we convert it to PDF. Whenever we receive a MS Office document from outside, we open it it StarOffice/OpenOffice. When we need to check if the conversion was well done, we open the document in Microsoft Word Viewer, Excel Viewer and Powerpoint viewer, which:
When will people realize that if compatibility was so crucial, then we would still be using Wordstar or an even older wordprocessor?
Regarding Photoshop, Corel Photopaint and Gimp are excellent replacements. I know they don't have all the prepress features of Photoshop. But most Photoshop users don't use prepress features!
Real Networks has open sourced some of its code, creating the Helix Community. Also, the Helix Server is able to stream RealVideo, Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG-4 from a single server running on a Linux box! Try that with any other server.