4 ms·
Primarily, I'd say it's application software support on Windows. Games? You get a few working under Wine, sometimes, partly, but they're far more likely to work
by SomeCallMeTim 16y ago
Primarily, I'd say it's application software support on Windows. Games? You get a few working under Wine, sometimes, partly, but they're far more likely to work well under the version of Windows they were tested with. Photo editing? Photoshop, or even Corel PhotoPaint, leave Linux in the dust. Video editing software? Nothing on Linux comes close to Vegas Video in features and usability. 3d Graphics? A slew of high-end solutions on Windows; Blender is nice on Linux, but has an exceedingly steep learning curve. There's a reason the original company went out of business. And as much as I want to like OpenOffice (and I do use it instead of Microsoft Office), it's too clunky compared to Office for me to recommend to non-geeks in good faith.
And, for developers, there's a market to sell applications to. When's the last time you saw someone making a living selling software to Linux consumers? (Web based products are an important exception to this rule, of course, but not everything can work well from a browser.) And as a bonus developers get to use the best IDE available anywhere.
These are just the needs I've had, for which I've actively looked for software on Linux to fill. Every single time the software available has been pathetic compared to the professional offering.
It's hard work getting that final level of polish on a piece of software that brings it from "it kinda works" to "it works really well." That's what's typically missing from open source apps: The push to make something really easy to use and solid. Frankly not enough professional applications reach that stage, but the ones I mention above all do.
Firefox is one of the few apps in the open source community to really reach that level of polish. Google Chrome is another. Thunderbird is another. There are a dozen other free programs I use, but none of them really feels polished -- they're good enough to get the job done, but only just. And if more things happen "in the cloud," that may be all people need in the future.
But until "the cloud" is brought to my house on fiber at gigabit speeds, I'd like to keep doing my video editing on a local system, thank you. And until it's less expensive to get a WiMax or 4G or whatever-new-technology wireless connection, I'd like the computing to stay in my laptop as well.
- squidsoup 16y agoI would have said photo editing too, but I've been watching my wife use Photobucket's web based image editor and surprised at how content she seems with it. I've used Photoshop so long that using any other 2d graphic app feels awkward, but the coming "web generation" might feel more comfortable using HTML 5 apps in the future.
- SomeCallMeTim 16y agoI left off a rant about "good enough" destroying the market for power-user software, because I was getting too much off topic. But roughly: Yes. The cloud may win over the hearts and minds of a younger generation, and they may be happy using one of the many application suites online. And then they become tied to having a constant $50-$100/month data plan so they can actually use their computer anywhere but at home. I'm waiting for unlimited/anywhere wireless plans to come down to closer to the $10/month level before I allow my computing to be based in the cloud.
- dagw 16y agoI'm sorry, but saying that Blender is the only 3D app for Linux is simply incorrect. Maya, XSI and Houdini plus several other professional 3D apps all run on Linux.
- eccp 16y ago"Linux infrastructure was heavily used in Avatar's graphics rendering done by Weta Digital [...] The Data Center of Weta Digital was re-built in 2008 and consists of 34 racks and more than 4,000 Hewlett-Packard blade servers with a 104TB of RAM. Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90% of the desktops at Weta Digital, according to Paul Gunn, the data center's systems administrator." http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/ubuntu-linux-used-making-avatar http://jordanopensource.org/freeplanet/article/ubuntu-linux-...
- SomeCallMeTim 16y ago3d rendering isn't what I need. I need 3d models for games.
- SomeCallMeTim 16y agoI stand corrected (though the one I've used most myself -- Max -- isn't on Linux). I'm not a 3D artist; I just use 3D models in games, and so have only really looked at free options. Which, when I last looked, were somewhat shabby. I just want someone to make a decent but free 3D model editor that supports skeletal animation (sorry, Sketchup). The remainder, however, are still unchallenged. Photoshop is considered unchallenged on the PC (though for what I do I like Corel PhotoPaint), so I think it would make quite a splash if it were challenged on Linux.