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The GNOME project at 15The GNOME project at 15Posted Aug 14, 2012 23:52 UTC (Tue) by DiegoCG (subscriber, #9198)Parent article: The GNOME project at 15
Android and iOS are having success? Let's add a app store too!
My distro has thousand of "apps", and unlike the iOS/Android app stores, most of them are useful, not cheap copies of the most used apps...
I don't think the Linux desktop lacks apps. Rather, it lacks the kind of things that Eitan writes about - "a focus on the production end of the New Media pipeline".
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The GNOME project at 15 Posted Aug 15, 2012 0:03 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> I don't think the Linux desktop lacks apps.
The linux desktop lacks many specific apps that people need.
some of the gaps have been getting closed (OOo and LO have done wonders), but there are others (outlook replacement, the ability to create visio diagrams, CAD programs, etc) and the fact of the matter is that if you have even a couple programs that you can't run on your main OS and instead need to use a VM with Windows to run, it very quickly becomes easier to just use Windows for everything.
The GNOME project at 15 Posted Aug 22, 2012 8:02 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]
Some of those big software platforms will never be FOSS. You are never going to see a FOSS CADD package that is equivalent to AutoCAD, Microstation or the other major players. This is software that requires thousands of man hours just to keep up with the innovation in the field and that means commercial vendors with pricey support contracts to move the software along.
Having tried every FOSS CADD package a couple years ago I can say with certainty there wasn't a single one that was even close to the cheapest 2D piece of crap commercial software in existence (there are 4th tier commercial indie CAD applications that are available for near nothing that are better than QCAD which was the best I tried) let alone offered real 3D and the precision necessary in commercial engineering.
If Linux is to succeed commercially we need commercial software. There is a lot of software that is only going to be developed as commercial software because of the specialization and work involved.
The GNOME project at 15 Posted Aug 22, 2012 18:37 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
While I agree that we need to have commercial software targeted at Linux, I think it's a fallacy to look at any software and start making claims that FOSS software will never compete.
They said the same thing about many areas that are now dominated by FOSS, including the OS itself (something that's far more complex than any CADD software)
The GNOME project at 15 Posted Aug 30, 2012 15:24 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
CAD is a weak area, I agree and has been for a long time. I too used QCAD/LibreCAD _a lot_ over last two years, and it is rather 1980s, but recently we got FreeCAD, which is proper 3D CAD usingthe OpenCASCADE back-end freed-up from a proprietary vendor. And libreDWG which helps break the .DWG stranglehold. Free software can be important in CAD and BIM too because it has the same advantages in this area as in others (openness to all formats, ubiquity, ability to fix things). Breaking the strangehold of the proprietary vendors is a long slow process, but opening up data formats and libraries really works in our favour and it seems to me that there is steady progress here and it's not all hopeless. There is a huge amount still to do for Architects to be able to use a Linux desktop, but like libreoffice, FreeCAD works on all 3 popular desktop platforms so people can use Free Software even if they can't use a Free OS for everything yet.
I see real signs of progress in this area, after a rather bare period.
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