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Distribution quotes of the week
"Gentoo" is actually an old Navaho word meaning "some assembly required,
batteries not included". You thought it was a penguin?
-- Ryan Hill
Nearly two decades have passed since operating systems were judged
primarily by their office suites and solitaire games. Photo
retouching, online note syncing, genealogy, kiosk-style UI for the
elderly, music notation, home accounting, calendaring, paying taxes,
making greeting cards, chess, Web design, screencasting, CAD, school
timetabling, wedding planning, screenwriting. For thousands of "long
tail" genres like those, competing OSes have multiple applications to
choose from -- but the published choices in Ubuntu are either
non-existent or, not to put too fine a point on it, terrible.
-- Matthew Paul ThomasNow, there are many reasons for that: difficulty of publishing is far from the only one. But it would be a subtle error to think that an application not existing for Ubuntu at all means that difficulty of publishing is unimportant. It may be one of the reasons nobody bothered to develop the application in the first place. (Log in to post comments)
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 10, 2012 21:14 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> Nearly two decades have passed since operating systems were
> judged primarily by their office suites and solitaire games. > Photo retouching, online note syncing, genealogy, kiosk-style > UI for the elderly, music notation, home accounting, calendaring, > paying taxes, making greeting cards, chess, Web design, > screencasting, CAD, school timetabling, wedding planning, > screenwriting. For thousands of "long tail" genres like those, > competing OSes have multiple applications to choose from -- but > the published choices in Ubuntu are either non-existent or, not > to put too fine a point on it, terrible.
music notation: rosegarden
Sounds like someone has entered the reality distortion zone.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 11, 2012 8:31 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
... or someone missed the last sentence in the pasted quote.
F-Spot is terrible. Gimp is super powerful but I've seen professional graphics designers get the quaking shivers when talking about their attempts to use it.
Evolution is terrible. Thunderbird is decent but, even so, no regular human will get Exchange-style calendaring to work.
Web design tools? Really? Amaya I suppose, but it's terrible when compared to DreamWeaver. What else did you have in mind? (a text editor, while I use one for web development every day, is not a web development tool)
FreeCAD is not even useful for CAD yet much less competing with AutoCad or SolidWorks.
I love and use free software every day but I do recognize that there are places where it falls very short when compared to proprietary stuff. And that's the long tail that keeps a lot of people pinned to proprietary systems.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 17, 2012 21:36 UTC (Mon) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> Web design tools? Really? Amaya I suppose, but it's terrible
> when compared to DreamWeaver. What else did you have in mind? > (a text > editor, while I use one for web development every > day, is not a web development tool)
So you use it every day for X, but it's not a tool for X. Got it.
I just get really annoyed at comments like this that basically go "there's no software available for Linux, or if there is, all of it is terrible." When you start examining those objections in detail they mysteriously evaporate or become even more vague. "Well there is XYZ, but actually it doesn't have some obscure feature that I want." "What feature is that?" "I forget."
And then, of course, the solution is clearly not to work on the missing features, but to create some infrastructural bridge to nowhere. Is Exchnage support not good enough? Then rewrite the packaging system! It makes perfect sense.
This is all, "not to put too fine a point on it," BS.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 17, 2012 23:18 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] This is actually pretty normal reaction. People who need something like DreamWeaver use DreamWeaver. And not on Linux. If someone who actually uses Linux talks to them he hears what they need/want but obviously he does not keep this information in memory: s/he does not need this thing (that's why s/he keeps using Linux) so why should s/he remember it?
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 18, 2012 5:31 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
> So you use it every day for X, but it's not a tool for X. Got it.
Um, Vim is a text editor and not a web design tool.
> When you start examining those objections in detail they mysteriously evaporate or become even more vague
...and my post had details. Many (most?) of the programs you suggest are completely inadequate when compared to the commercial alternatives. LIke, not even close enough for argument. FreeCAD? Really?
I find it very hard to believe that practitioners somehow "forget" what features they care about, especially in programs that they use professionally. Maybe they're just bored by the discussion?
Anyhow, so be it. We clearly disagree on who's caught in the reality distortion field.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 20, 2012 6:54 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
When I was in college, I used several (commercial) electrical enginerring CAD programs that ran on Linux. A quick Google reveals that most mechanical engineering CAD programs seem to be Windows-only (not even a Mac version). I have no idea why that is.
I think it's unfair to dismiss the Linux alternatives without at least explaining why you don't care for them. It just doesn't add any value to the discussion-- yet another post expressing an arbitrary opinion with no facts to back it. They may very well be behind, but if so, shouldn't we be helping them to catch up?
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 20, 2012 16:09 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] A quick Google reveals that most mechanical engineering CAD programs seem to be Windows-only (not even a Mac version). I have no idea why that is. Demand is too low. CAD programs started on big old UNIX and thus it was easy to port them to Linux. But over time UNIX died off and was replaced not with Linux or Mac but with Windows. At this point it was no longer viable to keep codebase supported on two wildly different platforms. We may see return to Mac but I doubt we'll ever see them on Linux again. Well, may be on Android, but many pundits don't recognize it as Linux for some reason.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 20, 2012 17:51 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I did explain most of them, here are the rest. I feel this is kinda obvious but since you asked...
F-Spot: super slow, development has been stalled for years, modifies your originals (fixed now?), clear dead end.
Evolution: difficult to set up (especially calendaring!), mostly stalled development, ugly, buggy.
Amaya and FreeCAD need no explanation -- they simply don't work for any reasonable task. In a few years hopefully FreeCAD will have something.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything I can do to help these programs catch up. They're outside my circle of expertise and the hours in my day are limited.
The EE CAD programs you mentioned from college, were they open source?
Related: I used a TCL-based VLSI layout program on Linux to lay out a crazy fast SRAM chip in college (forget the name). It was mostly closed source alas but I was able to tweak some of the TCL to speed repetitive tasks. I got it working but it was a lot more painful and time consuming than the popular EDA packages at the time, especially when it came to simulation! My takeaway: for the right program in a commercial setting, $15,000/seat is downright cheap, especially if it saves man-months during a project. (keeping those horrible dongles happy though, that's too expensive at any price)
As for why mechanical CAD programs are only on Windows? I only have a guess: blame the Unix wars. They're graphically very intensive and difficult to port. There's just not enough money in Mac or Linux to justify the effort to bring them back to Unix.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Sep 27, 2012 18:35 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
I don't use F-Spot since it's written in Mono. Gimp does what I need to do.
It would be nice to see Evolution improve. I use gmail at work so I can't comment on that.
> The EE CAD programs you mentioned from college, were they open source?
No.
> As for why mechanical CAD programs are only on Windows? I only
Most electrical engineers have a fair amount of computer experience these days. They do things like write scripts to automate common tasks, and probably have some familiarity with UNIX. Mechanical engineers don't really need these skills in my experience, so UNIX and Linux probably don't look as attractive.
Distribution quotes of the week Posted Oct 4, 2012 11:56 UTC (Thu) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]
Linux has several alternatives for photo handling, IMHO digikam is one of the best.
I agree with your comment about mail software, but there also Kmail.
For user-friendly webdesign there's Nvu/Kompozer (old Mozilla Composer), but that hasn't had much development in years.
For genealogy there's Gramps, but that's a bit more "technical" than most Windows alternatives and I think the other Linux genealogy programs are www-services.
For home accounting there are also several alternatives, but for tax stuff, nothing (at least very user friendly), partly because that is so specific to each country and the taxation rules change every other year.
For CAD there's also QCad (http://www.qcad.org/), but Linux CAD software doesn't really compete with professional Windows versions. (I've also had some problems when exchanging DXF files between Autocad and free version of Qcad, but that was decade ago)
For making leaflets etc, there's Scribus.
For more SW, one can check the list at Wikipedia:
And as a last resort, there's always Wine...
As a conclusion, yes, there are Linux variants for most of the things, but they may require more work to get set up, finding them may be harder and their user-interfaces may differ quite a bit.
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