What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Linux Journal covers the Novell Cool Solutions survey. "On an individual basis, many Linux users for years have been requesting a Linux port of QuickBooks or Photoshop, to no avail. The standard response from developers and vendors has been "there isn't enough of a user base to make Linux ports worthwhile". With this survey Novell is hoping that many voices united finally will motivate the application vendors."

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What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:09 UTC (Mon) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link] (23 responses)

I have a kneejerk reaction that goes something like, "Use GIMP."

Having been in tech support, and realizing that even UI changes in successive versions of the same program can make it hard for users to adapt their hard-won office gerry-rigging because they *don't actually know how the program works*, I suspect that picture-perfect duplication, e.g. porting Photoshop to Linux, painful and stupid though that would be, is going to remain the inevitable hue and cry of legions of office drones that won't learn more than they have to.

When you make computers idiotic, only idiots will use computers. ;)

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:25 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] (8 responses)

I work with graphic designers. They use Photoshop. I occasionally do a
bit of graphics work in Gimp. Photoshop has at least two technical
advantages over Gimp:
1. CMYK colorspace (important for print work)
2. 16 bits per color channel, rather than just 8

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:45 UTC (Mon) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link] (6 responses)

Well, if you're preprocessing for print, GimpCMYK and littlecms may not do it for you. You can work with CMYK graphics in GIMP, however. But you'd have to do some grepping to find that, and I don't expect corporate implementations of GIMP with CMYK built in that way.

As for color channel limitations, just try working in 32 bits per channel in either. :) Some people just have to have bragging rights.

Just depends on what edges of the market you need to fill.

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:51 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (5 responses)

What's the problem with 32 bits per channel? Krita does it nicely... Just
like Lab or cmyk. Or any colormodel someone wants to write a plugin for,
with any channel depth they like. But I shouldn't stop here to brag --
back to making loading adjustment layers work.

Boudewijn

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 30, 2006 19:17 UTC (Mon) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link] (4 responses)

Sorry, I didn't mean that to come off derogatory; the question is never "What can you do with 32 bits?", because the answer is "Nothing requiring 33 bits or greater." I meant to suggest that both 8 and 16 are a compromise, even though 32 is also still a compromise. I also didn't mean to suggest that GIMP was the only alternative; it just happened to be the canonical form of this debate in my mind. Which should suggest to me *not* to say it, because it's canonical by way of flamewars.

Can you see my foot yet? Have I cleared the lips? ;)

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 30, 2006 20:49 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (3 responses)

The difference is, common imaging devices have > 8 bits resolution per channel, but there aren't very many with > 16 bits per channel. So GIMP's 8-bit limitation has consequences in the real world, whereas Photoshop's 16-bit limitatation is barely relevant.

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 31, 2006 17:01 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

In fact the eye is closer to 8 bits per color. A perfectly calibrated device works alright with 8 bits per channel. But working with a photograph you need some room in order to make color corrections, compose with other images... in other words to process it, which is what these programs are primarily for.

It's similar to sound: the human ear cannot distinguish more than 16 bits (96 dB), but internally you want to work in 24 or 32 bits so that any level change doesn't lose detail.

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 31, 2006 18:35 UTC (Tue) by Ross (guest, #4065) [Link] (1 responses)

Another complication is that visual and auditory perception are both logarithmic, and the perceptible range isn't constant (you can't see details in the low end with bright parts being visible at the same time). No computer display is able to represent the range of visible colors, nor the range of brightness that we can see.

Unfortunately much of the color handling software keeps samples in linear space at one point or another, which either severely limits the upper end of the brightness range or drops detail from the lower end. If the samples were always kept in an exponential format with the upper end representing the brightest output from the display, in a colorspace more closely approximating the perceived colors, and it was converted to the display's response curve with temporary extra precision and jitter to avoid aliasing, you probably would be able to get away with less than 8 bits (24 bits per color).

But it's complicated in other ways too: we don't see colors in a space which is easy to work with for mixing colors. So you're going to have to use one of the CIE colorspaces or something similar which are better than RGB or CMYK, but still don't match the human visual system.

And finally, as you said, extra bits are important because round-off is cumulative. Just like with floating point math, you need the extra precision to hide the loss of precision errors.

So, due to these complications, I think that eight bits per channel is not sufficient unless the software goes to heroic efforts and there's just no point in doing that when it is easy to move to a different color space and add additional bits per color.

I have experimented with adding dithering high color resolution RGB images on an 8 color per channel RGB display, and the difference is visible even if it is carefully converted from the image's colorspace to the display's with full double precision floating point. Though the different is subtle, something which repeatedly manipulates the image, not only converting it for output, it is certainly going to benefit from extra bits.

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Feb 3, 2006 7:53 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

Actually the programs are working with a more "logarithmic" color space than you think. Most just work with the integers saved in the image file directly, and these are not linear with the brightness of the displayed image. They are usually the sRGB curve or something similar, which is approximatly a x^2.2 power curve. The integer samples are much closer together near zero than near one.

I believe if you are going to use more than 8 bits, forget entirely about all those 12 or 16 bit integers and go straight to floating point, using the ILM "half" format for storing floating point in 16 bits, or just normal IEEE format for 32 bits. Due to ignoring more than 8 bits, GIMP has the ability to skip an entire obsolete branch of image processing and go right to the future (not that it is easier than supporting 16 bits, but at least they didn't waste any time on it).

But before you do so, be sure to remove the sRGB brightness curve and make it really linear. The result will be a truly logarithmic storage but your math algorithims think it is a linear space where blurs and other calculations are easy and perfect. Plus the graphics cards coming out now support the half and float formats directly.

Gimp vs Photoshop

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:48 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

I agree with the above two points--they're very important--but there's lots more than that. Text support, for one, is far better in Photoshop (not surprising really, since Adobe can draw on the Illustrator and InDesign text engines for support in that arena.) This especially goes for supporting kerning tables. Support for Lab mode or duo/tri/quad/etc.-tones is also not available in GIMP. Support for multiple attributes of typefaces is another feature not present in GIMP. (By that I mean support of anything besides Bold and Italic as extra attributes on the typeface family, such as Condensed, Semicondensed, Light, Ultra Light, Thin, Outline, Semibold, Demibold, Ultra Black, Extra Bold, etc., etc., instead of being forced to use different families for these attributes.) There is also the style support, Layer Styles, Layer Effects, all of the available plugins,... I could go on for a long time.

As much of a flaming free software advocate as I am, I have to say that Photoshop is really the only option for a lot of people (at the moment). There really is no equal, and I doubt you could find a professional graphic designer that would dispute that. I have to give them credit where credit's due--their developers have done a heck of a job.

I would love to see all of these features in GIMP, and I also would like to see Adobe's corporate ego taken down a notch or two by some serious competition. (They are the Microsoft of graphic design, and act like it sometimes.) But I don't see a whole lot of chance of that happening anytime soon. :-(

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:46 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (4 responses)

>porting Photoshop to Linux, painful and stupid though that would be

Is factoring out the platform-specific stuff, and developing a thorough test suite to validate the chosen platforms, really so tedious?

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 18:50 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] (1 responses)

I have heard before that QT is used sometimes at Adobe, so it might be easier than one might think. Of course, customization might have taken a toll on portability... But just maintaining the Windows and OS X versions together should have made platform-agnostic code a high priority. Who knows...?

OS/X port?

Posted Feb 1, 2006 15:42 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Then they've already done 3/4 of the work.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 19:02 UTC (Mon) by kirkengaard (guest, #15022) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't tell you. I haven't seen Adobe's source. Maybe my accusation there is baseless. I just have the niggling doubt in my mind that a product with the lifespan of Photoshop has enough legacy code and hacks around platform restrictions to make porting it well more painful than coding the functionality straight to *NIX/Linux. Maybe that's FUD, maybe that's prejudice, maybe it has roots in reality. But the way they do it for Windows PCs and the way they do it for MacOS bear a composite relationship to the ideal spec for doing a given thing and the way things have to be done in the OS on that hardware.

It is thoroughly within the bounds of possibility that you know better than I how platform-independent their underlying code base is. I'm just gedanken here.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 1:11 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Photoshop 3 was available for Solaris, and I'm thinking version 4 may have been available as well. That was a long time ago, but at one time Photoshop did run for a UNIX nonetheless.

http://computing.ee.ethz.ch/sepp/photoshop-3.0.1-st/photo...

Tax software.

Posted Jan 30, 2006 21:05 UTC (Mon) by AJWM (guest, #15888) [Link] (3 responses)

I suppose it's not impossible, but it'd certainly be a pain in the butt to "use GIMP" to do my taxes.

I've got an old box around that, about once a year, I boot up into Windows to run TurboTax or, more recently Kiplinger TaxCut. I'd love to be able to buy a Linux version of either of those.

(And while I wouldn't mind having the source, I'm happy to pay somebody else a few bucks to keep the software up to date with changes in the tax codes, etc. Besides, as a "tax preparation expense" the cost of the s/w may be deductable. (Consult your accountant or tax attorney ;-))

Tax software.

Posted Jan 30, 2006 23:02 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

The Dutch inland revenue has from this year a Linux app for doing taxes.
Quite nice: an autopackage of a wxWidgets application with all the
functionality of the Windows app. And it's remarkable that the inland
revenue's "belastingdiskette" often gives tax payers a better break than
commercial tax apps.

Tax software.

Posted Jan 31, 2006 8:07 UTC (Tue) by tyhik (guest, #14747) [Link]

I have had an opportunity to use Dutch 'belastingdiskette' as well as Estonian Tax Office's web interface for preparing and submitting tax declarations. The latter is the real killer. When still living in Holland a few years ago, I did my Estonian taxes over the net from there, working on a linux desktop, of course. By the way, in 2005, about 70% of Estonian tax declarations were prepared'n'submitted through the web interface.

Tax software.

Posted Jan 31, 2006 13:16 UTC (Tue) by RobSeace (subscriber, #4435) [Link]

You don't need a stand-alone PC app to do taxes anymore; this isn't the
Dark Ages... ;-) I've been doing my taxes using a Linux box for many
years now, using TurboTax.com's online filing... In years past, they
have occasionally been obnoxious and had browser/OS checks, which forced
me to use a user-agent switcher to pretend to be running IE on Windoze,
but this year, I'm happy to say, I was able to get through without any
tweaks at all needed, using Firefox 1.5 on a RH9 box... (Yeah, yeah, don't
complain at me about RH9 being ancient; I know... ;-)) So, I don't really
see any usefulness in tax-prep companies porting their stand-alone PC apps
to Linux... In fact, I don't see any usefulness in them continuing to
produce those stand-alone apps anymore, at all! I'm sure they only do
for the people who are so used to them, or don't trust the evil and scary
Internet with anything as sensitive as their tax info... But, really, that's
just unfounded paranoia... (Sending it through SnailMail is probably a lot
riskier... Is it encrypted inside that envelope?? Do you realize just how
incredibly often mail gets misdelivered?? I'd much sooner trust an SSL
connection over the Net...) In reality, there's just no real reason why
anyone who is Net-connected can't do their taxes completely online these
days, from any OS and browser that they choose to use...

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 23:30 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I suspect that picture-perfect duplication, e.g. porting Photoshop to Linux, painful and stupid though that would be, is going to remain the inevitable hue and cry of legions of office drones that won't learn more than they have to.

I think better documentation would be a big help for people making the switch from PS to GIMP. A lot of GIMP tutorials, even ones written for beginners, refer to terms and operations that haven't yet been introduced, which means that one ends up with about 6 tabs open trying to figure out how to do something really simple. Most professionals will read documentation if they are able to find what the need without making an afternoon of it.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 1:17 UTC (Tue) by foo-bar (guest, #22971) [Link]

Don't want to offend anybody, but I find GIMP extremely counter-intuitive.
Without some experience you have no clue what to do with it. IMHO.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 8:41 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

"Use Gimp" - ah yes, the "one size fits all" solution :-(

And if you make me use GIMP - well, you are in technical support - expect a lot of phone calls from me ... :-)

Put bluntly, GIMP *doesn't* *work*!!! EVERY time I've tried to use it, I've given up in frustration. GIMP itself gives me no clues. I've tried the tutorials - they don't work. I've tried help - it needs net access and the computers I'm using invariably don't have a net connection. Etc etc.

It's probably like me with Word/OOo and WordPerfect. I hate Word, and I hate OOo because it's too similar to Word. WordPerfect USED to be perfect, quite literally, as far as I was concerned it "just worked". Now, the more they strive to be "like Word", the less it just works :-(

When they can fix GIMP to the point where it ACTUALLY WORKS, I might try it again. Until then, I'd rather exercise my freedom to pay someone some money to give me a product I can use.

Cheers,
Wol

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 19:40 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

When they can fix GIMP to the point where it ACTUALLY WORKS, I might try it again. Until then, I'd rather exercise my freedom to pay someone some money to give me a product I can use.

Well, it does work (probably rather well), but it's a bit of a challenge to figure out how. Since the documentation isn't all that good, it's a long and frustrating process. If it were a simple matter of learning the UI it would probably be quite simple to move from PS to the GIMP, but you have to think different about the process of creating an image with the GIMP.

If PS were available for Linux, I'd buy it. It would be cheaper than spending hours and hours trying to figure out how the GIMP works. I've even recently entertained the idea of buying an iMac for the purpose of running PS.

I think people who pimp the GIMP are either gurus, or casual users who haven't really gone past using Script-Fu for banners and such.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Feb 6, 2006 13:55 UTC (Mon) by wookey (guest, #5501) [Link]

Well, I like the GIMP enough to recommend it, and use it (about once a year) to do something difficult like merge parts of two pictures, or edit _huge_ images by chopping them up and reassembling them, but I don't think I fit either of your categories. I do agree that you have to get into a gimpish frame of mind to understand how the layers and masks thing works, and that this requires some effort, but it is very powerful when you have finally grokked it.

It has been many, many, years since I used photoshop so I have no idea how the two currently compare. The gimp is much more than adequate for my needs, although I could use a bigger/faster computer as my 25,000 x 30,000 pixel images are _incredibly_ slow to edit even on a 2.5Ghz, 1Gb RAM machine - a large cut and paste, and tidying up can take a couple of days to perform. And now I've got one which is 4m x 1m at 300dpi, which is even bigger.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 20:56 UTC (Mon) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (7 responses)

As long as everyone is talking about Adobe applications, I'd like to mention that a month or two back I was invited to complete a survey from Adobe. This survey was quite long and was trying to answer two questions: should we port Acrobat and Photoshop to Linux, and, if so, how much should we charge? I indicated that I would be willing to buy Photoshop at the same price point as the MacOS version, but I would not be willing to pay anything for the port of Acrobat.

Did any other LWN regulars see this survey?

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 21:27 UTC (Mon) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (6 responses)

I indicated that I would be willing to buy Photoshop at the same price point as the MacOS version

I'd pay for an upgrade to Photoshop CS2 if I could upgrade from my older Windows version to Linux at normal upgrade prices.

Photoshop and MS Internet Explorer (test purposes, I use Firefox almost always) are the two things that keep me on Windows as much as I am. I've been using Ubuntu at home primarily for a year or so now, and my testing box at work uses Fedora Linux/Apache/PHP (is that "FLAP"?!).

Also, I'm not interested paying for anything Acrobat either. Photoshop on Linux would be welcome, enough for me to upgrade (around $180 if I recall correctly).

-Brock

Can use wine

Posted Jan 31, 2006 0:28 UTC (Tue) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (5 responses)

Apparently MS Internet Explorer and Adobe Photoshop both work under wine, if that's more convenient for you.

Can use wine

Posted Jan 31, 2006 1:03 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't feel like playing with WINE.

Past there, for IE it shouldn't work exactly the same due to differences in things like opening windows in certain situations, fonts and rendering, etc.

Can use wine

Posted Jan 31, 2006 2:53 UTC (Tue) by etrusco (guest, #4227) [Link] (3 responses)

We can hope that at some time WINE compatibility will be good enough that the experience will deserve better description then "play with it" for the majority of people ;-)

Can use wine

Posted Jan 31, 2006 3:54 UTC (Tue) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link] (2 responses)

It is now. The people who think along the lines of "play with it" aren't up to date on what it can do. Crossover is really great and worth the price (IMNSHO) but even plane ol' wine will work for IE and most other things. No WinXX needed.

Can use wine

Posted Jan 31, 2006 22:52 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (1 responses)

The people who think along the lines of "play with it" aren't up to date on what it can do

I'm certainly not up to date on wine. I might have to give it a serious look.

I have CorelDraw 9 running in WINE 0.9.3

Posted Feb 1, 2006 15:48 UTC (Wed) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Yes, WINE has "real" version numbers now; it's that far along.

I have one minor remaining problem with Corel failing to render properly TrueType fonts which did not come with it, but everythng else seems to be working ok so far, to the extent I've tested it. (I don't have a color printer on this box at the moment; that's next.)

But yeah, I too was pretty impressed.

Just avoid winetools, or the IRC people won't talk to you much. :-)

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 30, 2006 21:16 UTC (Mon) by ami.ganguli (guest, #9613) [Link] (1 responses)

There aren't any mass-market applications that haven't been replaced by Free software, at least sufficiently well for my personal needs. I know Photoshop is wonderful and all, but Gimp is more than enough for me. Same with a lot of other things.

The only thing I miss is niche stuff. Language courses in particular. I doubt there's much hope of getting that stuff ported though, as there truly isn't enough demand.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 21:20 UTC (Thu) by patipati (guest, #28059) [Link]

Agree -- best I can do now is Rosetta under Wine works OK.

Any midrange ERP app

Posted Jan 30, 2006 22:56 UTC (Mon) by sphealey (guest, #1028) [Link]

A midrange ERP system. Any of the top 5 midrange packages would be fine, preferably more than one. Until we see that small/medium sized manufacturing businesses will have a very hard time transitioning to a Linux desktop.

sPh

Looks like a good list for Wine

Posted Jan 31, 2006 0:16 UTC (Tue) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link]

This looks like a good list for the Wine developers to target. If at least to run as binary applications, but once that occurs, it would be more tempting for the vendors to use the Wine library themselves.

Novells own

Posted Jan 31, 2006 9:04 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (1 responses)

As far as I know Novell has a stack of applications which still don't run on linux, like Groupwise, Wordperfect and a load of IPX and Netware-related things (management consoles, drivers and so on). Why doesn't Novell start by porting them first?

Novells own

Posted Jan 31, 2006 17:57 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

At least Groupwise does already work on Linux. Ok this Java version does not have all the features of the native Windows version, but it's getting better.
Enough to say, they already started.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 10:15 UTC (Tue) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] (1 responses)

I want to have analogue of Apple's QuickTime API on Linux. As I see, there is really no neutral stable OSS API for rendering images & video, playing sound/music and combination of all that.

Many people who come to OSS from Wind0ze think that QuickTime is the Player. But beneath that silly interface lays rich set of libraries which do support most major media formats. M$ never managed to come up with decent Multi-Media API, and desktop Linux mostly influenced by vocal minority of ex-Wind0ze anti-M$ zealots hadn't gained any counterpart.

The important part isn't only the support for the formats, but API itself. At times it can be obscure, but in nutshell, QT API follows Unix ideology: simple things are done easy. If application needs simply to display/play image or video or sound file - amount of work is negligible. But on other side if you need full fledged video editing capabilities - they are also there.

Both GNOME and KDE have their own frameworks, but both of them fall short on features. At moment the only usable media players are VLC and Mplayer. I hope VLC (alogn with e.g. SDL) can serve as a foundation for future of multimedia on Linux. VLC does its job perfectly for me as to end-use, but to me as a developer - unfortunately it's nothing.

P.S. Another factor, is of course, that Linux has no "native" multimedia file format. Even OGM files produced and played on Wind0ze are already far better supported under Wind0ze as on Linux. It seems that no development actually occurs on Linux side at all.

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Feb 9, 2006 21:23 UTC (Thu) by patipati (guest, #28059) [Link]

How about the Gstreamer framework? I guess that should do the API job?

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 13:10 UTC (Tue) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

AutoCAD

What Application Do You Want Ported to Linux? (Linux Journal)

Posted Jan 31, 2006 18:10 UTC (Tue) by carcassonne (guest, #31569) [Link]

Just for fun, from the survey itself:

However, it's also cool to see that we are getting requests from far-away places like New Zealand, Romania, Malaysia, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, and Singapore. Most excellent.

Yep, you know, Luxembourg. Right there in-between France, Germany, Belgium..

Quite a far-away place ! ;-)