When discussing graphics in Linux everybody mentions GIMP but no one seems to be aware of Blender or Midnight. ??? JLK On Sunday 25 November 2001 14:33, Christian Klippel wrote:
hi,
im shortening the original mail a bit, since i only want to say something 'bout specific parts .... ok lets go :
Am Sonntag, 25. November 2001 21:12 schrieb Timothy R. Butler: [....BIG SNIP....]
Gimp is good, Photoshop is still better. There is no such thing as "better because it's free" in the commercial world, and Gimp lacks mileage before it can stand up to Photoshop. Photoshop has its stronghold in advertising and graphic design. If Gimp is to succeed, it has to gain a leverage over Photoshop, delivering something these markets need.
Actually, I would disagree here. Perhaps not in the advertising industry, but in your average IT department things like initial cost savings and total cost of ownership are very important. For anything but the most serious graphics design, I think Gimp wins this round.
well, gimp is _almost_ a professional tool. all tools and filters that one knows from a (default !) photoshop install are there, plus a lot others. weired about the key bindings of gimp ?? make them like in photoshop: stay with the mouse on a menu item an press the key shortcut you want to have for that...voila... show me that in photoshop, no go !! BUT !! to make gimp a bit more professional, it needs one very, very important thing. no, not a different gui, and also not a interface to use photoshop plugins. it needs professional color systems to work on !! CMYK is a _MUST HAVE_ in professional image aditing. not to say that you need more colordepth than 32bpp ...
Maya ? You won't be needing that neither on Windows nor Linux unless your'e a true big-bucks movie company. And by golly, your'e not :)
Well, that just means that Linux covers all the bases, doesn't it? You don't need an IBM S/390 unless you are a big bucks corporation, but that doesn't mean we don't like to talk about 'em.
hmm.... i know alot of people that buyed maya (hey, its not that big-$ software as you may think ...) to make their 3d/gfx jobs. whats missing on linux is a software like 3dstudio, lightwave or the like. i know, i know, there is moonlight creator, blender etc. but none of them i would consider usable for professional day-to-day work .... usability of software is a big lack in linux. the software itself (if we look at it as simple routines) is all there, but there is no good/usable interface for the most of them. at least no inteface that makes it real usable and smooth to work with .... windooze software has a big plus there. but what do you expect from a _programmer_ ??? writing _user_ friendly software ?? ;-))
[....small snip....]
At can't be audio tools. Linux has it in aces there.
Quantity isn't the same as quality, and neither equals accessability nor useability. Linux audio tools tend to be raw and basically address the needs of the author, not the needs of the audience. That has to change. Both Windows AND MacOS offer better tools wich address specifically the needs, wishes and dreams of their respective audience.
What about Broadcast2000 for highend stuff? What about the integrated CD ripping in KDE for the lowend stuff? What about Gramofile for Record recording and sound noise removal? And everything inbetween...
bcast 2k is dead for now, and the future is unknown. apart from that, i tried to actually use it. forget about it. its nice, its powerfull, but again lacks usability in the user-interface. and hey, please, you all should not forget that multimedia is _NOT_ only a highe collection of players, encoders and the like. the underlying sytsem (linux) needs improvements in multimedia handling, too. think about realtime audio, the latency there is really high with a standard installed linux system. and also introduces a lot of lag too. nice api design, but not performant as it should be. there are low-latency patches out for linux. why dont the major distro makers include them in their kernels ??? _this_ would help to recon linux as mm platform ! also graphics .... hey, x may be nice, but its overbloated to program, and its fairly slow ..... try to play a fullscreen video .... watch your sysload. play the same, but with a smaller window .... you can clearly see that it is not the decoding that takes the most cpu power...... and again, there are solutions available to these problems (kgi.sf.net) , but none of the distro makers care about that. _thats_ a real pain. esp. when you try to add these patches yourself. and hey, im a programmer, but fail to apply some of them..... thanks suse for messing up with the kernel sources ....
[...last small snip...]
We say competition is good, and I agree to that - up to a point. When the competition has become fighting amongst our selves over desktops, their bound applications ( KDE, GNOME ), we lose. When it comes to ignorantly bashing Winders and praising what we've got, we've already lost.
That's true. Linux is to partisan within it's ranks, and that could be it's downfall - I certainly hope not.
yea, thats a pain too. instead of beeing happy what we have we start wars about our own app's .... hey, wasnt it in the past that open source development was about having "forks" of some particular projects, and let the forks die that showed to go in the wrong direction ??? why we are not simply quit, use either gnome or kde, and wait what will happen ?? meybe gnome dies, mybe kde dies, maybe booth co-exist nicely in the future ?? why arent we glad to have that choice, but rather start holy wars about what gui to use ??
Best, Tim
me too, and why not moving such discussions to lx-talk@mamalala.de ?? ;-)
chris