
Linux Design Tools: High-end Design on a Low-end Budget? - user_235711
http://www.sitepoint.com/linux-design-tools/
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Silhouette
I can't help feeling that this is just the same story as always.

Take the GIMP. It still isn't really compatible enough to be a drop-in
replacement for Photoshop. It still has limitations on basic stuff like colour
handling and typography. It still has a name that sounds like a sophomore's
dirty joke. If all you need is a basic image retouching application for photos
on your web site, it's fine. For full professional use, it's not even close.

The same arguments applies to almost all of the "big name" FOSS competitors to
dominant proprietary applications from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe: data
portability isn't quite good enough, features are missing or underpowered, and
usability is often inferior. They're fine as free substitutes and good enough
for basics (which for many people is sufficient) but the "high" prices of the
professional applications are justified in a heartbeat if you have real work
to do as a power user.

What I don't understand is why FOSS continues to be dominated by cheap knock-
offs in these fields. One man wrote TeX, albeit one exceptionally talented and
driven man, and to this day a whole industry uses it in preference to anything
else because it does what it does differently _and much better_ than the
mainstream products. There's still plenty its users would like to improve, but
then that's true of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite too, and they
have barely changed in years despite the vast resources available to their
development teams.

In short, if the FOSS world wants to compete in the market for mainstream
creative applications, it needs to start innovating and change the rules so
the presumption isn't that the FOSS has to (try to) match incumbent
proprietary products on their own terms. The question shouldn't be whether you
can cycle between .docx and .odt without messing up your formatting or whether
you can translate an AI file to an Inkscape-friendly SVG and back without
losing details. The question should be why you'd want to in the first place.

~~~
altero
You could also say that new commercial applications are cheap knockoffs of
older versions. Win8 is joke compared to Win7, Office 2003 is better than
20something. New Photoshop brings zero improvement except some crazy DRM.

Open-source programs are at least stable. It is less likely some commercial
company will flush my investment into toilet.

And Photoshop is probably better than Gimp, but in other areas the winner is
not that clear. For example OpenOffice versus MS Office. Or my favorite
example KWin versus.... nothing.

~~~
Silhouette
_You could also say that new commercial applications are cheap knockoffs of
older versions._

We certainly don't bother with the upgrade treadmill here. We'll spend a small
fortune on serious software _if_ it has demonstrable value to us. But upgrade
to a recent version of MS Office on the desktop? I suppose that's _marginally_
more likely than us signing up to a recurring subscription for something we
already bought once, where the "enhancements" mostly involve added DRM,
randomly changing user interfaces, paying several times as much in practice
for useful software, and cloud serv^W^Wsecurity, reliability, sustainability
and privacy risks that we would never seriously consider taking.

 _Open-source programs are at least stable. It is less likely some commercial
company will flush my investment into toilet._

I so wish that were true. In reality, I don't find most FOSS native
applications significantly better or worse in this respect than
proprietary/commercial ones.

Still, both are dramatically better than most SaaS applications or magically
changing software like Firefox and Chrome.

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girvo
Ugh, GIMPShop. The websites that Google gives you links you to the "source"
for the latest version for Linux. That would be fine, I'm not adverse to
compiling user space apps, but it actually just links you to _GIMPs_ source!

Apart from that, I've been trying to replace the Adobe suite with FOSS tools
for web design. Where I struggle, is I have been trying to learn it I'm the
same way I learnt photoshop: specific tutorials to what I'm trying to so.
Unfortunately, GIMP and Inkscape sort of lack those :(

However, I am learning regardless, and I think soon I'll be ready to switch
entirely, so there's that! Only issue I have is working with other designers
(I'm a developer mostly) -- I get a complex pdf, and can't open it without CS.
Any ideas how to get around that?

As an aside, I would pay good money (literally) for a FOSS (you read that
right) cross platform Fireworks replacement. Still my favourite web design app
by far!

~~~
jbeja
IMHO, why don't you use Inkscape for web design prototypes, since it interface
and behaviors are more suited to it? I don't understand the need to use a
Photo manipulation tool for that.

~~~
girvo
I wrote it incorrectly, but that's exactly what I've been doing the past few
weeks :)

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dkhenry
You know I have had this discussion with with many engineers across not just
design tools, but the entire software ecosystem. If its not design its IDE's
or CAD/CAM or its Math and Engineering. The honest truth is I could be a
professional graphics designer using GIMP. No its not Photoshop, but you don't
need Photoshop to be a professional designer. I know a few designers and even
a few photographers that use nothing but GIMP and Inkscape to make their
money.

Graphics design is not my area of expertise, but I get the same argument in
software development. People tell me all the time that you can't do "real
programming" in anything but Visual Studios. I chuckle a little since I have
no been professionally doing software development for over a decade using
nothing but F/OSS tools. Really all those individuals are telling me is that
they are not skilled in the field, but rather they are skilled with one tool.
There is nothing wrong with that as you need to have skill with your tool, but
if you understand the fundamentals of the discipline then you can work with
most functional tools. Often I see people blaming their tools to cover up for
their own lack of understanding.

~~~
ris
As much as I love the gimp, you'd have a hard time doing a lot of professional
editing without deep colour support.

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camus2
It's not really about what software X or Y can do on Linux compared to Adobe
softs but wether it can open this or that Adobe format with 0 issues.

The graphic industry is all about formats.

Adobe dominates the publishing and graphic design world(ironicaly because of
piracy which didnt destroy Adobe but all the small vendors). So a tool that
cant open or edit properly the last psd,ai format version... is almost
worthless in a professional environment,

~~~
blumkvist
This is not specific to your industry. Microsoft uses the same practices to
keep down alternatives to office.

~~~
bluedino
Microsoft sticks with their file formats for backwards compatibility, I'm sure
they'd love to start fresh but it's not for the reason of stifling
competition.

~~~
blumkvist
Microsoft doesn't release documentation on their specifications and constantly
adds new ones, which are even harder to understand.

Format specifications are the reason microsoft is where it is today. It is the
single business asset that gave them much needed leverage during the 90ties
and earlier 2000s to dominate the enterprise market.

Microsoft defended and developed that asset extremely aggressively throughout
the years and this policy lead to perceiving MS/Bill Gates as cut-throat
businessman.

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rjzzleep
i tried using gimp. hell i spent more than a decade using linux as my main os.
but why does noone ever mention the lack of non destructive layer effects in
gimp? it's probably the biggest showstopper i can think of.

yes you can simulate them with script use[1]. these scripts however are
destructive. meaning you can't on the fly adjust or change your effects at a
later point.

pick up a random ios or web design tutorial, and chances are a decent amount
of the tutorial is all about setting and tuning layer effects. yes, maybe this
is not what professional graphics artists do, but if we're talking consumer
facing products pixelmators last major release 3.0 was all about layer
effects.

and yes, I could build it myself, like i built other things i wanted to work
in linux like webcam drivers, various things in mplayer, but something i might
use every now and then? i got an old cs4 license lying around and am very
happy with it tyvm. works in wine too, not as smooth as gimp, but at least i
got the basic stuff that's needed hammered down.

to be fair i think for a long time gimp was almost a one man show, and i
applaud them for it, but i fear gimp never got the traction it needed.

[1] [http://gimpscripts.com/2011/10/gimp-layer-
effects/](http://gimpscripts.com/2011/10/gimp-layer-effects/)

~~~
tlarkworthy
YES. This is my main beef too. I can't work out the scheme scripting. I found
layer effects I like but can't apply them in any sane workflow.

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joe_the_user
I think a totally biased summary can sometimes help more than a slow "pluses
and minuses" article. Here are my biases (as an amateur who still does some
reasonably large publishing and graphics projects in Linux):

Inkscape - Actually good program. It's not an illustrator clone but a
reworking of CorelDraw but it's very logical on it's own terms, it's a program
you can enjoy using once you get used to it.

Gimp - annoying, kind of awful interface but you use to get things done once
you learn. It's a program only a mother could but which might have eventual
tolerance of.

Scribus - craptastically broken. It will destroy your work and delay your
project even after you've learned all it's pathological foibles. It's one
program where I actually feel constant hostility towards the author while I'm
using it.

------
Glyptodon
Personally, I think Scribus is more ready for professional use than Gimp. It's
just that its workflow is very very different from InDesign, and it's a little
less suited to artistic layouts. I can't imagine anyone who'd really want to
use MS Publisher instead, though, even if ID is arguably better. Maybe
Publisher has improved a lot since I last used it, though.

Also, I keep getting more and more impressed with Darktable.

~~~
joe_the_user
OK, what version?

I've used Scribus 1.3 fairly extensively and it was one of the worst program
I've ever had the displeasure of wrangling with. I see they're only up to
1.4.1 and I'm doubtful that much change could have made. For example, have
they reworked the bizarro auto-page-number editting system? Does undo work (it
failed 80% of the time when I've used it).

~~~
Glyptodon
Well, I'm on 1.4.x, but I've used versions of it for a while. I don't think
page numbers are hard. You just insert a page number on a master page and it
they number correctly on all the rest of your pages.

I've never had a problem, even if it's frequently easier to use the keyboard
than the mouse for things.

Undo works, but you might want to up the number of steps it saves as undo-
able. The default is 20, and you can waste a lot of buffer with minor tweaks.

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ch215
For me, Gimp, Scribus and InkScape cover just about anything I would want to
do but, then again, I'm not a professional designer. They take a bit of
learning that's all. Scribus reminds me of QuarkXPress which I always
preferred to InDesign. As an aside, I have just discovered Gimp's "Single-
Window Mode". It's a godsend for anyone who uses a tiling window manager.

~~~
ris
> QuarkXPress which I always preferred to InDesign

First time I've ever heard this.

------
lwhi
I don't mean to be nasty - but that first image is a prime example of why
skill will never be surpassed by access to tools.

------
WaterSponge
The tools are competent. The problem is usability and training.

------
contingencies
Darktable, which is mentioned in passing in the article, is really a great
application already. For those who haven't yet seen it, I would highly
recommend checking it out. IMHO its development community could benefit from
some more voices, and there are definitely some annoying 'features', but it's
truly an excellent tool for producing finished images from digital
photography. [http://www.darktable.org/](http://www.darktable.org/)

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csense
Whenever you need an SVG, just build a one-off program to output the SVG. For
Java [1] applications, there's an excellent open-source tool for this already
[2].

[1] Or Python via Jython, obviously.

[2] [https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/using/svg-
generator.htm...](https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/batik/using/svg-
generator.html)

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tlarkworthy
There are some great plugins for Gimp, but I can't figure out how to use them
without the mouse. My hand is dying from clicking so much.

I tried using the scheme script, but could not make head nor tail of it.

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dharma1
I wish someone built a good design tool with Qt that would easily run on
osx/linux/windows

Until something equivalent to photoshop or sketch comes out, i'm sticking to
osx

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mathnode
Gimp? No.

Krita? Yes.

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puppetmaster3
In this century, we do in browser design.

