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Re: Competition



On 08/27/2011 01:00 AM, David Young wrote:
At work the other day we were lamenting the high price of the tools that
our designers use.  Somebody suggested free alternatives and the general
agreement seemed to be that they would do in a pinch but not for doing
your job.  The quality just isn't high enough.

Ok.


I think that it's very difficult to match the quality of a for-pay
monolithic graphics app with a free monolithic graphic app.  I suspect
that it's rather easy to match the quality of a for-pay Gaussian blur
function with a free Gaussian blur function, however.

Perhaps you are right. I cannot say, I don't know nearly enough about graphic apps.



For me, the trouble with "the desktop" is that none of the traditional
UNIX design principles (everything is text, composition of simple
functions, blah blah blah) are apparent, and the gulf between what I
want to do and how I do it is too great (too much mousing around).

Perhaps not, but you can have a "desktop" with umpteen terminals open like I do. I suspect that the tools I actually use most are "find", "grep", "awk", etc, and shell intrinsics.

I also rely heavily on software that is standard with Linux but you'd have to add separately with Windows. For exampl perl, gnuplot, latex, make, gcc, etc.

To me this is part of the desktop experience. To me desktop doesn't mean that you have to use the mouse for everything. Ok, I do use a web browser, a GUI mail client and a PDF viewer. Those make the bulk of my "mousing around".



Please don't misunderstand this as an aversion to GUIs.  GUIs can be
great, UNIX just hasn't got one. :-)

FWIW, the desktop that I use is Mac OS X.  I find that it's more
bearable since I use Quicksilver.  There *are* things that UNIX could
benefit by borrowing from Mac OS X, btw, but WIMP is not one of them.

I once used Mac OS X for a year or two. It was tolerable, but I was thrilled.

Btw, what is WIMP? I assume you are not talking about Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.


--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.


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