What can linux do for me

[paramecij]

A couple here people believe the terminal is a failure, I disagree, at least if you're at the level of wanting to develop games on linux, you should be able to uncompress your tarballs and compile your own software, that's often just a necessity if you want the newest versions (although arch has been terrific on this front). The software center would be a lot better if it always had the newest versions of blender and gimp for example on download.

That's the fail right there - why should one have to use the terminal for simple and very frequent task such as uncompressing archives and compiling code?

 

Don't get me wrong, I love the options and power a command line/terminal offers and often write software with that in mind, but for a normal user and his every day tasks, one should accomplish everything without having to resort to terminal/cmd prompt.

 

 

Snapping to vertices and aligning to faces would be a bonus.

Actually that's much more important to me than smooth movement inside the editor. I hate modelling tools that don't offer any kind of snapping/aligning or a way to punch in precise numbers via keyboard.

[zester]

Sometimes you have to make a sacrifice to run Linux, Gimp is not quite as good as Photoshop, you don't have the same access to proprietary software, blender however is terrific on linux,

 

Gimp is a far better choice for game development, as far as I know Photoshop still doesn't have "Color to Alpha" and doing "Alpha Threshold" on an Image in photoshop is a pain, in Gimp both of those functions are a single click.

 

Gimp also has the "InsaneBump" plugin for generating normal/height/ambient/specular maps, it apparently works in gimp on windows also but I have never had any success.

 

For Painting there is Kritia and it is years ahead of photoshop, so much so that its sponsored by Weta and Digital Domain.

 

Maya, Mudbox, MotionBuilder, Houdini, Nuke, Mari, Realflow, Modo, 3DCoat, .... All have a native Linux version.

 

 

I could not agree more Josh. Any need to open the terminal is a just an annoying thing and shows that a package or whatever isn't fully completed for the average user.

 

That really depends, on what your trying to do. Example. Stitching a panoramic sphere-map using ImageMagick is a single cli command, Doing this using tools like Hugin can take a hour or more.

 

Another example is using Premake4(Lua based project build tool), to generate your makefiles the command is "premake4 gmake", I don't thing a gui could make that any easier to do.

 

Lots of things are easier or faster to do via a cli.

[n-pigeon]

User-friendliness is probably the biggest determiner of what software people choose. I know from experience it is much harder to write easy-to-use software than to just write software. The ease-of-use aspect of it is an entire layer of development beyond the core technology. It's probably 2-3 times as much work, and it has to be considered when writing the very core of the software. So dismissing Photoshop as being easier to use, that's like dismissing a brand of tires because they don't explode on contact with asphalt.

 

There's basically two ways to write software. You can approach it from the interior, and think about what makes the source code the most elegant, the most maintainable, and the most pleasant experience for the developer. The other approach is to think about what makes the end user's experience the most consistent, least surprising, and most pleasant. Leadwerks 2 was written with the first approach. Leadwerks 3 is being written with the second one. The second approach is much more work because you are absorbing complexity so the end user doesn't have to deal with various details. For example, the Leadwerks 3 editor auto-detects file changes and automatically converts model and image files into our own formats. In Leadwerks 2, the user was expected to do this themselves with command-line tools. The change in Leadwerks 3 made the developer's life more difficult because I have to deal with the complexity of making sure that works on all systems, but it made the end users' lives much easier. This is generally a good tradeoff, because for every hour I spend making the software more user-friendly, thousands of aggregate hours are saved by the user base.

 

I agree with that.

 

Open-source software tends to be written with the first approach, because the user experience work is very tedious, generally just isn't fun, and there is no financial incentive to buckle down and do that difficult work. If the business model is centered around paid support, then there is actually a financial incentive to make it harder to use.

 

Lets not throw all FLOSS to one bag

Talking about Gimp. I'm a long term user of Photoshop and Gimp, also someone involved in Gimp development. I would say that Gimp development is similar to Leadwerks 3, at least we are trying to and it is one of our goals

Gimp is definitely a bit behind in some areas, but I dare to say that it's not as bad as many say. I use this software for few hours a day and at the end of day I have my job done with a pleasure.

 

So why Gimp has so bad opinion about user experience?

1. Many users (not all) want free PS clone and Gimp is not PS clone. Gimp is Gimp We do our own software and we are NOT alternative NOR enemy of Photoshop. Most of Gimp users don't understand that.
    
   
2. Many users fight against software, they don't even care to try understand workflow design behind a tool. Gimp is for professional artists that understand core mechanics of image creation and manipulation, so they know how to work with it and have to work with it on big projects. Most users lack needed knowledge and blame software for it. Gimp is just too hard to use for casual users, not because it's bad design, reason is that advanced image manipulation is a hard topic in a first place. Casual users should use software designed for casual users for example Paint.NET or Pinta, many users don't understand it.
    
   
3. Echos of old battles - "Gimp is bad because it is not in single window" but it was good for Linux where we have virtual desktops. Many users wanted single window, but as many wanted multi window. It was long battle on arguments, so after advises form professional UI/UX designer that we work with - yes we work with usability designers. Single window mode was developed with a switch to old style multi windowing + extra docking features so it is easier to manage workplace.
    
   
4. Gimp development is slow, it's not because we are lazy we don't have enough people and those that we have don't have enough spare time to work on our huge TODO list in rapid fashion. Most of this list is about user experience, or usability fixes At the same time we are now moving to new long made powerful core, that will bring very important features and will have tremendous impact on user experience - one of them is non linear editing.
   

 

Next time you see user bashing Gimp, Blender or other software take his words with grain of salt. It's only "normal" everyday bad PR.

Leadwerks has this problem too, but on much smaller scale and I know that it has from reading this forum "Give me that OSOM features from magazines pictures and I will buy your software". We have the same topics, just change "buy" to "use for free without giving anything back, even bug reports, I will go with them directly to blogs or useless forums where you wont see how I blame you for making ****-software". I stumbled many times on this kind of situations, when <place name of the project>user "wanabe" is barking at the wrong tree

 

I see here many real Leadwerks users, who truly use it and they love to use it and because of that and only because of that, they see it's real weak points, so as community they try to solve them. One of reasons I'm interested in Leadworks is because it's developers and users as a community are close.

Josh main developer and CEO is writing directly to it's users and he reads what they write to him. This is how it should be everywhere!

 

We do the same in Gimp project but I don't know why it's much, much, harder to find users truly aware of the software they are using and ready to help make it better, users as Leadwerks have, or Blender.

We don't need Gimp fanboys wee need real Gimp users.

 

So that's why Gimp is where it is now, because we lack man power on developer and user side. That's what truly means being alone in a crowd and Gimp crowd is BIG and noisy believe me, I know.

 

Good that not all Gimp users are like that and I wish Leadwerks as many great users as it can handle!