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The Open Source Community Doesn't Get It!

It has now been 5 years since the initial euphoria began and I doubted Linux to begin with...

After a few years I had seen some progress and thought, "Hey maybe they really can do this!". But now, there are several serious issues that are lacking with the OS Packages that are presently on the market and the Open Source Community seems to be largely ignoring them!

First, there is still no Color Management capabilities in any of the GUI's or the Operating System itself for that matter. This is huge because no Graphics Division or Photography Shop (and yes they are as much PC now as MAC if not more) will touch this OS. At my company we have some 1200 people in Marketing using PC's and Roughly 10 People in Repro-Graphics using MAC so this issue is certainly relevant.

The Second is the Printing System, if I want to use advanced picture printing capabilites of a printer in Linux it simply is not possible! This is huge when you consider Marketing will always have some photograph in a flyer they've designed.

The third issue, which could be lessened dramatically if people had a clue, is Photoshop! Without a credible Photoshop Alternative there will be no major shifts to a Linux Desktop anytime soon! I know many will claim, "GIMP is as good as Photoshop!" Well, stop right there because it doesn't have half the features that Photoshop CS has and it didn't have 66% of what Photoshop 7 has! The truth is, GIMP hasn't been a Photoshop competitor since Photoshop 5 was released.

Another issue is the whole security registration thing... MS offers this service to the people who develop their software on an MS based OS and they like this because it helps to stem some piracy issues! Sure this technology has been cracked but I haven't had one piece of cracked software using this technology work 100% correctly yet so I bought my OS and Photoshop. The truth is application developers see this as sort of looking out for their interests and it makes the platform more attractive to them.

The Office Suites are literally just short of junk and outside of a free PDF converter have no benefit to me at all! I have Word Documents created in Office 97 some 5 years ago (my own personal documents) that don't display right in Open Office! Open Office can't even get the tables right in my own documents so why would any business trust it for their documents (it's an all or nothing issue for this suite).

Another thing comes with the finances of it all, everyone says, "Windows is more expensive" but in reality most of the Windows desktops (short of maybe 50 per year in an office that is 1500 strong) are already bought and paid for so the savings is minimized! Going further the other issues that are missing more then out weigh the cost of making such a move to Linux.

Finally, people use to balk at the stability of Windows (even though since 98 I haven't had major issues, of course I wouldn't use XP) but they can't make those claims anymore. The facts are the latest Windows Servers never seem to break anymore (unless you're a clueless hack who does stupid stuff with it) so there isn't a major reason to switch.

The truth is unless this community starts taking the desktop as seriously as they're taking the server side then Linux will do nothing more then replace Unix servers and in the end will have served no greater purpose then to achieve a Small MAC cult like following! Is anybody listening, or is this still falling on DEF ears?

Posted by: el-heffa   Posted on: 01/20/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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