LinuxWorld: Novell's debutante ball

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Actually...

I could make just about every argument about Windows compareed to the Mac that you make about Linux.

14 years on with Windows, and there's still no color management system built into the OS, like the Mac has with Kodak's ColorSync. On the PC, Corel has their system, Adobe has its system, Microsoft has one which the others cheerfully ignore...as one of the few out here who do high-end graphics for print (and television and the Web) on a PC, it's a major pain in the rear to get consistent workflow color on a Windows box. Which is why PC users in the Graphic Arts are still in a distinct minority compared to the Mac folks.

Adobe and Quark products on the PC are pale shadows of their Mac equivalents. Quark can't export CMYK color correctly to other applications on the PC. Corel, the leading vendor of PC-centric graphics programs, is famous for their buggy, ill-tested products (I'd love the company if they could just release something that was stable). PC versions of Adobe products (which otherwise seem to be just swell) suffer from the inherent greater instability of Windows. Just last week, a Microsoft security update screwed up my Win2K Pro main workstation and just about forced me to move a time-critical job over to one of my Macs to finish it. Fortunately, I limped around the problem, no thanks to Microsoft.

My partner, who primarily uses Macs but who is now doing some work on a Windows box I built for her, put it very succinctly one day: "You know, PCs really suck compared to Macs, don't they?" This after we had to play Musical PCI Slots trying to get a FireWire card to work in her PC (something that to my memory never happens on the Mac). My assessment is not quite that severe, but she has a point. PCs are cheaper than Macs, and you get what you pay for: a buggier OS with software that's largely an afterthought compared to the Mac versions.

Don't even get me started on printing under Windows...as a former imagesetter operator, you don't wanna go there. 'Nuff said.

Over all, I have much more confidence that graphics will blossom under Linux than under Windows. All the really exciting software development right now is happening under Linux.

Also, I can tell you that Windows XP (at least the version with Windows Product Activation) is totally unsuitable for a hard-core graphics production environment like mine, where I might be swapping graphics cards, hard drives, DVD burners, etc., several times a year in each of my machines. Can't have the OS disabling itself each time after so many hardware changes to the box, wanting to call home to Redmond to re-establish its credentials. That simply won't do. And the corporate version of XP is out of the question...don't have that many boxes that I'd consider putting XP on, especially now that Linux is making such headway.

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

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