Is there any news as to whether Adobe and/or Macromedia will releasing their products on Linux?

Mike

Well, I know Acrobat Reader is already available. There's Scribus, which is apparently pretty good. What other products did you have in mind, specifically? They make lots of software There are native alternatives for many of them.

Adobe
Photoshop CS
Illustrator CS
InDesign CS

Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX (though I can live without this, I know manual web publishing, but it still helps)
FreeHand MX
Flash MX
Fireworks MX

Mike

I hadn't heard that they had had any plans to port their software to Linux. Where did you hear this?

Apparently Macromedia are going to start trialing software on Linux. They're going to start out by ensuring that Flash MX will work under Wine. If this proves successful then they will work on it's other applications in a similar fashion, with the aim of producing native Linux versions "one day".

(Modified extract taken from Linux User & Developer Magazine, UK)

I don't know anything about Adobe's or Macromedia's plans for bringing software to Linux, but for some of the software you mention, there are comparable alternatives that run natively in Linux. GIMP, though not quite ready to take on Photoshop in preprint processing, is more than adequate for most users' needs. Scribus could probably be compared to PageMaker or InDesign (though I'm not very familiar with any of them). Flash may be a ways off, though I've heard it runs well in Wine. The Draw package that comes with OpenOffice is excellent, and very well integrated with the rest of the OOo suite.

Bluefish and Screem are supposed to be fairly nice web design suites, and there's a variety of different content management systems for Linux that can probably do better than Dreamweaver does for that sort of thing.

For real desktop publishing (pre-print, typesetting and whatnot), I believe Linux already has the upper hand, with TeX, LaTeX, Ghostscript, LilyPond and so on (though they are also available for Windows).

Trickykid I am sorry, I seem to be doing everything all wrong on this forum.

Mike

No your not, its just this topic fits or is more suitable in Software where it will get the right exposure, etc.