I think what would make this thread better is a maintained list of software voted for. Otherwise its just an enormous string of posts that no-one will ever read through again.

3 members found this post helpful.

OmniGraffle is the best diagram editin tools I have seen, unfortunately though it is MAC, and I hate MAC
I hav tried Dia, and Inkscape too, they are awsome but Inkscape is too much and Dia is too little.
I can see Dia has the potential to become a really great diagram editting tool but right now it is not perfect.

Yep, IMO the last time Norton made useful programs was in the 90's. It's been a no-go AV for me since it caused crashes with AutoCAD since 2000. You might want to try AVG or rather Avast! instead - both even have free versions, that's if you can't convince your wife of coming to the non-dark-side

As for quickbooks, have you seen this: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1738551

Yep. Maybe something like a wiki page - with sub-pages per program. That way comments, suggestions and alternatives can more easily be found for any one specific program. It's a pain searching through 4500+ posts to find any useful info.

Just use the search function on this thread with the name of the program you are looking for.

But that would rarely give any alternates posted as answers to those queries. Now if this forum had a non-linear tree-view of the thread I suppose this could have worked (only option is Linear Oldest/Newest first)? Hopefully the answer(s) weren't posted several pages after the original query!

Adobe Framemaker.

I used Framemaker around 1990 on Sun and IBM Unix workstations. Framemaker was synonymous with industrial-strength desktop publishing. I have never seen another package that came close to Framemaker's capabilities. A powerful desktop publishing package is the only thing that my modern Linux PC lacks compared to those ancient Unix workstations.

Of course, we'd want a Framemaker for Linux that's free (as in speech and beer), which is why we'll never get one.
Ed

I would very much like to have a prorgramme equally powerful and easy and has all the features of MS Access in GNU/Linux desktop. I have tried KEXI, OpenOffice.org_base & SQLite, but find no such programme. I believe we do not have any. Can anybody throw any light? Thank you.
ragpicker.

That reads like something people wrote about Photophoop 3 ;-)
... and yet GIMP?
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searches?
https://encrypted.google.com/search?...o-linux-105955
https://encrypted.google.com/search?...questions.org+

https://encrypted.google.com/search?...o-linux-105955
https://encrypted.google.com/search?...questions.org+

https://encrypted.google.com/search?...o-linux-105955
https://encrypted.google.com/search?...questions.org+

About FrameMaker ... Yep, maybe Scribus perhaps?

As for Access: I'm with you on that score. I can't find a DBMS client interface as easy to use as M$'s (IMO) only good product. There are several which are more powerful, have more features, etc. But none of them is close to such a well rounded UI as you get with Access ... in all others you need a near IT degree to figure out what to do, with Access you don't even need to be very computer literate to make a decent database with awesome input forms, reports and queries. Making referential integrity's also a breeze by simple drag-n-drop.

OOo.Base (or LibreOffice if you prefer) is like a half-hearted attempt at an Access clone. It can link to more types of databases, but that just means you need to be a DB Admin ... in which case you'd probably have used other tools in any case.

Please stop wheeling out The GIMP as a replacement for Photoshop. GIMP is ok for personal use, but not at all suitable for semi-professional use. Even with its copycat filters and (the-now-dead) GIMPshop, it's really not even close.

Photoshop: 8-, 16-, 32-bits per channel; GIMP: 8-bits per channel.

Photoshop: Greyscale, s/RGB, CMYK, L*a*b colour spaces; GIMP: Greyscale, RGB colour spaces.

Photoshop: Supports spot; GIMP: Doesn't support spot.

If you've ever wondered why 16- or 32-bit channels are useful, open GIMP's histogram window and run a few Colour Tools transformations to see how badly combed an 8-bit image gets after just two or three operations. All those big holes in the histogram are lost information.

Sure, GIMP has HSV and CMYK colour selectors but there is no image support for those colour spaces. You can decompose an RGB image to LAB or HSV channels, but this is a difficult and unnatural way to work with images.

A much closer match to Photoshop would probably be Krita.

1 members found this post helpful.

Good point about the bits per channel! Another problem I have with GIMP is a lot of our colleagues/consultants/clients use PS, AI, ID and/or CorelDraw. Saving back-and-forth is a BIG no-no! Ever seen what happens to text, not to mention shadows? And saving to PNG/TIFF is also something to avoid like the plague, you loose all "smart" objects - in effect making the file near un-editable! We're more into presentations of buildings than photography or graphic arts so don't use the colour adjustments as much, rather the text, flood-fills & shadows - in which case we should be moving to Autodesk Impression instead (but that has similar if not worse interoperability problems with other programs).

I've never heard of Krita ... will have to look it up! Do you know if it at least does shadows correctly when saving to / opening from PSD? ... Wait! No it doesn't even save to PSD/XCF (import only on XCF), so that's not for me either! Though the rest of the Calligra suite looks promising, will keep an eye on that for sure!

1 members found this post helpful.

Photoshop current version, lightroom and Wacom drivers is at the top for me.

If Adobe would port their major software offerings over to Linux it would be a huge boost to Linux in the work environment and encourage other software vendors to do the same. As I see it Adobe is a critical player in the success of an OS. If they had of decided not to port to OSX 10 years ago it would have died. Microsoft office could even be just as key even though there is wonderful alternatives that work for 90% of people MS Office is just the professional suite business demands.

I am a professional retoucher, and I prefer not to use OSX as it always seems more limiting as an OS than anything. Windows 7 is the best version thus far for a workstation but a far cry from Linux. I feel that that Linux 5+ years ago would have had a difficult time making much way into the mainstream but ease of use and the spread of knowledge on its use and information available on the internet I hope it is only a matter of time till Adobe should realize it is a very viable platform and better than that of OSX or Windows 7 for their software.

I would just hope that if Adobe did port their software over they would offer both Redhat and Debian packages. Redhat would probably a big one for the corporate environment but Debian based distros have always seemed to be ... just better for me.

If Adobe ever decides to create Linux versions as a Professinal I would be more than willing to test and promote the use of Adobe products under Linux to anyone I could.

-Brian
www.brnyrk.com

Guitar Pro.

I thought that there were Wacom drivers for linux: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawik...itle=Main_Page.

Are these not good enough quality or something? I wouldn't know, I don't actually own a wacom device, but I looked into linux compatibility a little while ago, when I considered buying one.