4 Windows apps I can't let go

If you've read anything by me in the past month, you've probably seen that I moved to Linux. I'm extremely happy here but I still find myself loading Windows in VMWare for several tasks.

Linux is awesome. It's both prettier and faster than Windows and I've found myself falling in love applications like gedit because they're both simple and incredibly powerful (tabs, code highlighting, remote editing, line numbers, language lookups, spell checking and full, key-bindable scripting access to do anything else!)

However, while I've replaced most of my apps, I still have to boot a virtual machine running Windows to complete my workflow. Some of these are particular to who I am and how I'm most comfortable working, but I'm willing to say there are probably a few other people out there struggling in similar situations.

1. Adobe Fireworks is a jack-of-most-trades bitmap and vector drawing application. It's integral to my workflow because its options for slicing up and optimising are so radically simple compared to apps like Photoshop and just as powerful. It's just the right mix of vector, bitmap and web for me and there's nothing like it for any platform.

   I've just found that the MX2004 version works fine under WINE so I may fall back to that, and in all honesty, they haven't introduced any features in the last three versions that I actually use.

2. In a similar vein, I'm just as addicted to Adobe Illustrator. AI is a superb vector imaging package that I use for my more industrious designs (like the current one). And here's the big problem: I've got years of work trapped in Adobe formats.

   However, I think Illustrator is far more likely to be replaced than Fireworks, namely because lots of people want a viable alternative too, whereas Fireworks is just a little too niche and general at the same time. Inkscape and Xara Xtreme look promising but they're still a long distance from keeping up with Illustrator.

3. This one is all my fault. I'm an idiot for mentioning it in a list like this but I'm tethered to IIS (web server) and Visual Studio for ASP.NET development. It's just an awesome set of tools that make life doing fairly complicated programming as simple as possible. In other words, I'm not looking to replace C# with another language.

   Mono is looking like it might be a viable alternative further down the line, but it's always going to be several steps behind and I'm not going to get involved until the Mono runtime works with proper MSIL generated against .NET packages, and the .NET runtime runs MSIL generated against Mono packages... If that ever happens.

4. The last and most surprising one out of all this is Explorer. Yes, the crappy, always-crashing file manager (amongst other things) for Windows.

   This is probably down to my stupidity, but I can't find a decent way to find files by filename in a specific folder in Nautilus. Every time I try doing a search, it comes back with a list of files from a random directory, so I just share the dir (if it's not already shared) with the VM, open up Explorer, navigate to the dir I want to search in, press F3 and I'm where I want to be.

   From the terminal, I can use find, but this makes it a bugger if I want to find things on SMB shares, ssh connections, etc, soft-mounted through Nautilus. If I'm being a fool, please kick me in the right direction.

What are my chances of ever getting off these?

Adobe are, I think, going to remain best-of-breed software producers for some time — they just need to get their arse in gear and realise there are more than two platforms where people want to do design. I'm not saying FOSS organisations shouldn't bother trying to make alternatives, just they're going to have to be damned good in plenty of respects.

Microsoft won't be making Linux software for years... A decade if I had to guess, and by then, I'd say it's too late — I won't want their software.

Written by Oli on Monday, 19 November 2007. Tagged with linux. Read 2660 times. If you liked it, please give it a digg.

1 to 10 of 13 < 1 2 >

#1 — Author comment /* 12 months, 8 days ago */

There are a few more applications I didn't think to mention:

1. Steam (HL2, TF2, etc),
2. IE6 (for webdev testing), and
3. An obscure app to upload homebrew to my Nintendo DS cartridge

These all run through WINE and are only a reminder of Windows. They are irreplaceable due to their uniqueness, and therefore, don't count (IMO). A purist may see otherwise.

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Oli Numero Uno

#2 /* 12 months, 8 days ago */

Nice blog!

I'm not sure if Inkscape users would agree with you about Illustrator. Myself I'm a big Inkscape fan and user, but never used Illustrator so I can't really say. There are more than a few messages from Illustrator users switching to Inkscape on the mailing list so I have to presume it is a compelling choice for *some* people (not all).

For me, (a full-time linux user for over two years now) I still keep a VM with XP on it for 3 applications:

1. Video editing (simple MovieMaker stuff for home video editing). There's simply nothing approaching this on Linux (yet!). But hopefully this will change.
2. MS PhotoStory - I do a lot of photography, and the way you can put together nice slideshows with panning, zooming and music so simply is sadly something I've yet to find a windows equivalent for.
3. MS Powerpoint - I use Openoffice whenever possible, but I need PP for the part time college course I teach. It's what they have on their media equipment that I use (I can't use my own pc for the weekly course slideshow).

But I think a lot of these things will come with time. In photography and media, Linux is really improving. As long as that keeps happening, I think it's only a matter of time before the VM running XP will disappear.

I do a fair amount of Inkscape and other linux related stuff over on my blog. You might find it interesting (or might not! ;) ) It's at http://jack-of-all-tradez.blogspot.com

RQ

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Richard Querin Normal User

#3 /* 12 months, 8 days ago */

I take it you mean: Macromedia Fireworks, not Adobe Fireworks? Yes i am an ass :D

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WildThing85 Anonymous User

#4 /* 12 months, 7 days ago */

Microsoft Access essential for those one-off db apps created in a few hours for a few $$.

(thanks for showing in a graph that norton AV slows things down, we all knew it but a graph beats 1000 words anytime...)

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Justin Anonymous User

#5 /* 12 months, 7 days ago */

"An obscure app to upload homebrew to my Nintendo DS cartridge"

You might be able to install DSFTP on your DS and use your FTP client thereafter to make transfers. Of course, that limits the transfer speed to that of your Internet connection.

Cross me and be thagomized.

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Stegosaurus Normal User

#6 — Author comment /* 12 months, 7 days ago */

Richard, you make some great tutorials. Have a look at the most complex stuff I've ever made in Illustrator. I'm no graphic artist, so this is pretty tame in comparison to most people's needs: Spam chart from Shouldn't ISPs protect their users?

Charting doesn't seem to be part of Inkscape (yet) but I imagine it wouldn't be impossible to import the shapes from something like Dia.

Office is one that -thankfully- I'm not tied to, but a lot of people have issues getting away from. To make things harder on people's future platform decisions, MS Office 2007 is a great application and it's light years ahead of Open Office in terms of usability (for now) and looks, let down only by it's lack of open format, or should I say, its corrupted open format. The IBM/Lotus Symphony version brings the gap down, but Linux's Office applications are years of development behind the rest -- probably too far to ever catch up, considering the rise of office-webapps.

I forgot to mention on thing, while I'm still talking MS: MSSQL Server Management Studio Express, and SQL server, again both for developing ASP.NET. They're both relatively light and they do exactly as I need them to. I may consider migrating away to MySQL at a later time but I'll need to find another application to manage it with (a desktop one, PHPMA too slow to get things done).

You might be able to install DSFTP on your DS and use your FTP client thereafter

That would be a comfort if Linux FTP clients were any better than a kick to the head. I get on okay with Nautilus (gnome's version of Explorer) but it's a bit of an arse at times. It's really no pain loading it through WINE so I'll stick with it for now.

I take it you mean: Macromedia Fireworks, not Adobe Fireworks? Yes i am an ass :D

Nope. Macromedia was bought by Adobe and rebranded all MM products as their own. But yes, you are an arse.

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Oli Numero Uno

#7 /* 12 months, 7 days ago */

Have you considered Django for web development? I switched to it from ASP.NET (after migrating to Linux), and I find it just awesome! And it's much faster than even the most accelerated raw PHP
But for me there is another reason for switching. We are going to deploy two Django projects on Ubuntu VPS (provided by hosting service). This VPS server consumes about 80 MB of RAM with all services necessary for running Django (except MySQL). So 512 MB VPS host is more than enough for pretty heavy loads. And now look at Windows Server 2008 system requierements. Its MINIMAL requirement is 512 MB RAM but it's not likely you'll be able to do anything with it. You need at least 1 GB for the system just to normally operate(just like Vista)
This means that Windows 2008 VPS definetly won't be an option for hosted environments.
I'm clearly going Linux, Python and Django for web development.

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Andrey Anonymous User

#8 — Author comment /* 12 months, 6 days ago */

The webdev isn't really about the server platform for me. It's about the language and the investment I have in it already.

PHP is horrid and PHP frameworks are hacks. There. I said it. I use PHP and I've toyed with a couple of frameworks, but seriously, it's not in the same ballpark elegance-wise as C#+.NET.

This site also represents some 10 to 20 -thousand lines of code, spread out over hundreds of hours of sweating and swearing -- I mean programming. It works well and it's a dream to maintain. I enjoy looking after it in its current state and it's a hobby, amongst other things. I'm a day will come along when I want to do a serious test of another language with better features and performance, but that language still doesn't exist in my world.

Hosting TPCS is cheap because it's such an efficient engine that it lives under heavy load quite happily on a shared server. If, as I said before, Mono gets good enough, that may give me an exit plan onto a cheapo dedicated Linux box but it's not really an issue for me at the moment.

So, all in all, I'm not too peeved that I run VS.net and IIS. They're nice tools to work with.

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Oli Numero Uno

#9 /* 12 months, 6 days ago */

I agree that PHP is bad and ugly. But Django is Python framework and Python is really good language in my opinion. And if you like C#, Python is worth trying.

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Andrey Anonymous User

#10 /* 12 months, 3 days ago */

Hey this is cool but IE SUCKS

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PENIS Anonymous User

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