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Novell's most-wanted list of Linux applications
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CommentsScott Morris, Novell Cool Solutions Linux community editor, says the data suggests users are satisfied with the Linux email, word processing, spreadsheet, and Web browsing applications already available. He says that the requested programs are mostly in areas of multimedia. "Linux sometimes has a reputation for being a little difficult to use or not [being] ready for the desktop," Morris says, "but what these numbers clearly show is that all of the basic needs of the users are being met. Tasks that are generally used on the desktop are being taken care of."
Richard Holder, a manager in the global partner and channel marketing division at Novell, says the survey started with the company contacting its customers to find out what they want on the Linux platform that is not already available. After they received more than a thousand suggestions for applications, Holder says "the next logical step was to go out to the greater community and find out" what they would like to see ported to the operating system.
As Novell continues to gather data, Holder says the company is contacting vendors behind software mentioned in the survey to gain information on whether their products might eventually be ported to Linux. "This is a way to have a voice, with ours, at that particular vendor," he says.
Responding to Linux users
| Top 10 most-requested applications |
|---|
| Intuit Quickbooks |
| Autodesk Autocad |
| Adobe Photoshop |
| Apple iTunes |
| Macromedia Dreamweaver |
| Microsoft Visio |
| Lotus Notes |
| Intuit Quicken |
| Macromedia Studio |
| Sage Software Act! |
IBM has long been involved with both Linux and the open source software community, with releases and project announcements coming from the company on an almost regular basis, but its Notes client has not yet made it to the Linux platform. The application offers personal information management tools and email and calendar clients, among others, for IBM's Domino line of server products, which can run on Linux.
With Notes unavailable to natively run on Linux, customers have until now had access to a plugin allowing it to run in a Linux environment. According to Notes product manager Heidi Votaw, the company has been doing internal beta testing of Notes for Linux, as well as selecting customers to participate in another limited beta test. She says IBM expects a public release of the beta to come sometime in the second quarter of this year.
Many customers also had been using Notes to build collaborative applications which they then run on Linux servers, even though Notes itself cannot run on Linux clients, says Rob Ingram, product manager for Domino at IBM.
By contrast, Adobe says demand for its products on Linux is not strong enough for it to act upon, although the company is aware of customer's desires for Linux versions. Pam Deziel, director of platform strategy for Adobe, says that Novell's survey is in line with the company's own internal data. She says that, of Adobe's products, Photoshop is the most requested application for Linux, with Acrobat coming in at a close second. And although she says Adobe does not comment on unannounced products -- and could not reveal whether any of its products are currently being ported to Linux -- Deziel says that the company is "paying attention to the Linux platform" in its server products, more than in its client software.
"It's an area that we continue to monitor," Deziel says. "We make product decisions based on the vector that we see.... [But] we haven't found sufficient business opportunity for offering desktop applications on the Linux platform."
Best for everybody?
IBM's Ingram says it is significant that enterprises are moving to Linux because it shows they want choice. And while the move is already significant for many enterprises, he says that if the applications organizations use are available on Linux, it could ease concerns about such moves and motivate more to follow suit.
"Customers have invested training and infrastructure around those software," Ingram says. "They like the idea of not being tied to the Windows operating system [but] it's important to them ... not to interrupt the applications they already use."
Novell's Holder says he realizes that significant work could be required of vendors to make their applications available on Linux, because some of the software on Novell's list has large code bases and could require a lot of work to port over.
Although some vendors, such as Adobe, take a Linux-agnostic point of view, the more customers that demand applications be available on Linux, the better chance there is of it actually happening.
Novell has no plans to discontinue the survey, Holder says. "This is the second wave [of the survey] to make sure that we're targeting the right companies and demand from our customers," Holder says. "We're gratified that the community will respond to requests for their needs. This growing communication will help everybody."
Comments
on Novell's most-wanted list of Linux applicationsNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
The whole point of the FOSS movement is to use free software, so some replacement will be written. Software doesn't just "crop up", by the way; some very talented people have to give up a lot of their time to develop it.
- ACT! Is a mature Personal Information Manager on steroids that offers Customer Relationship Management software capabilities. ACT! has features and capabilities coming out its ears because it has been around for so long. It installs quickly and easily on an individual machine and has the capability of sharing its database with others over a network. It is easy to use and has a large install base.
- SugarCRM is a server based Customer Relationship Management system written in PHP and is accessed through a web browser. It could be installed on the same machine as its client browser but, that was not its intended design. Most road warrior sales people will have difficulty running Apache, MySQL, PHP, SugarCRM, Firefox on their laptops. It is not easy to setup. It is not easy to use. It is not targeted at the same userbase as ACT!. If you squeezed the features of SugarCRM into a desktop application like Evolution, then you might have an alternative.
- Visio is a diagramming software package that has developed the ability to automatically diagram many many different things. Visio can automatically diagram websites, databases, whole networks, NDS, Active Directory, and lots more. Visio can output its diagrams as pictures, HTML, and it even stores attribute information in a database that allows your diagram to be clickable, pulling up more detailed information about the objects. Visio comes with a vast array of stencils or scalable pictures that represent thousands of different types of object and there is a plethora or third party stencils available for Visio. Visio drawings are dynamic with stencils and connectors adjusting to inserts, deletes, moves, resizes automatically.
- Dia & Kivio are crude drawing/diagramming applications. They allow their users to draw flow charts and stick figures manually. They have no form of automatic discovery/digramming features. There are a very few crude stencils provided with the applications and virtually no third party stencils at all. They draw stick figure flow charts with no backend database of attributes and meta data about the object. Compare these <a href="http://images.google.com/images?q=visio&ie=ISO-8859-1&hl=en&btnG=Search+Images" title="google.com">Visio diagrams</a google.com> to these <a href="http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/scrshot.html" title="gnome.org">Dia screenshots</a gnome.org> or the FAR superior <a href="http://www.koffice.org/kivio/screenshots.php" title="koffice.org">Kivio</a koffice.org>
But, to answer your question, the desire is for the companies to offer ports. People don't mind paying for the software if it is what they want. They do not want some half-assed wanna be attempt at duplicating the software. They want the real deal that looks and works exactly as they are already accustomed to. They already know how to use Quicken and do not wish to relearn everything in order to use the inferior GnuCash. They understand the complexities of AutoCAD and do not wish to spend years learning how to make VariCAD almost do the same thing. Almost!
The reason that these software packages are on the list is because no alternative exists. I guarantee you that all of the respondents to this survey are already Linux users that have already looked at the "alternatives" and blown Coca Cola out of their noses in response.
The other part, which you did not mention, is that buying decisions are often not made by the users themselves, but rather by top brass who often "force" people to use either an application or operating system that said top brass read about in IT World or some other similar periodical. For example, I once worked for a firm that used Apple Macs with Photoshop to do their graphical design. We got bought by another company, and their executives came in and forced the graphics shop (under threat of termination) to change to MS Windows machines, which gave the graphic designers the fits. Their productivity plumetted while they struggled with having to learn Windows, and they hated the repeated crashes that came with Windows. I know this, because I was their sysadmin at the time.
Thus, to keep your job, you may be forced to learn a specific software package which you find to be an inferior tool (e. g. having to learn Quicken vs. GnuCash, which is actually superior to the former). It's the network effect, not superiority of the application, that's in play here, otherwise Linux and/or Mac OS X would be on *everybody's* desktop by now, instead of the inferior Windows (especially XP). That's also why you still see some Web sites written "for Internet Explorer only" instead of "for any HTML 4.0.1-compliant browser", such as Firefox or Mozilla SeaMonkey.
Thank you. You've just proven my point. You offer up an alternative that is NOT an alternative at all. It does not work the same way as AutoCad, doesn't always handle AutoCad files reliably, and requires all sorts of special effort with Wine to make it run at all! But, then you go on to excuse it by saying that it wasn't written for portability.
Do you not realize what you are saying? Do you not see that you just went out of your way to justify an inappropriate solution to yourself? You're lying to yourself!
What does that mean? What are you trying to say? If you have a point make it. Who said or implied anything about software writing itself??? As for bigotry, I have no idea if you are a bigot or not but, there was certainly no bigotry in my post so, I resent the accusation and association.
Gimp has a really stupid name, and the user interface is not as well-organized as it could be. But what is missing from it compared with Photoshop?
(This is not a rhetorical question - I really want to know.)
__
Brian Jones
I cannot speak of personal experience, since I am more of a coder than of a layouter, but it would seem like under certain circumstances CMYK has advantages over, say, RGB.
Regards,
t
But they are able to grasp the essentials of CYMK.
I'm sorry but not only these children have no instict for RGB, neither do we. Just because NOBODY has ever been able or will ever be able to draw the colors cyan, yellow or magenta with just red, green and blue markers, or paint, or ink or whatever. Camera sensors, some scanners and all color CRT and TFT screens work with RGB. Screens mix light, not paint or ink, so I guess they have no other option than to use RGB. Cameras and scanners catch light of all wavelengths, they should be able to work just as well in CYMK as in RGB. The only scanner I've ever opened and analized used white light and red, green and blue filters in front of its sensor, sending the cyan, magenta, yellow and black informtion to the computer, which translated and stored it as RGB...
By the way I believe that most scanners nowadays do have RGB sensors. not sure.
More and more software starts using hue, saturation and lightness. I know the theory behind it, I'm able to use it through trial and error, but I don't like it unless I want to create special effects.
Another option some programmers think we should like is to select parts of a picture and define them as "grass", "light skintone", "olive" and so on. Maybe some people can do miracles with it, I can't do anything that way.
For me CYMK rules.
<a href="http://www.gimpshop.net/" title="gimpshop.net">http://www.gimpshop.net/</a gimpshop.net>.
Ok interface is out. This is gimp twisted to look like photoshop. Now it must be a feature.
Ie you can put any interface on top of gimp even a web one if you are nuts.
Just read what people say about GIMP v. PS
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 24, 2006 07:20 PM<a href="http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/05/2319247" title="slashdot.org">http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/05<nobr>/<wbr></nobr> 2319247</a slashdot.org>
Actually, all GIMP devels whould read it. There are pros who would gladly spend their money on something else but PS. But at moment GIMP is far from anything pros can use.
P.S. Excerpts for lazy. GIMP (1) lacks CMYK support, (2) lacks support for more than 8 bit per channel color support. IOW, GIMP is RGBA/32bit only. One can hardly imaging tool lacking CMYK support chalenging PS positions in desktop publishing. 16bit color support was mentioned several time - some scanners can produce 16bit value for every color making resulting RGB color depth of 3*16 = 48bit. Add alpha channel and you have RGBA/64bit.
If you go to open a file in Windows, where do you find "My Documents"? Right, nowhere! That's it! No further wth this program.
Using The Gimp is using stone tools; it is light-years behind Photoshop and will probably never catch up. I say this as a long-time Gimp user who had to switch to PS when I turned pro.
To answer your question, lots of things are missing from The Gimp that make it unsuitable for professional use. Here's a partial list, off the top of my head:
- Too slow for professional use. I'm not talking about the code, I'm talking about the workflow. We pros often need to work on dozens or hundreds of images per day, and The Gimp just takes too darned long. Here are a few examples:
- Severely limited size of clone stamp tool. I think the biggest you can make it is 20 pixels or something ridiculous like that.
- No healing brush tool. This makes some retouch jobs more costly than the value of the image.
- No 16-bit-per-channel capability.
- No IPTC header capability. No publisher will accept images anymore without these headers filled in.
- No <a href="http://www.digimarc.com/" title="digimarc.com">Digimarc</a digimarc.com> capability. This is essential to those of us who need to keep a lid on illegal usage of our images.
- No color management capability.
The last item is the real deal-killer. Without Color Management there is no way to ensure that the colors I see on my monitor are the same colors that a publisher will see on hers -- and also no way to ensure that what is printed will be the right color. Even if The Gimp took care of all of its other disabilities above, this one glaring lack alone makes The Gimp a non-starter for professional photographers.
<a href="http://www.freesklyarov.org/" title="freesklyarov.org">http://www.freesklyarov.org/</a freesklyarov.org>
___
Brian Jones
And the BSA is 95% a Microsoft front so I don't believe that M$ wouldn't stoop that low.
Someone showed me Photoshop, and I found it pretty clumsy to use. Same thing with MS Office vs. the OpenOffice.org that Riverdale Public Schools uses. I had lots of exposure to both OpenOffice.org and MS Office, but MS Office seems a little clumsy to me, probably because I use OpenOffice more often. So, I guess it's a matter of what you grow up with and what you're used to...and I guess whether or not you've ever been sued by the BSA.<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:-)
The freedom to do less!
The freedom to be more complicated!
The freedom to be more difficult!
The freedom to not look as good!
The freedom to pretend that it's about 10 applications rather than 10,000 applications!
Yea! FREEDOM!!!
Remember the Mac? Remember why the Mac wouldn't/didn't overtake the PC? It wasn't about price or "freedom", it was about the available applications. Macs are OK and all but, there are tens of thousands more applications available for Windows. That's why so many people choose Windows over the Mac. The same is true about Windows over Linux and the survey only scratches the surface. What you call freedom feels rather oppressive or at least restrictive to me.
Do you even know what oppressive means?
When your cult like OS allows me the freedom to access the most popular music site on the internet, call me.
When your cult like OS allows me the freedom to play the same games, even Flash games, that everyone else is playing, call me.
When your cult like OS allows me the freedom balance my checkbook electronically with a program that doesn't suck, call me.
When your cult like OS allows me the freedom to use the most widely used CAD software on the planet, call me.
When your cult like OS allows me the freedom to automatically discover and diagram networks and LDAP directories, call me.
When the supporters of your cult like OS allow me the freedom to choose to use the best application for the job without trying to ridicule me for not being "free", call me.
Until such time, your "freedom" is oppressive** or restrictive to me so, I can't possibly call it freedom. The freedom to suck is not much of a freedom in my mind, especially when I have to give up so much to get it!
**Oppressive adj (unreasonably burdensome : overwhelming or depressing to the spirit or senses) Sounds like Linux to me!
* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Peace
But, you completely fail to impress anyone because you completely failed to address one single challenge from the original post. In fact, you turn the argument from freedom(liberty) to free of cost with, I hope you have enough money to buy all the software you have stated above, because i certainly haven't, (let me guess you broke the law and craked them). You guess wrong. You fail to provide an effective argument. You fail to provide any evidence, let alone proof. You are an utter failure!
WAR! Freedom has never been won through peace.
Also, nothing on your list has anything to do with freedom. Saying "Linux doesn't give me the 'freedom' to run Photoshop" is like complaining that 110v outlets don't give you the freedom to run 240v appliances. I take it that many apps that run on Linux don't have the features you think they should have - I fail to see what this has to do with freedom.
Our society has come to operate under the assumption that "everyone uses Windows" - it is hardly a novel observation that it takes effort to swim upstream and use Linux instead of just going with the flow. Maybe you don't care much about the ethics of Microsoft and similar companies.
I really do care. I want everyone to have access to software that can be used for free that does whatever they want to do, with no worries about having enough licenses or getting in trouble for making a copy for a friend. I don't want to worry about getting audited by the BSA and being threatened with legal action if I can't prove I have paid them what they think I should. I don't want to worry that my purchased software will spy on me, or that it will quit working if I don't pay a renewal fee.
Since you didn't seem to grasp the importance of an above poster listing the FSF's "Four Freedoms", I wanted to give you some tangible examples of what we mean by "freedom". Freedom does not mean more features or functions to do things we wish for, and the lack of desired functionality is not a lack of freedom.
Either:
YOU ARE A TROLL, YOU WORK FOR MICROSOFT OR ADOBE<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...
Or
YOU ARE SO CLUUUUMSY, THAT YOU REALLY BELIEvE YOUR SOFISMS. And you dare to call stUUUupids to other people posting here... funny. No need to say who is the stuUUUpid...
You don't have the rights to do what you mentioned, that is true... but not because of Linux, or Free/open_source software impede you in any way todo all that.
The real reason why you can not do all that, is that is the owners of what you want to use who are unfairly restricting your freedom to use it. If there were not propietary standards you would not have such problems<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.. isn't it???
Nahh, nah.. You clUUUumsy boy... You should writte 100 times in a blackboard:
"I'm gonna think twice next time i talk, so I do not say nonsenses"...
Figh those who opress you, not those who help you, Silly Willy !
Freedom Angel
!!!!
!!! Re: FREEDOM!!! - Yours is CLUUUMSY freedom !!!
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on March 02, 2006 02:59 PMEither:
YOU ARE A TROLL, YOU WORK FOR MICROSOFT OR ADOBE<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...
Or
YOU ARE SO CLUUUUMSY, THAT YOU REALLY BELIEvE YOUR SOFISMS. And you dare to call stUUUupids to other people posting here... funny. No need to say who is the stuUUUpid...
You don't have the rights to do what you mentioned, that is true... but not because of Linux, or Free/open_source software impede you in any way todo all that.
The real reason why you can not do all that, is that is the owners of what you want to use who are unfairly restricting your freedom to use it. If there were not propietary standards you would not have such problems<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.. isn't it???
Nahh, nah.. You clUUUumsy boy... You should writte 100 times in a blackboard:
"I'm gonna think twice next time i talk, so I do not say nonsenses"...
Figh those who opress you, not those who help you, Silly Willy !
Freedom Angel
!!!!
options
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 24, 2006 05:09 AMACT! -> SugarCRM..of course, if you want one you can carry with you that's a different story
Visio -> Dia is decent and so is the KDE Kivio..mostly the lack in these is a good, quality stencil set
As for the rest...should a replacement crop up or should these companies work on ports?
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