In part one of this series I talked about why I’m going to be switching over to Linux. In this part I’m going to talk more about the actual additional software and what my options as a designer and illustrator actually are. There are only a handful of reasons why I would stick with Microsoft and windows. What’s really funny is that neither actually come from Microsoft itself. The first and major reason for me would be Adobe’s Photoshop and the now defunct (and one of my favourite applications) Macromedia’s (once again it will always be Macromedia for me) Freehand. There are other programmes of course that would make me flinch, such as Indesign and believe it or not my favourite text-editor, PHP Designer.

So before I made the leap, I started thinking about this whole thing a little more. Would it be a viable jump or could someone who considers themselves a designer/illustrator to make the jump into the Linux environment? Is it too harsh a landscape that I should just bite the bullet and stay put?

You’d be surprised how much stuff is available to the Linux user, either for a very small fee or completely free, so lets have a look at these options shall we.

Freehand Replacement

The biggest news for me to be honest was that Xara Xtreme was completely open-sourced for Linux users. That’s absolutely fantastic news. That alone makes me calm about the loss of Freehand. One of the great things about Xara is the fact that the peeps behind this application seem to know what’s important. Don’t force additional features on the programme. Just make it really good at what it does. Make it fast (easily on of the fastest vector programme on the PC at least). Where Illustrator is the heaviest programme in the world Xara Xtreme flies. This is a huge boon to the open source community and people should really be jumping on this bandwagon as soon as possible. Version 0.5 was released a month ago and they’re looking for more people to help out. I guess the main reason why people haven’t jumped is probably because they’ve not heard about it. I just finished reading this review over at Linux.com and it sees things in a very similar way. If Xara do actually implement things properly it really could be one of the greatest gifts since Blender and Open Office.

While Inkscape is a good little programme and I would never dream of bad mouthing the valiant efforts of the open source community, it feels clunky to me. There are certain aspects of the programme that could use with a lot of polish and I’m sure it will eventually get there in due time. After all we’re still on version 0.42 of the programme, not exactly the most mature offering. Xara offers some level of maturity RIGHT NOW. It’s got around 10 years of experience behind it

Photoshop Replacement

See this one is far trickier to be honest. There is the obvious contender for that role, mainly the defacto photo-editor of choice on Linux, being The Gimp. I've talked about this programme in the past, however there is an alternative. And I've got to say that it's a superb replacement, Enter Pixel.

Pixel seems like it’s going to be a kick ass application. It’s still in the Beta stage, but even at this stage it seems to be pretty mighty. I’ve downloaded the preview version and I’ve got to say that it’s incredibly nippy. It’s obviously not as polished as Photoshop, but I mean c’mon we’re on version 9 of that programme and it’s backed by a huge amount of developers. Just looking at what Pavel has done here, it does look as though he’s emulated the photoshop scope completely (which I dunno Adobe might have issues with this at some point) but he does add some seriously cool little features that PS doesn’t have which make perfect sense. Like an additional tab that has different configurations of the work space for any one document which enables you to flip and highlight different functions etc. It’s subtle stuff but it’s a got legs.

Indesign Replacement

Thankfully this has been taken care of as well. I've got a good solution in Scribus. As I've not really played around with this application I can't really comment on how good it actually is to dealing with my desktop publishing needs, however it looks to be a pretty mature and something that will achieve what I need (such as exporting as a pdf, etc). Hopefully it's slightly faster at loading than Indesign because that is another terribly heavy programme.

Flash Replacement

There is none. I know it's a massive shame that SVG didn't take off for Adobe, because then it wouldn't have had to pay MILLIONS to by Flash..erm sorry Macromedia. The real problem is that of course it took the 'easy' route out and left a lot of the open source community looking for something that could potentially do everything that Flash can. To be honest with you I gave up on Flash over a year ago now. The last time I really hammered this programme was for the ill fated Emmortel. I've moved on and now I'm going to concentrate on Javascript to provide me with animations. I hope that I have some animation project in my future, however it won't be with Flash and hopefully by that stage something similar on Linux will have emerged.

Xnview Replacement

One of the programmes that is invaluable to me for blogging is Xnview. The reason is due to it's size and lightness, I'm able to do whatever I want to an image, which is usually slice it, resize it etc on the quick and dirty. Thankfully the people behind Xnview share the same view as many other software houses and provide this programme for Linux as well, so I'm not really giving this up either and trying to find a viable alternative, although I'm pretty sure there is one.

One thing as Marco rightly pointed out in the comments of the previous post is that it’s really important to have applications. While Linux isn’t over flowing with proprietary products to use within, that seems to be a trend that is changing. Hopefully people will start doing what This move also gives hope to the future of other software manufacturers out there and a nice trend of them trying to cater to the Linux market. They don’t have to be as fantastically cool as Xara and open source it but at least they can make it available to the Linux market.

One of the things that magazines and tutorials and graphic designers and illustrators all over the world try and hammer across, is that the programme that you use shouldn’t really matter to the final work that you produce. To a certain degree I agree. It shouldn’t matter, except when you end up fighting with the actual software to achieve your vision. That’s when it become counter productive. Currently my thinking is that maybe, just maybe the tools on Linux will enable me to achieve my vision. It’s an experiment and I’m always up for experimentation. If I don’t succeed then at least I’ll have given it my best shot. If I do succeed, then I’ll have broken away from the shackles of being bound.