Re: Competition

[Daniel Carrera <dcarrera%gmail.com@localhost>]

On 08/27/2011 01:00 AM, David Young wrote:
> At work the other day we were lamenting the high price of the tools that
> our designers use.  Somebody suggested free alternatives and the general
> agreement seemed to be that they would do in a pinch but not for doing
> your job.  The quality just isn't high enough.

Ok.


> I think that it's very difficult to match the quality of a for-pay
> monolithic graphics app with a free monolithic graphic app.  I suspect
> that it's rather easy to match the quality of a for-pay Gaussian blur
> function with a free Gaussian blur function, however.

Perhaps you are right. I cannot say, I don't know nearly enough about 
graphic apps.



> For me, the trouble with "the desktop" is that none of the traditional
> UNIX design principles (everything is text, composition of simple
> functions, blah blah blah) are apparent, and the gulf between what I
> want to do and how I do it is too great (too much mousing around).

Perhaps not, but you can have a "desktop" with umpteen terminals open 
like I do. I suspect that the tools I actually use most are "find", 
"grep", "awk", etc, and shell intrinsics.

I also rely heavily on software that is standard with Linux but you'd 
have to add separately with Windows. For exampl perl, gnuplot, latex, 
make, gcc, etc.

To me this is part of the desktop experience. To me desktop doesn't mean 
that you have to use the mouse for everything. Ok, I do use a web 
browser, a GUI mail client and a PDF viewer. Those make the bulk of my 
"mousing around".



> Please don't misunderstand this as an aversion to GUIs.  GUIs can be
> great, UNIX just hasn't got one. :-)
>
> FWIW, the desktop that I use is Mac OS X.  I find that it's more
> bearable since I use Quicksilver.  There *are* things that UNIX could
> benefit by borrowing from Mac OS X, btw, but WIMP is not one of them.

I once used Mac OS X for a year or two. It was tolerable, but I was 
thrilled.

Btw, what is WIMP? I assume you are not talking about Weakly Interacting 
Massive Particles.


--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.