Photoshop is running in Linux. If they can work out the last incompatibility bugs in Open Office, we’ll start to reach a tipping point, given the unhappiness with Vista.
[Tuesday evening update]
More bad news for Microsoft. Firefox has reached 30% market penetration in Europe.
The crucial 0.75% market share level is in sight! Break out the wheatgrass juice!
I would switch over to linux if Adobe made a native linux version of PS. But anyone who isn’t a hobbyist needs lots of speed and stability and running under a windows emulator doesn’t promise either.
It’s bad that there isn’t more choice for operating systems.
I use Windows and also a UNIX shell. I also browse mostly with Opera. It’s somewhat ahead of Firefox in the usability department. Some things are worse but some things are phenomenally better like the whole original Opera tab approach to browsing, the trashcan and speed dial. (And IE7 I don’t use when I don’t have to, it’s not even released for my OS, which is Windows 2000.)
And future Opera versions will bring even more, you will be able to search past opened web pages for content. (You know how often you had gone to a page that was a good reference but can’t remember where it was or what it’s name was…)
Linux requires so much tinkering that it’s just not nice. Installing software is often a huge trouble and there is less variety to choose from. Also the modern graphical interfaces are very resource hungry.
Hooray! PS was the only reason for me to keep a windows box around, along with SPSS which is finally available for linux.
Crispy, you wrote:
The crucial 0.75% market share level is in sight! Break out the wheatgrass juice!
Googling around, I see linux market share estimates are all over the place. It appears to me that the lowest estimates come from measuring web browsing of English-reading users. That gives the lowest figures (around 0.63% according to Net Applications). This ignores that the non-English reading portion of the world uses a lot more linux machines and that not all desktops (eg, hordes of government-run linux machines in places like China, Japan, and Brazil, for example) are used for web browsing on sites where this company can measure them. This ZDNet blog claims
that there are two studies which report linux desktop usage over 5%.
My take is that Linux is growing in market share especially in countries that can’t afford the overhead (fees or expensive computers) that operating systems (OS) from Microsoft or Apple have. It also provides the best upgrade path for a lot of old hardware. Still running a 386 or need that PDP-11 code to run on something recent? Linux has the best support for old hardware and a wide variety of emulators.
Hey K, I run Photoshop CS on my tablet under Wine, and it runs faster and smoother that it does on the same tablet under Windows XP Tablet Edition. The lines I draw on my tablet have smoother curves in Ubuntu than in Windows, so I say Linux + Wine + Photoshop for the win.
My only gripe: Drag and drop for opening images would be nice.