What applications do you wish were on Linux?

[Rob Williams]

I know I may strike the wrong chord with some, but I'd love to see what applications people wished to see on Linux. Even though I use Linux solely on my primary computer, I boot up my other PC occasionally whenever I need to do some specific tasks... especially graphs with Office.

Here is my list:

Photoshop
Dreamweaver
Office 2007

If any of those came to Linux, and I don't mean emulated, I would be quite pleased.

So... what are your choices, if any?

[1c3d0g]

Photoshop - The Gimp
Dreamweaver - SciTE
Office 2007 - OpenOffice.org

[Rob Williams]

The Gimp - It's not half as easy as Photoshop to use, and I just don't like how it works. Editing pictures is far faster with Photoshop.

Dreamweaver - SciTE... will try it out. Use Bluefish atm... but I don't like it much either. NVU is horrible though.

Office 2007 - OpenOffice... horrible resource whore. Takes forever to start up, especially when dealing with .docs that are 10~ pages or more.

[Michael]

Rob, have you tried out AbiWord?

[Rob Williams]

Nope. Downloading it now to give it a shot though. :D

I think Photoshop is the biggest program I'd like to function in Linux. I edit a lot of pictures, in addition to watermark them. What do you use for the site Michael? imagemagick CL tools or an app?

[Michael]

Wrote a program to dynamically watermark them using the PHP GD library.

[Rob Williams]

Oh yeah, taking the easy way out I see.

;-)

[1c3d0g]

If you don't like The Gimp, there's Pixel.

For the slow OpenOffice start-up, uninstall Java. It takes no more than 3 seconds tops to start-up for me.

[Rob Williams]

I use Java for Azureus, hehe. It's not really the start-up that bothers me, it's the insane resources that it uses when viewing large documents. I've run large games through wine that haven't used up so many resources.

[1c3d0g]

Weird. I have 20+ MB word docs that open up in just a few seconds, and my PC is very modest (P4C 2.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM). :o

[Rob Williams]

Strange.. I have the same results on two PCs. It could be the mass amount of images in the document also, I don't know. Regardless, I haven't been much of a fan of OO.o that much, but I'll continue to toy with it. Kind of addicted to Office 2007 though... it's a very sweet setup.

[James]

As someone who's not particularly fond of OO.o., I can second the Abiword suggestion.

For the rare image manipulation that I do, I find Krita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krita) works quite nicely. I don't think it's quite as featured filled as Gimp, let alone Photoshop. The interface is quite nice, and it's also KDE native, which can be either a pro or a con.

[Rob Williams]

I've had Krita installed, but it never ran for some reason so I uninstalled it. Will try a fresh recompile of it and see if it runs this time.

I did play around with Abiword a bit... it does seem -far- faster than OO.o.