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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the verge of setting up my MBP to double boot to Arch or Debian and slowly moving as much as possible to Linux.

Unfortunately, neither Illustrator or Photoshop are available on Linux. Are their open-source equivalents anywhere near the quality of their Adobe counterparts yet? I've yet to try InkScape, but I know that the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating. I would rather work via ImageMagick, RMagick or node-canvas than subject myself to gimp.

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Just run those apps in a Windows VM. VirtualBox seamless mode is quite nice.

It is if you don't use it on Ubuntu+Unity. It's totally unusable on that on 12.04 at least.

I reckoned that was an option, but since migrating to OS X, I have never had to have a Windows VM installed and couldn't be happier. Having to put a Windows VM in order to migrate to Linux kind of turns my stomach a bit.

Argh yeah. Compiling ImageMagick is easier than using GIMP.

Surprised someone hasn't made a LOGO-like language for raster editing.

Is there any specific motivation to switch to linux? OSX might not be libre, but it mostly works (apart from setrlimit).

I simply want to do more and more of my computing at the command line and with OS X I often find that every task I want to accomplish is a little more complex than it has to be, and that over time that all adds up.

Yeah that's true. Should always try to mirror prod as close as practical in dev, and OSX != Linux. So I use just one Ubuntu lts VM with docker backed by zfs. That way, I can ssh to it and predictably recreate any number of isolated environments. Way faster than vagrant and still provides isolation, although docker could be driven by it. There's always a need for some sort of deploy/configuration mgmt to bootstrap to speed up testing and reduce tiny difference gotchas. The other good things are that it doesn't sacrifice osx usability, no reboot is needed and it doesn't require repartitioning.

> the last time I used Gimp, it was excruciating.

To be fair, it's a LOT better since they added the single window mode. I've been using it since then and I am quite satisfied (although I am not a heavy user). Maybe you should give it a more serious try. Inkscape is also pretty good I think.

Apparently you can get Gimp to look almost like photoshop[1]. You can see it's a fairly simple interface. The screenshot actually makes it look fairly clean.[2]

[1]http://elementaryforum.org/forum/how-to/customization_aa/des...

[2]http://s16.postimg.org/nbs29omth/Gimp_Like_Photoshop.png

Hadn't seen that before. Kicks the crap out of GIMPshop! Impressive.

try krita, mypaint, darktable,rawtherapee.

Darktable is broken in fundamental ways and the devs are stereotypically F/OSS hostile to bug reports about simple UI fixes and usability tweaks that haven't been state of the art for a decade.

It's the standard F/OSS model of "open source replacement for commercial software" that has some list of features nobody but nerds cares about and is completely unusable for day to day work. It's sad.

GIMP is easy to use once you adjust to its peculiarities. Blender is the same way, even before it got a facelift.

Photoshop CS5 works perfectly on Wine. I had it running on Mint 15 for a while.

and Netflix. Although it could be good for productivity.

Netflix actually works through a special wine version now.

https://launchpad.net/pipelight

or (older)

https://launchpad.net/netflix-desktop

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