You can't go saying "immeasurably" and then go and measure it, man. That's just not on.

Make them make After Effects/Illustrator/Photoshop linux Xen, pleeeeeeease. I could ditch Windows and OSX then.

I forgot to post here but I have recently made OSX surprise even me, a grumpy Mac user, with how fucking stupid it can be.

I've always wondered why Adobe doesn't release on linux (after all, Autodesk did with Maya). Maybe one day they will.

Hah, they're moving towards being web services too, aren't they?

(I actually literally use Gimp these days :| I can't bring myself to use Inkscape though so I run Illustrator through Wine. (Inkscape is powerful and all that, but the UI is fucking dreadful))

(It's extremely weak for video editing stuff though, aye. There's some stuff in the works but nothing good enough to replace AE or Premier yet)

Because 2% of desktop market share -_-

Maya makes more sense because big studios obviously want to use Linux for their render farms so moving the whole chain to Linux is less of a step (and has more obvious benefits).

SteamOS (and the shitness of Win8/direction of MS) might eventually bump that 2% up to something respectable though.

I can't really even use alternatives anyway, they'd have to be absolutely 100% compatible and whatnot :(

They have a rendering engine Mental Ray (which also renders 3DSM & Softimage) as a separate product. Plus many studios have their own, custom engines.

Apple has proven with Aperture and Final Cut that adobe does not have a lock on the market -- all the more reason for adobe to move out of the walled garden.

You put up with GIMP but complain that Inkscape's UI is bad? wtf man :D

(I have limited needs to Acorn is fine for me on the Mac, and I ... don't mind the Inkscape UI at all, although I've never used Illustrator so I guess I don't know what I'm missing out on)

Final Cut seems to have taken a bit of a beating lately, professionally speaking at least. While becoming more accessible to the home user. I've used it a bit a few years ago but didn't really get on with the interface. Motion and Livetype were kinda fun timesavers.

Regardless, it don't much matter - everyone I work with uses Illustrator/Photoshop/After Effects and assorted related plugins. It's bad enough when Adobe updates a version, never mind trying to mix up semi-compatible alternatives.

At least my Office needs are generic enough that I don't need a 'proper' version of that.

Oh and
...ah man, Linux  :') 

Clearly got to be Butter Face.

I've still not got my head around a potential Windows 8 roll-out here in this School.  I can't get the tile start menu doing exactly what I want for user profiles.

Gimp's not that bad any more. Certainly no worse than Photoshop, which was always pretty dreadful. Illustrator has a decent interface though, whereas Inkscape is just... yeah, bad.

w3rd.

GImp, though much improved, is certainly still much worse than Photoshop*. My biggest complaint about PS is that all the stupid do-dads they've bolted on since about version 6 should be offered as optional plug-ins. And the drm and now cloud bullshit.

But the interface is actually about as good as it gets for such a complex and powerful set of tools. There's loads of people (mainly professional photographers) who only need to perform a few rote enhancements to their boring pictures of weddings, corporate smurfs and hamburgers. So for them the GUI and learning curve could be significant drawbacks. But hey, that's what instagram is for.


* full disclosure: I love using gimp.

I guess I put up with Inkscape (and its bad performance on the Mac) because it's the only vector drawing thing I've found that has a decent amount of features. I forget what exactly but I looked at several and they were all missing some obvious feature that I use a lot (and by "a lot" I mean "a lot on the rare occasions I actually need to use a vector drawing program").

And as to Gimp, well, no Layer Styles = no good tbh.

Pro photographers would probably do better using Lightroom if they're only doing rote enhancements. Way quicker.

Windows Ain't. It sucks.  :-(