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“Why did the chicken cross the road?” Well you know that answer, but it is very analogous to “Why did the Web Developer switch to Linux?” If the OS (Operating System) is the bridge, then the Applications is the other side of the bridge. That is to say, in some cases, the grass is indeed greener! So let’s begin by talking about grass, or rather, Applications for productivity.
1. Editors: This was, and still is a bit on the tricky side. I had gotten so accustomed to utilizing Adobe’s GoLive that any other interface just seemed archaic at best. I used Dreamweaver for a short time, and that was just way to cluttered to be of any real coding value. And I have always despised drag-n-drop methodology. In addition, many people who use Dreamweaver get so reliant on wizards that if they had to use a basic text editor they would be completely lost. I never really had that problem with GoLive since most of its interface was designed on the production side of things, making ftp’ing and version-ing much easier, but still allowing for hard-coding your page. Moving over to Ubuntu gave me many options for an editor, Bluefish, Amaya, Quanta Plus, and Screem. Bluefish looks kinda nice, but seemed to fall short in some respects, particular with regard to having a likeable interface. Screem has a great interface, but seems to be devoid of options. Amaya has some real potential, since it was designed and built by W3C for strict code adherence, but I haven’t spent the time with it to make it functional for me. Quanta so far has been my editor of choice, simply because I could start using it immediately. I could open several pages in their own unique tabs, which is nice for me because I swap back and forth between my HTML page, and my CSS pages ALOT! I haven’t tried opening my javascript pages in there yet, but I’ll soon test that. Quanta also has some great plug-ins as well. An XSL and Cervisia proves to be a bit attractive although I haven’t used them yet. I really like the preview button, but I wish I could keep the preview button in a separate tab so I don’t have to keep swapping my main html page between edit and preview mode. This was what really made using GoLive very, very likable. In short it looks like Quanta will be my editor of choice until I give Amaya a fair trial.
2. Graphics, Graphics, Graphics: I am usually graphics intensive, it helps me with my creative outlet. I own a really nice Cannon digital camera, which is nice to have quality imags to work with, but in addition to this, I enjoy the creative process that begins with a blank sheet of paper. Adobe Illustrator is an amazing product, and I loved working with it, but in turning to open source alternatives I found that Inkscape Vector Illustrator is a great tool in its own right, and quite a bit easier to use than Adobes product. True, Adobe spends alot of time and energy in its interface, and hands down, I don’t think anyone can beat it, but weighing the cost, I found it much more useful to use Inkscape. If you have ever had problems manipulating Bezier curves, they seem to be easier with Inkscape. As far as photomanipulation, The GIMP, and CinePaint is what I worked with, although, CinePaint seems to be more geared toward touching up video and the like, and I could never seem to get around its interface very easily. At first I really did not like the GIMP, it seemed like a cheap version of Photoshop, but after spending some time with it, I am actually beginning to enjoy The GIMP more than I liked Photoshop. It really does automate and run much nicer than Photoshop and seems to use less than 10% of the resources that PS uses. Lets face it, if you have 2 Adobe products running, you can flat eat up processor and memory. GIMP runs smooth and has never crashed on me at all, nor has it rendered my PC useless, both experiences I have had with PS CS2. And here is a big plus, you can add a special module plug-in on GIMP and basically run every plugin and script that you can run in Photoshop. Just copy paste into the appropriate directory and you are in business. So everything that I used to do in PS CS2 I can now do in the GIMP. Incidentally, I like GIMP’s scaling and cropping tools much, much better than PS. In fact, I think its worth the switch just for those two tools alone. I do miss the right-click option on the layers panel, however, I find that I am much more productive and much less reliant on the layers panel than I was with Adobe. The PS product tends to make you layers dependent, and the GIMP lets you get to the art in a much more expedient fashion. That is just my personal opinion however. I havn’t worked with Synfig Studio much, however it looks promising as a replacement for Flash, but I pretty much abandoned Flash after learning it. True you can get really cool flashy stuff, but I never really enjoyed using it. Plus in a web-page production environment, Flash takes awhile to load and I’m just not interested in creating that kind of media. I may play with .swf’s again, but not anytime soon. Especially since I found an awesome little toy called Blender. Blender is not a program for the faint of heart, and they tell you right off, that it does not conform to interface standards, in short you will relearn everything you ever thought about graphics production. But Blender is so incredibly powerful as a graphics creation device it is simply amazing. If Blender will simply add some Vectoring capabilities (like Illustrator) and image manipulation (The GIMP), I would strongly suggest that it be your one-stop-shop for graphics development. But to be fair Blender isn’t interested in doing that. Blender is a 3-d graphics rendering application, and boy does it do 3-d. The 3-d environment is a bit brutal learning, and its so dependent on mouse orientation, it can be maddening, however once you get a few tutorials under your belt, and ‘animate’ or rather render a few images you will be hooked. It took me around 3 days to do anything the least amount productive, but once I got the basic skill set, I can do many things. I will save more on Blender for another post. One thing I want to mention is that Blender is 1. free, 2. available on the top three operating systems. Mac, Windows, and Linux. It is really a very attractive program.

Conclusion: or is it?

Well, this is my build so far, and although I have had a few stops and starts along the way, I am starting to be really happy with what I have put together. But even if you do not perform alot of Web Devleopment kinds of activities, I think you will find Ubuntu a really great and in many ways superior operating system compared to Windows. Its faster, its more stable, its safer, and its free. The main reason why I switched over to open source, was when Adobe introduced its new CS3 Master Suite at a whopping $2400.00. In my opinion this is border line price gouging. I thought I would just stick with my CS2 suite since I had already bought and paid for it, but then I thought better of it. If you utilize a product like Adobe for too long, you will suddenly find yourself not being able to do ANYTHING without it. I’m not going to pay that much money so I can become a lazy coder/developer. While you can say it is just as true for open-source alternatives, I would have to acquiesce. What I could say is that I did it for a whole lot less, and in that vein, who got lazy in the smartest way possible?

-rc