Continuing with powerful and impressive graphics tools, Xara Xtreme is another powerful package, itself drawing from a commercial software heritage, but now released and maintained as open-source for Linux.

By contrast, Xara Xtreme for Linux is free and has both binary distributions and source code available for download. This system is stable and receives rave feedback for its phenomenal performance, but is not yet feature-complete: the coders are still working on porting the package entirely from their flagship Windows release. A “What can Xara Xtreme for Linux do now” page keeps users up-to-date with the porting progress. Conversely, features still remaining to be implemented are also documented.

For existing users of the Windows’ version, perhaps the best news is that Xara Xtreme for Linux opens and renders all .XAR files, rendering 100% complete. This means that there is full file compatibility between the two platforms and any existing work created in the commercial Windows version can be loaded and used within the Linux release with full confidence.

Other features considered stable at this time are the bare essentials like selection, object delete/cut/copy/paste/duplicate/clone, zoom, group/ungroup, undo/redo and the like along with more advanced facilities such as profile editing, ImageMagick import/export, Adobe Illustrator import and profile editing.

Returning to performance, Xara Xtreme boasts a rendering speed of 7,690 polygons per second compares to Adobe Illustrator CS2’s 860 polygons per second on the same architecture. Xara state unapologetically they have the world’s fastest vector rendering engine and as a result Xara Xtreme is the world’s fastest vector drawing program by a huge margin. Given the massive amount of time rendering a multi-frame animation sequence can take, these performance gains can shave large blocks of time off any project.

Capping things off nicely, a series of downloadable movies cover the basics of using Xara Xtreme through to topics like photo editing, composition and web graphics and illustration. In short, there’s plenty of compelling reasons why you should take a good look at Xara Xtreme for serious hard-core graphics work.