Sam Varghese
Saturday, 17 October 2009 13:14
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
A second case is that of Adobe Photoshop, a product from a company founded by one of the truly great programmers of our time, John Warnock. It is
the application for manipulating graphics, to the extent that it has also become a verb. When using GNU/Linux, the alternative on offer is the GIMP.
Now I'm not knocking the GIMP - it has amazing capabilities and more than suffices for me. But compared to Photoshop, it is nothing but a poor cousin. For a professional graphics person, it is a no-contest, Photoshop, despite its huge cost, wins every time.
When it comes to GUI mail user agents, there aren't too many that can beat the free (but not open source)
Pegasus Mail. This, again, is a Windows-only application. Written by an extremely intelligent New Zealander, David Harris, Pegasus beats the hell out of Outlook and all its various incarnations. Feature for feature, it just overwhelms every one of its competitors - it's well-designed and intuitive and powerful.
It used to be one of the must-use applications for me, but some years ago I moved to the command-line MUA, Mutt. After using Mutt, the use of any other MUA is something like drinking weak tea. No GUI mail user agent comes even close.
There are lots of other areas where Windows applications are that much easier to use and work without problems compared to GNU/Linux. There are areas like multimedia where GNU/Linux users are often disadvantaged because of proprietary codecs - but the average user really doesn't give a damn about things being proprietary or not.
Even when it comes to word-processing suites, Microsoft Office works much better on Windows than does
OpenOffice.org - simply because the programmers at Redmond have access to all the Windows source code and those outside have to make do with the limited information provided to them by Microsoft.
In my estimate, OpenOffice.org is a perfectly adequate office suite - but then try telling that to all the office workers who love Office like they do their own children and are so familiar with it than even an upgrade to a new version results in protests.
And changing the app? Forbid the thought. A physiotherapist I know recently switched to OpenOffice.org due to the outrageous cost of an Office licence; when I visited him recently, his office assistant was doing everything but throwing her mouse at the screen while trying to do her work using OpenOffice.org. (I showed her a few things to calm her down.)
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