| At one point last year I went all-out open source and dumped my W7 machine w/ photoshop and illustrator to switch over to GIMP and inkscape. I stuck with this configuration for about 9 months or so. After getting through the UI differences and learning curve, I was still disappointed. Most of these apps feel like they've only been handled by causal users. The worst memory was in GIMP working with layer sizing and floating objects, so many things were fixed and required hunting through menus or googling shortcuts to get them to resize or to place an object out of edit mode. The equivalent in photoshop is the enter key, or automatic layer boundary resizing, etc. The application does a much better job of staying out of your way. If you're noodling about with a few photos its no big deal but the first major file I had to tackle with a few dozen layers and objects burned me out completely. I literally stood up, went to the shops, purchased a copy of windows and got my old setup back. The secondary issue in the background of all this was the time invested to work around rendering speed issues, video drivers, wacom compatibility etc; none of which earns me any coin but needed to be resolved before doing any work. Unfortunately this will always be measured against the ease of getting Windows setup on a machine (less than half a day to a production ready box versus a solid week of problem resolution under the Ubuntu/Suse/Gimp combo). I aim for open source usage whenever I can, and the quality is there, my main gripe always seems to be workflow. If more professionals start using it and providing feedback, yes, it will mature. However I think at this point to claim they are a straight replacement (in the case of Gimp and inkscape) is a bit short sighted when you consider the workload some of these tools support. |