The "wow" starts a bit later, I’m afraid.
So, after five years from the release of their last operating system, Microsoft released Vista, codename “longhorn”. I think longhorn is appropriately bovine, given the amount of useless crap MS likes to cram in. Oh wait.. those are supposed to be features. My mistake.
In all fairness, I’m typing this on a laptop running Vista. I’m not saying that the new OS is any more sluggish than XP, but it certainly has more bugs than I’d expect for something that took five years to put out to the public, more obnoxious security hassles to work around, and really nothing that I didn’t have with XP. In-fact, I’ve lost the ability to play Sims 2, I now have to manually adjust my fan speed at startup because the Nvidia vista driver doesn’t support fan speed adjustments on BGP video cards, and I can no longer connect through a VPN that relies on CHAP v1 encryption.
At this point, it’s worth wondering why I am bothering to use Vista at all when there are better alternatives out there, such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu linux. I’m a web/graphic designer. Thus, I’m married to Adobe CS3. I could theoretically virtualize and run XP in VMWare in linux, but the goal is to not use windows, so VMWare solves nothing in reality.
Yes, I could give in, buy a mac, and at least be using a unix core, but there is the problem that apple’s laptops are rather expensive and not nearly as durable as my latitude d400.
So for me, I’ll tool around with the latitude until either it dies a natural death or becomes so obsolete that it is no longer productive. Then I will consider a shiny new Macbook.
July 17th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Hi.
Go for the mac asap - they’re only 800 quid (plus a mac copy of CS3). You’ll save that in a couple of months of productivity improvements and not needing so much therapary!
Dan
July 17th, 2007 at 5:25 am
There are ways of running photoshop in linux without using a virtual machine. There are many tutorials on the web about running photoshop on linux, using wine and other api’s. Check them out, and have a go at linux, maybe ubuntu studio. It will be well worth your time.
July 17th, 2007 at 12:07 pm
Alex: Good in theory, but not always in practice. I’ve yet to turn up a tutorial for installing all of CS3 on WINE, and I’m pretty sure it’ll take up more time than it will ever be worth.
Dan: You might be right about the productivity improvements, although therapy might be a stretch. I’ll consider it, but a mac isn’t my first priority right now.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:05 am
While I’ve not played much with it myself, there is a package called “Gimpshop” that takes The Gimp and makes it more like Photoshop to use.
Personally, I have setup seamless virtualization using VirtualBox, XP Pro and Ubuntu. The overhead is a bit high, in my opinion, in terms of hard drive usage, but the speed is as fast or faster in VBox that my system runs XP natively. And CS2 at least, works on this setup, I imagine CS3 will as well. The only thing it blows on is games, no 3D support in VBox.
Yes, it still uses Windows. No, it’s not a “Pure” solution. It’s also not gonna nuke my system from opening a virus’d email, either
July 27th, 2007 at 9:06 am
Thanks for the tip, Jeff. Unfortunately, the Gimp engine still lacks a lot of photoshop’s features that I’m really fond of, such as smart objects.
I’m not worried so much about virus. Clamwin AV is an excellent product, and far superior to Norton AV when it comes to the effectiveness / resource hogging ratio
I don’t see as much support in the open source community as I’d like for designers, but that’s for the same reason that there isn’t a lot of open source software out there for accountants. There isn’t enough of an overlap between the two fields.