Are you joking? You would not be dissuaded from forcing your employees to switch from the many world-class graphics tools on Mac to the terrible Inkscape and Gimp? I wish there were better graphics tools on Linux, but it's just not the reality right now.

Harsh word. I don't think gimp and Inkscape are all that terrible for casual use.

On that note, I honestly can't think of anything other than Adobe products and Microsoft Office that is preventing a mass migration to Linux (or rather Ubuntu, let's be honest) at this point. It has all other killer apps. Dropbox, Spotify, VSCode, Atom, Steam, Chrome, VLC, etc...

I know that Excel is the only thing keeping my dad on macOS these days. He is definitely not the Apple fanboy he once used to be.

What an amazing day that would be... when, at least Adobe, would release builds for Linux. Does anyone know if there's a serious obstacle for them other than market share?

While likely not as widely used as Adobe, until mechanical CAD software like Solidworks, Inventor, or PTC Creo support Linux I won't be making a full switch any time soon. There are a few offerings lacking in features and I guess you can do some FEA with Nastran, but there is no comparison to these Windows only suites.

And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games.

> And while Steam is supported, the Linux library is a shadow of the Windows library even if you exclude older, underplayed games.

True, but you can't expect things to change from one day to the next. There are many more games on Linux now than there were like 3 years ago. Like 2000 more. And it's still growing, and in 2016 we have got more AAA titles than ever mostly thanks to Feral Interactive's porting efforts. It's better and better for Linux gamers. And even AMD is slowly fixing its broken Linux drivers.

A lot of this seems like problems with the graphics sub-systems. It's getting better, but nvidia still doesn't have open-source drivers, and graphics switching still doesn't work (nor does power management). By "doesn't work" I mean that as someone with >10 years *nix sysadmin experience, I couldn't get everything to work right on Ubuntu 16.10 on a Dell XPS 9550 in a week of downtime effort (probably around 10 hours total).

If NVidia, Intel, and AMD got serious about Linux graphics support for enthusiasts and professionals, I'm sure we'd see a huge improvement and make switching viable for many traditional hold-outs. Chicken and egg, unfortunately.

> but nvidia still doesn't have open-source drivers

They dont have any open source drivers for ANY platform. So that's the same on Windows and Mac. On Linux you have the Nouveau (open source, independent) drivers for nVidia though, and you can already play some games with it despite major performance loss.

As for graphics switching you'll be happy to know this is a problem that the SOLUS distro is going to tackle in 2017 to have a better solution than the existing ones which are mostly broken.

Nvidia are serious about graphics for professionals. The linux driver is fast and continuously updated.

I have deployed thousands of workstations with various ranges of graphics cards. Nvidia is the simplest, a trailing second is AMD (they do make rolling RPMs easy though) They are just as buggy as the windows drivers.

Intel make brilliant drivers now, its just a shame the graphics cards are tiny compared to AMD/Nvidia.

Nvidia just don't do opensource drivers. For me, I frankly couldn't give a fig if they are open source or not, just so long as it works.

For the first time ever, I bought an AMD card. The open source drivers are miles ahead of the nvidia open source and binary drivers (at least with my old GTX 570 that used to work flawlessly, but now has tons of visual corruption).

The "TearFree" xorg feature does the best job of vsync I have seen in a long time. On the downside, the variable refresh rate stuff hasn't quite landed in mainline yet, and audio over display port hasn't either. holding breath

I agree. There is simply a lot of inertia on Windows heavy game development. Unfortunately, Windows will be needed for a long time for classic titles that probably wont be officially ported. Browsing through the list of top played Linux titles I am surprised by the many games I own that have since been ported, but I still see mostly indie titles. Until the really 'AAA' devs like Activision, EA, Ubisoft make changes I don't anticipate a n OS shift for the enthusiast crowd.

> Unfortunately, Windows will be needed for a long time for classic titles that probably wont be officially ported.

I don't think that is necessarily true. WINE does a wonderful job nowadays to run older games - while the support for DX11 is still very much work in progress. Most DX9 games run just fine, and older versions of DX have little to no issues either. IN some cases WINE does a better job running an older Windows game than Windows 10.

> CAD software like Solidworks, Inventor, PTC Creo, etc...

This is why I still have windows machines for work. If open source CAD software were competitive (or if the commercial companies offered Linux ports) I would be 100% linux.

Is Steam supported? Steam is in the Ubuntu repos and available for download, but it seems like it's impossible to install for thousands of Linux users and this has been the case for 4 years. The problem seems to either be that it wants 32bit libraries that 64 bit linux does not include (and the problem is impossible to fix, I have tried) or that Steam wants a different GPU driver to the one you have installed (why a browser and installer need a particular GPU driver idk).

At this stage in Steam use on Linux, I would say it exists, but it does not appear "supported" by Valve.

I think valve very much supports Linux. Their steamOS is built on top of Linux, so it is in their best interest to support it.

I've been running steamboat. Linux for a while now and have never had any issues running g it. Sure, there aren't a huge number of games for like us, but that has more to do with the game development ecosystem at the moment. Developing on Windows or Mac is just easier. You have access to all the 3d packages from autodesk and other companies.

I'm not talking baout the games, I'm talking about the Steam client delivered by Valve. It seems that a great many people share my frustration (1) You can tell me I'm wrong a hundred times but the link speaks for itself.

https://www.google.no/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&es...

Steam it fully supported. I run it on Ubuntu 16.04 and 14.04 without any problems. Just run it like this:

    env LD_PRELOAD='/usr/$LIB/libstdc++.so.6' steam

I have no idea why Valve doesn't make that command the default.

I have tried that and many other solutions and forums are still piling up with hacks to get the steam client to work on 16.04 and as far back as 14.x.

Just tried on fresh 16.04 install. Works out of the box.

Make sure you download Steam from official website, not the version packaged with the distro.

I have tried both on identical PCs.

That's interesting (I assume 64bit version of Ubuntu, right?). What GPU do you have?

Well, as a linux (latest linux mint, 64 bit) steam user for more than two years I can tell you it is pretty much supported.

I had it working on 14.x but cannot get it to start on 16.4 after hours of trying. Just because it works for you...

I am on Arch and I followed the documentation https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Steam and it just worked on every machine I tried it.

Bully for you. As an Arch user you must not flinch at having to tweak to get something working, but on Ubuntu for an app in the repository I would expect apt to install and resolve any dependencies and for the app to ten start.

From your link: If you have a 64-bit system, you must install the 32-bit Multilib version of your graphics driver, lib32-alsa-plugins to enable sound, and lib32-curl, lib32-libgpg-error to enable update at first run.

Maybe someone can explain why I need a GPU driver for what is in essence a browser and install wizard? Not being facetious, I honestly want to know why drivers have anything to do with the Steam client working or not.

And is it not time for 64bit Steam client on Linux so that users of 64 bit systems can be free of all these hacks?

>(and the problem is impossible to fix, I have tried)

Somehow I managed. 'dpkg add-architecture i386' ? Also, the steam client never asked for a driver on my machine. Proprietary nvidia does the magic I need for everything to run.

pebkac?

As I said, I had tried "everything" and that includes the "add-architecture-i386" fix. I have the proprietary Nvidia driver installed.

pebcak yourself, I linked to a very long list of google results for this very problem, suggesting quite strongly that the problem does not just lie with me but with the way in which Valve choose to roll out the Steam client. Or are you suggesting that dpkg -i steam.deb and resolving some dependencies is beyond all of those Linux users? Or maybe the problem does actually lie with Valve.

One thing that I've run into when running Adobe stuff on OS X is that it fails catastrophically on a case-sensitive filesystem. That would be the first thing to sort out; short of that I think it would be a matter of platform integration for color management, and windowing system integration (iBus, libnotify). I'm sure there's plenty more in the way of technical difficulties in porting Creative Cloud. One reason they might do it is to capture the film industry, which seems to do grading and compositing on Linux (which is why Autodesk's products in those categories support it).

I actually reard in an HN comment that OS X's case-insensitivity by default was a choice that revolved solely around compatibility with Microsoft Office, so I think you're on to something.

> reard

Is that a combination of heard and read? I like it!

I rear you!

That sounds unlikely.

I believe case preservation but insensitivity has been in Mac OS since the original Macintosh File System; certainly it was in the Hierarchical File System and was inherited by HFS+. When they switched to OS X, they still had to maintain filesystem compatibility for the Classic system, and maintaining it for the entire OS probably made porting other Mac applications simpler as well.

I think here's the comment he was referring to[1]. You're right, case-insensitivity was introduced in HFS or earlier. Back then filenames could use any byte except ":". With HFS+ it accepted all Unicode, where case-sensitivity gets quite a bit trickier. With the later switch to OSX it would have been a great time to change the default to case-sensitive if they wanted to, but as they said, you're then betting on a few killer apps like Office and Adobe products supporting it. Office has always been notoriously slow to update and Adobe has been notoriously slow at adopting new technologies like Carbon and Cocoa. I'm sure Apple at the time was in close communication with those teams.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877431

Speaking of Autodesk, they do have SketchBook Pro, not sure they have Linux version of it.

I meant film. Where all of the major grading and editing packages for large productions are available for Linux. Please calm down. :- \

Also, I think it's pretty unfair to call Inkscape "terrible". It has, by far, the better shape editing tools (especially CSG) between it and Illustrator. As a bonus, Inkscape tends to output SVG files with maybe one or two unwanted transform()s, rather than the six or seven you get with a typical Sketch or Illustrator SVG.

What about Cinelerra?

Let alone video editing software! If I'm missing something let me know, but last time I checked people were recommending editing within Blender, of all solutions.

Blender really isn't just a 3d modeling tool, it's a bit of a hodge podge. It does things well though. It gets the name "blender" for its video compositor features, comparable to AfterEffects.

For video editing, kdenlive is the state of the art on linux. Here's a guide written by a professional video editor who uses only free software http://slackermedia.info/

I've heard about https://kdenlive.org/ but never used it for real myself.

Using Kdenlive regularly and it does simple jobs very well and is really stable nowadays. It's certainly nothing like Adobe Premiere but it works.

Lightworks? It is pretty much the best software i've used for that and it runs even more stable on linux than windows

Depends on your industry; there are bigger players in film than Adobe. LightWorks is quite accessible, and Autodesk has lots of software for you to throw your money at.

Black Magic Davinci Resolve is fantastic on windows but costs money on Linux. For professional video editing I was very impressed after having tried kdenlive, sony vegas (and premiere long ago).

> world-class graphics tools on Mac

I hope you don't mean Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator. I tried those a couple of weeks back. Compared to Gimp and Inkscape they are as buggy as hell. Simple .png export with custom dpi often doesn't export to custom dpi. Exported images often aren't pixel-precise if you repeat the export and layer boundaries somehow suffer from float rounding errors if you load/save the file multiple times. I find it amazing how supposedly professional tools can have such major problems. I guess it's just good marketing.

The only thing missing in Gimp is CMYK support and that might be sole reason people are still using Adobe products.

Adjustment layers/non-destructive effects are really the biggest missing pieces in GIMP

Gimp has a learning curve just like everything else. It's _different_ from Photoshop, but for most tasks it's not actually _worse_. It needs to be learned. I learned it and it's comfortable to use.

Does Gimp have any kind of smart object equivalent yet? I've been using Photoshop for years and haven't been able to move to Gimp because it's missing a lot of "non-destructive" editing features like smart objects, smart filters, adjustment layers, etc.

Not that I'm aware of. The workflow would be to make a copy of the thing before you do a destructive operation on it. You can put it in a hidden layer or something.

save your image state in git, you get non destructive editing with extra layer of control. But its not seamless.

Has the CMYK situation improved? For someone that needs to output files for offset printing, that is an instant deal breaker.

I don't know much about CMYK, but I found this summary on the current state of CMYK support in Gimp: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GIMP/CMYK_support

Gimp is definitely horribly bad but there are good graphics programs for Linux - Houdini, Nuke, Digital Fusion, Maya, etc.

And Krita.

Hmmm... Most iOS devs I see here use their Macs, not OSX VMs running on Windows/Linux PCs.

Well I might give it a try, anyway...

For one, OSX in a VM is a bit tricky. Also it's expressly illegal to run OSX in non-Apple hardware, at least with its standard license.

"Illegal" is not a correct word. It infringes on Apple's EULA, and is at most copyright infringement.