Wine? Like a good red to keep the rants at bay? :) Or the library to run Pagemaker on Linux? Jeff, I'd be curious if you have a success story about running something that uses quite a bit of GDI under wine, if you could post your success story here... I suspect Pagemaker 6.5 or one of the pre-2000/XP ones may work OK, it'd be neat to see it work.
The "equivalent" list is interesting, because as Jeff has explained, for the user of an application, being successful at compatibility isn't just having the same features, but having the same menu commands and toolbar items that the user is familiar with, because the user may or may not be able to retrain their style of working with a new Linux application that behaves vastly different. Maybe the equivalent project needs to keep some metric or score of how costly the conversion is for a user that isn't interested in learning a new application that behaves differently. An example of this is Gimp. I love Gimp, it does everything I need it to do, and I find the menu and toolbox structures to extremely well designed. Across the board, however, 99% of Photoshop users hate Gimp. Yes, it does great high quality photo editing, etc... but they miss the layout of Photoshop, the menus and tools in the places they expect them. (Not me, I hate Photoshop's menu layout) If I was a traditional office app user, switching to a new application that claimed to be an equivalent, and if it was missing more than 2 key features, and the menu/layout was all different, I might not feel like switching either. I have a couple of thoughts on this: first, I think the equivalency project is great, and I keep sites like that around to give to others, they help foster discussion and provide examples, etc... secondly, I think this is an opportunity for a group to provide "conversion howto's" that show people how to learn new ways of working, new styles of tasks to do the same thing in the new/improved open source application, so maybe a PDF which is a cheatsheet card (2-sided PDF, could be printed and laminated) which shows Gimp for Photoshop users, or Scribus for Pagemaker users. Well, I'll try to install scribus this week and make a flyer and export to a PDF or something. See how well I fare... DK Jeff Lasman wrote: > On Sunday 24 December 2006 03:16 pm, Joel Brauer wrote: > > >> I for one thought it was an excellent list! If I wanted something >> that duplicated functionality of Windows, I'd use Windows. No wait, >> I'm using a Mac... yeah that's the ticket :) >> > > And I do use windows for that specific functionality. > > I was simply commenting on the fact that Scribus is NOT a replacement > for Pagemaker. Not even close. > > Of course my discomfort at having to keep one Windows desktop system > around simply because of the unavailability of one program does creep > through my thoughts, perhaps into a perceived rant. Perhaps I'll try > wine. > > Jeff >
