Inkscape Version 0.91 Released 134
Bryce writes: Four years since the last major Inkscape release, now news is out about version 0.91 of this powerful vector drawing and painting tool. The main reason for the multi-year delay is that they've switched from their old custom rendering engine to using Cairo now, improving their support for open source standards. This release also adds symbol libraries and support for Visio stencils, cross platform WMF and EMF import and export, a native Windows 64-bit build, scads of bug fixes, and much more. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X.
Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, it's free? Clever Inkscape, very clever.
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Yep... Inkscape is the answer to the open source bitmap editor GIMP... mix the two programs and you have the complete feature list of Photoshop!
Re:Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually Inkscape is more of a competitor to Adobe Illustrator than Adobe Photoshop.
Re:Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:5, Insightful)
The GIMP *wishes*.
Inkscape is one of those 'Best of Breed' open source apps where it's pretty much all you need to do the task you're downloading it for. It beats the ever-living SNOT out of Illustrator on simplicity, ease-of-use, and, of course, price. You're not locked into Adobe's new SasS model or a huge license fee, yet can create great looking vector art with fantastic compatibility.
Compare to, say, PuTTY, or VLC Media Player. They do a single job, and they do it REALLY freakin' well.
GIMP does not. GIMP's UI is STILL a cluster@#$@ after years and years of development and user feedback, and the last time I checked, it still lacked the support for color matching that would make it viable for creating images that were print-ready.
Frankly, if you're working on Windows, you are far more behooved to use Paint.Net than you are The GIMP.
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Software patents (Score:4, Insightful)
the last time I checked, [GIMP] still lacked the support for color matching that would make it viable for creating images that were print-ready.
Have the patents on practical methods of color matching expired yet? If not, then it's impossible for free software to support proper color matching.
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I used paint.net for years to play around with game art and it's great. But when I bought a wacom it came with PhotoShop elements which does a lot more. It's not that expensive on its own and you don't need to buy into a subscription. There are plenty of more expensive hobbies. If you're doing these things for a living though I think it's always best to get the best tools. If I made my living in digital art I would probably have an adobe subscription.
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I tried to like The GImp, it is an amazing app, no doubt about that, but I agree, the UI is.. awkward.
What ever happened to GimpShop?
http://www.gimpshop.com/ [gimpshop.com]
I'll admit part of my issue with The Gimp is the long history of using Photoshop 5,6,CS and having to try adapt to their UI - just not happening.
Paint.net for Windows is very cool though still too feature limited but it has potential, very slim, fast, even follows the Windows colour scheme (yay!) - I hope it eventually has most of Photoshop CS's feature
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What ever happened to GimpShop?
http://www.gimpshop.com/ [gimpshop.com]
Thanks for reminding me that this existed. Wish my distro had a package for it. Not that hard to build from source, but a bit tricky to replace the default version. Maybe this time I'll try installing it in my ~/bin and leaving the version installed by my distro alone.
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I just had a look for myself now to see if it was still active, this is a little worrying: http://www.gimpshop.com/uninst... [gimpshop.com]
Says the advertising stuff can be disabled though but I'm always suspicious.
Download Admin
The installation of gimpshop is managed by DownloadAdminâ. For more information on how DownloadAdmin works, please go HERE.
Ech, whatever happened to a regular installer?
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I use gcc and make. What sort of installer do you prefer?
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copy con setup.exe ? :)
Re:Alright, time to pirate it! (Score:4, Informative)
Ok, I've had a slightly longer look, and (*cough* slightly customised version of *cough* the GPL notwithstanding) I see no way to obtain the GimpShop sources. There's a .deb but it's version 2.2.11, whereas the Windows version is at 2.8 (like GIMP). The source download link just points you to ftp.gimp.org
So, yeah, as far as I'm concerned, GimpShop is dead. Ah well, too bad.
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Sources? My understanding was that Gimpshop didn't actually change the sources, but instead hacked the changed the settings (gimprc) and string files (.po).
The creator of Gimpshop seems to have given up after having difficulties with other groups passing off their bundles as the official Gimpshop.
GimPhoto seems to be aiming to fill the same niche as Gimpshop. The developer of gimphoto wasn't using a revision control system which doesn't inspire confidence.
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The "GimpShop.com" website is not the official website of the project. According to Wikipedia, developer Scott Moschella doesn't run it.
"Not more than a few days after the OS X version was released and spread virally, someone who isn't me bought "Gimpshop.com", put up a site with hot-links to the files on my site and began advertising - LOTS of advertising. Soon, there were donate buttons, my name in the site's title and much more - making it look like my website.
I asked that the owner stop hot-linking my f
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I suspected something was fishy about the .com, but did not know the story. Thanks.
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One of the biggest changes in GIMPShop was the single window mode that docked the toolbox into the image window, GIMP 2.8 has such a feature as standard(if it's not default it's in the window menu, i think)...
Well, duh. I honestly did not know this. Thank you, AC!
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No torrents [thepiratebay.se] of it yet.
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Tch, I torrent all my open source apps from TPB to give me that thrill free software lacks!
I just wish they came with cool .nfo files with hot ASCII babes and cool x86 assembler coded intro.exe's!
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You can actually pirate FOSS. Just not in the usual way. Remember, piracy is really copyright infringement, and to infringe copyright means to reject the FOSS license (which puts the code under default All Rights Reserved copyright), then violate that.
In other words, if it's GPL, simply distribute binaries without source code. Or make a change to it, rebuild and then ship the binaries to that. You're technically going against the license, and the license gran
Re:Ad (Score:5, Funny)
Well, for Inkscape we at Slashdot just take a small percentage of the purchase price for every copy shipped; maybe we could work out a similar deal for your product -- what it is? This works best if your product is high-quality open-source software ;)
Money grabbing! (Score:2)
That's just low. Next you will be telling us that you have revenue share deals for all the big software. I'll bet you got yourself some really nice toys with the money you made from Firefox and LibreOffice you recently promoted. What next? Promoting KDE or Gnome with some sweet purchase price deals?
Also, why even promote this? What is this, some kind of news site for nerds? How dare you.
Have a lttle heart would you, this stuff matters.
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The secret is out! Now we'll have to return the gold suits and fancy cars ...
Port it to Qt, please! GTK+ is awful! (Score:1, Interesting)
I like Inkscape. It's generally a great program. But its most serious problem is that it uses GTK+ as its toolkit.
GTK+ is rife with serious problems. The first is that it's affiliated with the GNOME crew. Their grasp of sensible, proper UI design is very suspect, especially after the GNOME 3 disaster. For example, these are the kind of people who took gedit, GNOME's text editor, and changed it from this sensible, usable UI [wikimedia.org] to this hideous, unusable UI [wikimedia.org].
The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter ru
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The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish.
There's nothing polite about derogatory hyperbole. The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all. In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms. I don't think that can reasonably be described as "utter rubbish".
I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it.
Developing GTK+ apps on OSX is not as easy as it should be, but in my experience, at least, it's not all that difficult, eith
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Have you ever even tried to use Inkscape or GIMP on Windows or OS X? You're absolutely wrong when you say "GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms". Running Gtk+ apps on either platform is an awful experience. I'm not even joking when I say that Java apps using AWT and written back in 1997 still give a better cross platform experience than Gtk+ does today. At least those programs will start. I experienced the same problem as the GP with Inksc
Re:Port it to Qt, please! GTK+ is awful! (Score:4)
The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all.
He wasn't comparing GTK+ to single-platform frameworks. He was comparing GTK+ to Qt. He said that Qt is a far better framework if you want cross platform, and he's right. And Qt is hardly just a "windows or OSX" framework. Qt really wipes the floor with GTK+ for cross-platform /especially/ if you want an application to run on Windows, OSX, Linux, Sailfish, Embedded Windows, Windows RT, Android, and Blackberry, QNX, and VxWorks.
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BMO
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he portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all.
What exactly do either of those have to do with a discussion of Qt vs GTK+?
In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms.
I've use GTK+ apps on both Windows and OS X and they do not work "quite well". Many OS X GTK+ apps still require pulling in X11 which adds extra hassle and more dependencies whereas Qt does not have that issue (even if Qt apps still don't look completely native on OS X).
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Well another post suggests that Gimp *no longer* has an X11 requirement. So perhaps it's the skill and dedication of the porter not to bring in a kitchen sink of dependencies.
I've used several Gtk+ applications on Windows XP such as Geany, Pidgin and GIMP. All integrate more than adequately without issue, save preferring a weird file dialog instead of the Windows native one.
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>weird file dialog
It's not "weird." It's standard GTK+. It's the GTK+ file dialog. If I were to pick a single reason to never use GTK+ it would be the file dialog which represents /everything/ that is wrong with GTK+, especially since absolutely nobody in the GTK+ community wants to fix it. It's been that way for years and years, and people who point out that it sucks get told to fuck off.
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BMO
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MacOS X and Windows are both second-class citizens. They work poorly and inconsistently, and are not well-maintained ports. You can't build a Windows or MacOS X version of a GTK+ application and expect it to work properly. With Qt, you can. Nowadays with GTK 3.x, even non-Linux and non-GNOME are no longer catered for properly. This isn't new. Windows support was mediocre back in 2004 and it's still mediocre today. MacOS X is arguably worse. Case in point: copy-paste was broken in Inkscape the last f
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It "works" under Windows and OS X, but if by "working" you mean it runs but is generally unusable. I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it.
I've been using it on OS X for several years - it's clearly not a native OS X app, but works just fine. And for me personally, the new version is really excellent since I have a lot of old Corel Draw/WMF (yuck) files floating around.
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I'm just a designer, and I've never done any C++ programming,
You don't particularly need to know C++
Qt has bindings for even Lua if you want.
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BMO
Underrated Inkscape tool: Vectorizing (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the coolest things about Inkscape is that it does a good job of converting bitmapped images to vectors, which is especially nice if you want to combine source elements created in a raster-art program at wildly different scales. This capability is found in other software, I know, but Inkscape makes it relatively simple and (at least if you're going to use the results *in* Inkscape) saves some steps.
This is also a fun way to decompose images into constituent color layers, separate them, and then play with the resulting layers -- cool high-contrast results sometimes in combining just 2 or 3 of the resulting layers.
Have always preferred Inkscape (Score:2)
The last relatively serious thing I used it for was to draw tree form illustrations using a Wacom. I had always like the application, but this use made it clear how much more usable it had become than Illustrator. Granted, Illustrator might have made some changes in the handful of years since I've bothered, but I've preferred Inkscape's UI because it's just so much less clicky.
Glad to see the long-awaited new version. Hopefully they fixed some of the annoying bugs I saw using the drawing tablet.
Inkscape plays nicely with Inkcut - vinyl cutting (Score:5, Informative)
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Video demoing the new features (Score:5, Interesting)
popular libraries are "standards" now? (Score:1)
Look, there may be valid reasons to ditch your working code for adding a dependency on some other open source project. But this reasoning stinks.
Finally (Score:2)
I'd been thinking this would never see the light of day.
The Cairo backend stuff was a focus in 2010 and 2011 and everyone thought 0.49, the first version with the new renderer, was going to be released in 2012.
Whatever happened in those three years, I'm glad they've turned the corner and hopefully future development can be release early release often again.
Windows Users - Performance Tweak (Score:5, Informative)
For Windows, the UI will seem to lag or not redraw in real-time while drawing or using it.
Disable Rulers (ctrl + r, or Menu: View -> Show/Hide -> Rulers) will fix it.
I spoke with the very helpful people on Inkscape's IRC Channel for this tip.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ink... [launchpad.net]
This may also apply to some versions of The G.I.M.P.
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Knowing Ubuntu it can take months... at least not till the next release. If you want the latest on some apps you just have to forgoe the standard distibution repository and either add in the program specicic PPA or install it manually. Its not really THAT hard, once you have done it a couple times its not much extra bother.
Post like it's 1999 (Score:1)
Is it just me, or is this whole thread making you feel nostalgic for the good ol' Slashdot days when we gabbed about stuff that was a lot more fun to gab about?
Linux and open source, baby!
Whoa.
Did we live through our very own hipster 60's freedom-power revolution without realizing it?
GUI apps vs. desktop components (Score:2)
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Inkscape is awesome... but... (Score:3)
I love Inkscape and want to use it, but as long as there is no proper CMYK / printing support it's pretty useless for profession work.
Xara Designer Pro is still the only viable alternative to Illustrator at this point.
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I love Inkscape and want to use it, but as long as there is no proper CMYK / printing support it's pretty useless for profession work.
What the fuck is it with design people acting like their profession is the only one there is?
There's a whole world of professional work to be done for design on the web, in mobile apps, etc that doesn't need CMYK.
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The design profession normally includes printing, those brand colours and logo on your website or mobile app still need to be printed at some point.
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Who the hell prints in 2015?
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Here in Australia I noticed something interesting going into Woolworths (one of the biggest food markets here) and that is that their new logo is a slightly different shade of green on different packages / signs, sometimes darker, sometimes a little lighter.
I admit it's not a big deal, the problem comes mostly from colours changing completely, for example getting a decent looking red colour is an incredible pain because when it's off it turns into orange or yellow or brown (definitely do not want).
I'm not a
Re:O...okay? (Score:5, Informative)
Inkscape is one of the handful of apps (along with The GIMP, Firefox, OpenOffice, and some others that could round out a nice top-10 or top-20) that together make up a good base set of software that's more than good enough for most people's computerizing needs. (And, in keeping with that idea, it's included in the defaults for many distros, which is appropriate.)
What's funny is how limited / limiting the default software set is on Windows (a bit better on Mac OS X, but still falls short), if you're used to the kind of apps that come with a typical Linux distro, or are available for instant free download. The GIMP is not PhotoShop (you know how you can tell? You don't have to keep buying it each month ... ), and Inkscape is not Illustrator (ditto), but they're both *good,* and mean you / the 900 students in the school down the street / etc. can be playing with and using them now, for free, forever.
No one can make anyone care about this or much of anything, but quality open-source / Free software has a lot of person-hours behind it, and its worth celebrating, especially when the releases are separated by such a long time.
Serious answer for a question I suspect is pure troll, but Hey, it's my day off, and everyone needs a hobby ;)
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What's funny is how limited / limiting the default software set is on Windows (a bit better on Mac OS X, but still falls short), if you're used to the kind of apps that come with a typical Linux distro, or are available for instant free download.
I'm pretty sure it's due to all the lawsuits and regulatory pressure they've already faced when trying to bundle too much of their own software.
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I doubt it. The situation was the same before the lawsuits and regulatory pressure.
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Not really. MS views Windows as an open platform and invites 3rd parties to create the apps that run on top of it. This has always been it's strength but as a result mspaint etc. have always been limited.
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This last comment is very insightful and addresses something I've thought about from time to time.
You pay whatever it is that Windows costs (no, it isn't free just because it's bundled on a computer), and then what do you have? Actually, not much. You have an operating system and a few tools (and maybe a bunch of bundled demo crapware).
You install Ubuntu or Mint or similar, and you have a suite of tools, and the means to easily install more, for free. Like Inkscape, as the lead article discusses. Within hal
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My time has value, so if I have to spend 3 extra hours researching stuff on Linux that either Just Works or that I know how to do on Windows, Linux ends up more expensive. My last handful of attempts to switch to Linux ended taking a lot more than 3 hours, and I never got to a working config, or to a nicely working config, for a vareity of reasons (grub2 choking on AMD controllers, nice multiscreen handling and video support requiring different drivers, Upstart having no end-user doc,...).
Sorry but I don't
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My time has value, so if I have to spend 3 extra hours researching stuff on Linux that either Just Works or that I know how to do on Windows, Linux ends up more expensive. My last handful of attempts to switch to Linux ended taking a lot more than 3 hours, and I never got to a working config, or to a nicely working config, for a vareity of reasons (grub2 choking on AMD controllers, nice multiscreen handling and video support requiring different drivers, Upstart having no end-user doc,...).
Sorry but I don't see a need to spend hours and tear my hair out over software.
I really don't understand this. You're complaining about 3 hours? Do you have someone else doing your windows setup/installs, app installs, updates, etc? Every time I setup a windows box (it is rare, but it tends to happen at least once every 2 years, and last two happened a month ago - one win 7 enterprise and one win 8.1 pro)... every time, the updates alone take forever (days). Then there's finding and setting up all the programs that I need (which isn't much - browsers, email client, pidgin, putty, vim,
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When 3 hours, converted to money, equal a Windows license price, his calculation is correct.
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When installing windows, updating, sourcing all his various apps and licenses, and getting them all installed and updated, all takes many times longer than either the 3 hour example or an analogous operation in Linux land, then his money argument is horribly flawed.
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you missed the "extra" between "3" and "hours"
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No, it's not. The hours start AFTER everything was installed and configured (allegedly so, because Linux-based OSs likely ask you to drop to terminal and enter commands a long time after you thought you're finished).
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You're right in theory, but in practice, as I said in the OP, my Linux installs never succeed: fatal grub2 boot bug, inability to handle 2 screens *and* play video, inability to configure startup processes via Upstart for lack of doc... and that's overlooking creature comforts such as preferring to have my Start menu on the right-hand side of my main screen, using RDP instead of VNC because VNC is so ugly and laggy...
I'm sure all of that can be fixed (except the right-hand menu, best I could get was with...
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I'm complaining about, after the standard evening of "new OS install", being mired in non-working stuff, staying up way too late, and still having no solution in sight. I'm not even getting to the App stage, which I'm sure is OK, and a centralized repo must be very nice. But I get stuck before that, at the OS stage.
My most recent issues have been:
- grub2 simply not working with my motherboard
- issues with my dual-gpu, dual-screen config. I never got it to play video reliably, even setting up 2 different-rez
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My time has value, so if I have to spend 3 extra hours...
You've got to be fucking kidding.
A Windows installation from scratch, plus updates, plus apps, plus updates for the apps, is going to run you 5-6 hours, and maybe more if you can't find that one Adobe CD or your 'Net connection is flaky. Whereas you can install an "everything including the kitchen sink" version of any major Linux distro, complete with all the latest updates, complete with all the latest versions of all applications, in less than an hour.
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All the latest version of applications?
For me and people I know, the new versions of Inkscape and LibreOffice (or their point updates) will be in the OS's base packages in late May, 2016. For those who will bother updating the whole OS.
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Waiting a short bit until the latest bleeding edge of a given program has been tested and updated in the main distribution is, IMO, completely reasonable, and also desirable (it's one of the main reasons I chose the distro I use).
That said, for any app you want to keep as up to date as possible, there is usually an option such as the following one for inkscape on ubuntu (or many other debian derived distros):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:inkscape.dev/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install inkscape
After
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Can't you use the MATE desktop with your RHEL 7 clone? Or use it in with the next distro you'll use. It is fine, really, I have been using it since when I upgraded from Ubuntu 11.04 (Gnome 2 out of the box) to Mint 13. It is strongly maintained and feature complete as ever (only nag is in my recent version it had decimal megabytes and I changed that to binary megabytes with dconf-editor).
My comment had to do with using a distro that tracks Ubuntu LTS and not bothering with ppas, compilations, binary distrib
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I left for red-hat derivative Scientific Linux (Fedora is too bleeding edge and I don't trust the NSA with non-European Linux anyway, so Centos and Mint aren't quite independent enough for my paranoia ).
But redhat / Scientific linux repos have been too conservative.
But ever since the start I've been plagued with insufficient repositories, versions that are TOO old and dependency problems when I try to add my own repos or download / compile my own.
You picked the wrong distro. If you want stuff that is up to date, don't pick a distro designed to be stable and lagging. RHEL 6 was released in 2010. It does get updates, but the 6 line maintains significant compatibility across that line which will greatly limit its ability to easily run all the latest and greatest, as you have found out.
You were using Ubuntu and left due to Gnome 3. You could have just went to any of the ubuntu spins (kubuntu, xubuntu, lubuntu, etc etc) or to mint or to debian etc etc et
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Or to get conservative Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is an option (alternate CD or netboot to install without a desktop envionment) ; Mint 13 is the same OS and its XFCE spin is nice.
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I never get to the app install stage, I'm talking about the OS install.
I spent about 10 hours researching how I could use UpStart to start deamons. And another 10 (spread over 3 weeks, the dev was trying to be helpful, but he seems to work at it only on weekends, which is fine, but still...) trying to get grub2 (the default bootloader) not to crash on boot. Then had to learn about free and non-free video drivers when I had the gall to have a dual-GPU, dual-monitor system *and* wanted to play videos...
I'm su
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What's funny is how limited / limiting the default software set is on Window...if you're used to the kind of apps that come with a typical Linux distro, or are available for instant free download.
Bloatware remains bloatware whether it is FOSS or commercial and proprietary.
I have been" instantly" downloading free software for Windows since the mid nineties --- most often from sites that offer the best in breed whatever the licence.
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Openoffice and LibreOffice are a joke. It's hard to describe quality, but simply, they just are significantly worse than what the Evil Empire makes. For some reason, when I start Gimp or Inkscape, they also look amateurish and unpolished - interesting cue, since both are in the realm of visual design.
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> This obsession is certainly missing in Firefox's case.
Yes, just as I was reading your comment, Firefox went and upgraded to version 31415926535892718281828459.