How long do you end up waiting for an Amiga driver to be released?
Zero seconds. All the drivers I've needed have been out for years, and available on Aminet.
Regarding the comments on Gimp - I don't understand any of the criticisms. I wasn't a Photoshop user, instead I migrated from Degas Elite (Atari ST), to Deluxe Paint (Amiga), to Paint Shop Pro (Windows) to Gimp (Linux). The path wasn't at all painful and I can still switch between Gimp and PSP with very little frustration (basic tools, layer windows etc are all very alike). Are you sure it's not Photoshop which breaks the convention? I've heard people say Photoshop has a learning curve and can be difficult to get started with - I have no personal experience here.
Photoshop has no real learning curve for basic use, the only complicated things are a few of the secondary tools that aren't immediately self-explanatory (pen tool, for example,) but once you get past that it's not difficult at all. I can't speak for your pre-GIMP experience, but it's not the layout or familiarity that's the problem with it - it's many, many smaller issues that all add up to a lot of hassle:
- Accelerators in menus and dialogs are an absolute mess - half of them assign the same letter to multiple controls, so that you have to cycle through them, which entirely defeats the point of having them. Tab-stop order is also a nonsensical jumble.
- As I recall, half the time there weren't even Enter and Esc shortcuts to submit or cancel a dialog.
- The layout appears to be based on Photoshop for Mac OS, with the menu bar up at the top and palettes floating over the desktop at the sides, but they've overlooked some crucial aspects such as:
- (Most? All?) Linux desktops don't have a Mac-like global menu bar, so they have to keep the menu confined to the document window - which means it gets added to every document opened, which is a waste of screen space they could've avoided if they'd gone with a Photoshop-for-Windows-style multiple-document interface (I understand they finally added a "single-window mode" which is almost like that, I haven't gotten a chance to try it.)
- Also, since Alt-Tab on (most?) Linux desktops switches between windows and not applications, having a dozen images open in the GIMP means having to cycle through a dozen image windows to get to, say, a web browser with a reference image, or the MP3 player so you can queue up the next album, or whatever. Another aggravation that could've been avoided if they'd just gone with the design paradigm that suited what most Linux environments are actually like.
- Furthermore, the document windows get opened wherever, completely irrespective of the application's own windows, so you can quite easily wind up with document windows overlapping (or underlapping) the tool palettes you use to work on them, and have to relocate them manually. That's just braindead. It's not like the GIMP doesn't know where its windows are.
There's a
lot of that kind of stuff. It all feels like the symptoms of a project where everybody wants to work on the (admittedly cool) backend functionality, and the part of the program that actually faces the
user gets back-burnered until it can't be ignored any longer, then hastily slap-dashed into a basically feature-complete state.
The GIMP is an extreme example, but in my experience that kind of problem seems to be endemic to the Linux developer community - in an open development environment, programmers want to work on the stuff that interests
programmers, and without some kind of additional driving force, they really have no interest in boring stuff like usability except in that it gets the program into a state where others can appreciate the cool backend stuff they put all the
real work into.
My surprise at defending Linux on an Amiga forum? Perhaps I should have worded that as my surprise people are so pro-Windows on an Amiga forum. The reason I felt so at home in Linux was due to years of experience with the Amiga. Amiga (AmigaDOS?) to Linux (BASH) seemed a natural progression, certainly a lot more natural than Amiga to Windows.
Well, not all of us are fighting the same old grudge-match from decades ago. I like the Amiga because I find the Amiga to be neat, but I don't have the time or energy to be mad at Windows for beating it, especially when what
actually killed it was managerial ineptitude and a few of the bigger scoundrels at Commodore poisoning the well.
Also, huh? AmigaDOS to me looks a
lot more like MS-DOS with the design issues fixed than anything like a Unix shell...
