website design/developement and linux

hey everybody
i have a pc with debian based OS ('cos linux is much better than windows!!)
anyhoo
i never tried using photoshop with WINE although i heard that CS2 works just fine
and i use bluefish to code...
unfortunately i don't use gimp coz its nothing compared to photosohp!!

any other website designer/developer uses linux? what programs do you use?

 

Well, I believe most designers would prefer working on Mac, at least on Windows.

Linux can be better than Windows, in some ways but not all. In such a situation, you might consider using Windows instead of Linux.

 

yea i agree, i think it's better to work in mac or windows.

p/s : i don't say that windows is better =)

 

yeah that sux though
coz i'm a linux addict... but i guess i'll just have to get a mac or something at least for the design
coding with linux will do.. as long as you have some experience i don't find it particularly challenging

 

For web development, there's nothing in Photoshop that you can't do in the GIMP. Photoshop excels only for print. For vector graphics, Inkscape is superior to Illustrator. For really serious, state of the art image manipulation, there's the ImageMagick suite of utilities.

If you think you just must have CSx, install Sun's VirtualBox. Install whatever Windows for which you have a license on the virtual machine. On my Debian workstation, I have Vista running as an application, mostly for testing in IE7. (An old Win98SE box provides IE6 and some DOS programs I still use. I will be installing Win98 in the VM when I find some time.)

It's hard to argue against Mac, since they went to a Unix-like OS. If this were about development for print, I wouldn't, due to the many DTP applications for Mac, that don't run in Linux. My argument against Mac comes down to its over-reliance on the GUI, and the difficulty in running as a mouse-free environment. Every time you reach for the mouse, it slows you down. Linux lets you use the mouse when appropriate, but more importantly, allows you to use the keyboard with putting hurdles in the way.

cheers,

gary

 

If you love handcoding XHTML and CSS, and don't care much about graphics, then gedit works fine after customizing and adding extra plugins. On windows I'm in love with notepad++ & photoshop. Photoshop and lack of internet explorer for testing purposes is a miss on linux, there are solutions, but it seems one would be wasting more time setting things up on linux.

 

What in the world does graphics have to do with coding? As you ignore, GIMP does all that PS does where web graphics are concerned.

For IE, you simply do as I mentioned above; install Win as a guest on your Linux box. Win then runs in a sandbox, unable to harm the underlying system. When it gets infected, wipe it and re-install.

gary

 

Linux FAR beats out windows for web development because you're running it on the same platform that over 2/3 of the websites you make will be hosted on.

In all honesty the internet IS linux in this day and age, and although the files that are eventually going to be hosted can be prepped on a toy operating system like windows, there's no match in power when it comes to the capabilities and environment of the operating system. Linux was made for development, windows was made for games and exploits.

So, that aside, I challenge you to create something in photoshop on mac or windows that I can't do in the GIMP on mac, windows or linux.

Better yet, I bet you I have MORE professional quality production software available for linux than any other platform. Yes, Photoshop can be purchased for Mac or Windows, but as it's been pointed out, you could virtualbox either windows or mac, and run the software from the comfort of whatever host OS you want. And any good web developer needs to test their sites in other operating systems as well.

Looking at it that way, A mac is the best computer you can buy if you're planning on doing this full-tilt. It's the only machine that can natively and easily run Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows without modification.

Personally, I'm a long-time linux user, and now I'm also a mac user (loving every moment) and what I love is that almost all of my linux software is available for Mac, as well as the best commercial software. I use VMware fusion to virtualize ubuntu and I also have it installed....but it virtualizes so well, and I can use both operating systems at the same time - so i rarely have need to ever reboot into Ubuntu anymore.

Best of luck, your toolbox should look something like: GIMP, Inkscape, Eclipse for editing code.

 

Yes GIMP is an alternative but after using the Photoshop interface for years GIMP just feels wrong, i keep going back to it every time they bring out a new major release but i still hate the way the interface works.

Tha said at work all our team use Linux PCs for web developement. Our graphics are done by a separate design team who i believe use windows. When I'm working on my own projects at home I think Inkscape is quite nice for vector design and www.aviary.com provide some decent free web based tools for graphic design.

 

If you need to view your website in IE you can use http://browsershots.org/ - they provide screens shots of your website from all the major browsers. Otherwise as previously mentioned IE works fine under wine or you can run it inside a windows virtual box.

 

wow!!
thanks for pointing out browser shots!!

and the rest of you really useful replies!
but yeah i guess the problem with GIMP is the layout although technically speaking you can achieve the same results as photoshop.
and i'm actually forced to start with gnu/linux software because i don't have the budget for acquiring ps licenses ecc.. so i want to make the most out of my linux experieces since i'm really passionate about it!!

 

I'll tell you what, I'm a graphic designer, and I've been using linux since 2001, and mac since 2007.

I did purchase the Adobe CS3 Design Premium and I use those tools daily, but even though I have what most would consider to be the top of the line as far as commercial software goes, I still also use Inkscape, GIMP and plenty of other open-source tools.

I honestly believe that I could use open-source tool only and still create professional level product that that's what I'm doing. I'm moving into freelance and at this point I'm so convinced that even though I have the means, I'm not sure I can justify the need at this point to buy more commercial software.

Every tool has its own strengths and weaknesses.

GIMP I use because of its massive compatibility for unheard of formats. If you cansend it to me, GIMP can open it. I find that its filters, although less pretty than Photoshop's tend to be more powerful and leave a better looking result - so for many image editing needs I will use GIMP instead of Photoshop.

Photoshop is good for editing and retouching photos - but I'm not a photographer, I'm a designer. Sure I may need to do some levels or colour adjustments, but I don't even need GIMP for that sort of thing. Photoshop's strength lies in the smart filters

Inkscape is a wonderful vector tool, that opens and saves plenty of standard formats. It has advanced path and fill dialogs, and it calculates colour with alhpa, not just transparency applied to whole shapes (something Illustrator can't do) which makes Inkscape FAR more useful for icon-making and most of the vector illustration I do.

Illustrator is a solid app with familiar feel if you're used to photoshop - one thing I love about Adobe software is how small the learning curve is once you've learned the tools in one program. Excellent smart guides tool which can really help speed up alignment or type-curve editing.

Scribus (page layout) is the tool I learned Multi-page layout on. I find now it feel limited when compared to InDesign, but if you use your head, I am convinced that I could produce anything I make in InDesign now in Scribus, and its better support for SVG graphics (like those fancy ones illustrator can't make with the alpha gradients...) makes a lot of the print stuff I do easier than it would be in InDesign (where I would have to take those advanced vectors and rasterize them to a hi-res PNG so InDesign will shoe them)

InDesign - my love. I absolutely love every aspect about this program, and the fact that it loads Adobe swatch libraries from illustrator and photoshop makes me squeal with glee! I absolutely love the advanced typesetting tools in InDesign, and I love typography so it's a great match.

Kate/Kwrite/KDevelop/jEdit/Eclipse/Bluefish/Aptana - all great and equivalent apps for the web markup and layout code that I do - nothing heavy like c++ or even languages like python for me, I just use the syntax highlighting for HTML, JS, CSS and I'm happy. I also love tabs.

Dreamweaver - it works well, I only use it for editing the code and it serves its purpose well. I enjoy the ease of connecting to FTP, and I know Eclipse will do the same but I keep Dreamweaver as the default code editor on my mac because I've got it.


So as you can see, you can have a profesisonal toolbox using either only Open-source tools, or using Proprietary, and the big advantage to having proprietary is you can have both sets for the price of just one, but if your big goal is to have one set for the price of none you can still make high quality stuff.

I am a big Ubuntu fan, and I strongly recommend you check it out if you're using a Debian distro other than Ubuntu. I've found (when compared to just straight up Debian which I used to use) that it often has better packages/software and faster than regular Debian, because they only have to maintain packages for a couple of architectures. The strength of Debian is that you can run the same apps equally over 10 or more architectures at once and keep them all the same, but if you only run one computer, or more than one but all the same architecture (x86, powerpc, arm, acorn, risc.....) I don't see any value of debian over ubuntu.

Also, be sure to check out UbuntuStudio, a distro based on Ubuntu - but it comes pre-loaded with all of the goodies already installed that you'd need for music, graphics and video production (and the web tools are just as easy to install!)

Best of luck, I know that wonderful feeling when you stop using your computer as a toy and put a real operating system on it, and the joy of running a linux box is only paralleled by the joy of.......well, is there anything else that feels that good?

 

hey innovati thanks for the time you took to answer to my post
your answer really gave me hope!! i now see that there are others that use open source to make quality stuff...
99% of designers totally ignore linux (atleast for the designing part) and almost laugh at you if you say that your gonna make a layout in GIMP...anyhow i tried ubuntu studio a couple of years ago and i find it better just to install ubuntu and install the packages i need later.. this is my opinion you may not agree..
and im gonna stick to ubuntu like you said coz there is really no point in using debian if you only work with 2 pcs and you don't have a workstation...
and last thing running a linux box is almost like sex i must agree!!
long live linux!!!!

 

well good luck to you, enjoy it, and be sure to post some work up here to show off once you get rolling on your new system!

 

I don't know if I'd go that far. But, if it is, using Windows is like sex with a diseased whore—you will get infected.

innovati is quite right. Even in the graphics field, Linux/Free/open source applications are catching and even surpassing the best proprietary software. Even better, they're nearly always cross platform compatible.

Re Debian vs Ubuntu: The Ubuntu installer has a higher level of default settings to make the install fairly painless, and desktop very Windows-like. That's the good for non-techie users. I've been using Debian since the initial install on three P3 boxes in 2000. The installs went well, but required a lot of study to prepare myself. A year ago, I was forced to buy a new dual core 64bit box to support a Vista install for IE7. I downloaded Etch (Debian stable) and burned to a DVD. The new install was absolutely painless, and very fast. (I hadn't done a Debian install in eight years, so this was a pleasant surprise. A Red Hat system I administered was not as pleasant.) I reinstalled Vista in a VM. What a PITA. Configuring it was even worse.

On install, dead even to slight Ubuntu advantage. Windows was not even in the ballpark.

On ease of use, Ubuntu manages to hide the system's guts very well. For those who want to point and click, Ubuntu's the way to go. If you like the power of the command line, not so much.

You mention Ubuntu having newer software. This is true in some cases. Running Debian stable does mean no non-security, non-bug fix updates. It's stable; no surprises, and meant for people and systems that need to just work. Period. If you want the latest and greatest, you run "testing". Testing is the next stable release in waiting. Updates are daily, not Ubuntu's every six months.

On stability, edge to the Debian stable release.

On currency, advantage to Debian's testing release, or the unstable (Sid) release for bleeding edge stuff.

cheers,

gary

 

Although you claim Ubuntu hides the command-line what you mean is that, like OS X there are GUI dialogs that make it possible to administer your system without forcing you to use the command line, but it isn't less equipped than regular Debian if you prefer the command-line.

8 years of Linux has taught me, a graphic designer who you would assume to be more GUI oriented, to trust the CLI and to embrace the CLI. In fact, in the last couple minutes or so I just did a 'killall Dock' to restart my Dock here on OS X after I had manually replaced an icon (and changed it to a linux icon at that!)

What I like about OS X is that although they have excellent GUI's for everything, the CLI is still there, and that's comforting - I use it daily.

My advice to anybody starting out with Linux - slowly try to learn and use the command-line, because a lot of the tools and way you do things on the command line will be the same no matter what version of Linux or Unix you use. I could pick up OS X in about 10 minutes because if I didn't know how to do something on the desktop, at least I knew how to do it in the command-line.

Coming from a very visual background, I can definitely say you don't have to be a programmer or a code-junkie to harness the power of the command-line, and I know teenagers who can run circles around me with it so with some patience and tutorials you should be more productive than ever.

I worked on the graphics for the open-source game Nexuiz, and I did 2D artwork for the initial release - which required me to test the graphics in-game. I had a dual boot windows/linux machine at the time, and I tested it in both.

On the windows side, the game would run at 17FPS, barely usable, but since I was testing the menus I didn't need a whole lot of power. I didn't know how to compile the game engine from source on windows, even though I tried many times - I could just never get it to work.

On the Linux side I could get 30+FPS which is enough to not only play, but enough to win ;-) I would test, play, and I did manage to compile my own engines from source.

Then I learned how to make a simple BASH script that would do this for me:

-Check out the latest engine source code from CVS
-Move into the source directory and compile the engine
-Move and rename the engine binaries, deleting the old binaries
-Execute the game with the new engine

I set this script to an icon on my desktop so every time I launched the game it was with the current source code, from literally 2 minutes prior. I couldn't even figure out how to compile the filthy thing on windows if I took a whole day - so there's a real-world comparison showing how with the same knowledge and same computer, how just the difference between two operating systems can have a TOTALLY profound impact on productivity.

 

I'm too tired to read through all the posts but it looks like Gary and Tom above are dead on with everything. However, I'm a FreeBSD shop. I have 8 FreeBSD boxes, plus one with Linux and one with Windows. I only have the Windows box to test IE in and the Linux box because my host uses Linux. I ran Ubuntu on my one notebook, till it died last month, but only because LInux runs flash better than FreeBSD.

I use all the same tools mentioned by Gary and Tom above. I haven't use any Windows software for anything in over two years for my web development business or personally. I would feel like a fool if I were to buy Photoshopp when Gimp does the job.

There is no reason at all that anyone has to use Windows for web development. Windows just gets in the way more than anything. Remember, more of the web runs on 'nix than Windows despite any paid advertising some believe in. And I really, really wish I would break down and buy a Mac.

 

@Tom: I didn't say Ubuntu hid the command line. Please read more carefully. I merely said Ubuntu was more accommodating of the point and clicker. That bias does influence user behavior.

gary

 

lol!!

well about the command line... that's what makes linux more flexible and plus the basic commands are the same on all distros so its not painfull to go from one to another

and what you guys said is really true. i totally agree that linux=developement so it should be what all developers use by default since the web is mostly made from *nix... i guess ppl are just scared by the command line and stuff like that

so we are the smart minority i guess!!

 

There is no point to stating the obvious.



<giggle>


cheers,

gary