Free! But not as easy….
I’ve always been interested in open and legally free software. So between my mom’s visit to Houston and getting serious about studying for my architecture registration exams, I wasted the better part of the weekend installing Linux and various free software programs onto my computer. The most painful to install was Linux. Installing the new operating system was not a problem – the painful part was creating the separate partition on the hard disk on which I could install Linux. The partitioning software (provided with the Linux installation software) was pretty easy to use, it was just really painful to defragment my hard drive multiple times with different defrag preferences until it finally defraged in a way where I could partition the hard drive. Trying to set up my dual-monitor (or any drivers) was not much fun either. And in the end, Ubuntu is does not really boot up any faster than good old Windows XP.
Fortunately, the other software programs, Open Office, GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP, the Photoshop replacement), Inkspace (Vector editor Illustrator replacement), and Scribus (book layout InDesign replacement) were all quite easy to install. I mean, install in Windows. I tried installing them in Ubuntu Linux, but none of them seemed to have a GUI installation package and I was sick of messing around in the Unix terminal. In any case, after playing around with these programs in Windows, I realized that I doubt I would ever get around to using any of these programs just due to the the hassle of learning how to use them.
In the end, I got the impression that free software will always have a major problem – in general they are clones of the “standard”. As such, they don’t really present much of a feature upgrade (if at all) and people have enough trouble learning the “standard” interface that they aren’t really excited about spending time to learn the alternative, even if its free. If I was in an office, I would say that my time is valuable enough that it would be worth purchasing a license of Adobe CSx instead of wasting the company’s time to learn the new program.
The exception that may prove the rule is Open Office. I haven’t messed with it much, but I have already ported over my Word and Excel Documents over to Open Office. I was using MS Office 2003 and the current version of Open Office emulates that interface almost perfectly. I’ve heard that Microsoft has messed with the UI of current version of MS Office and if that’s true I think I’ll just stick with what I know – Open Office. I don’t know how much one can emulate the UI of another company’s product, but if these other free image editors can get their UI much closer to the Adobe CS Standard, I’d seriously think about jumping over.
I still might try to learn GIMP, Inkspace and Scribus, but now that I’m about to start my Architecture Registration Exams, I think I have a better use for my time than learning redundant software interfaces just for the conceptual pleasure of running on a all open-source rig.