Linux anyone?
Baby steps. Seriously considered it for my new computer and looked hard at the MacBook too. Ultimately, I found hardware I liked a lot and it came with Win10, so I'm using it, but trying to wean myself from apps that do not have Linux equivalents. So I ditched MS Office for Libre Office (so far, quite adequate). I ditched Photoshop and Illustrator for GIMP (functional, but a bit cumbersome, perhaps because I'm not used to it), Inkscape (haven't used it enough).
I think the last apps that I really like a lot have Linux equivalents, but not quite as easy to use on Linux.
- PowerGREP
- Beyond Compare
I use them less and less, but when I use them, they are just so powerful and easy - yes, I've been dumbed down ;-) - compared to piping a bunch of stuff to through sed/grep and dumping to files.
- InDesign. I downloaded an open source layout tool, but it's far far from InDesign. I laid out and self-published a small book this year and while InDesign was a total PITA, it does offer great functionality that the simpler tools like Vellum (Mac only) just don't in terms of fundamental things like kerning control and laying out to a baseline. Scribus is the Linux option. I need to play with it. The main issue is the ID files are totally proprietary so for the legacy files, if I ever want to work with them, I would need ID. But I think the solution there would be simply to keep my old laptop for a few years and fire it up on the rare occasions where I want to update an existing book.
- Acrobat. I can't find a good replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro (with the ability to combine files into a PDF, annotate, edit and so forth). This is something I still use quite a bit, especially when I'm teaching. Though I'm not sure how much more of that I'll do.
- Camtasia. Another one I might go six months without using, but then, for example, during the recent course I taught, I would make 4-6 video a week for the students. Things like cursor highlighting, editing sound levels and things like that.
There might be a couple more, but those are the apps that I would miss that come to mind right away.
