Thy Penguin Come Pt. 2

Here's the list of apps I'm currently using (or thinking of using). It's completely non-authoritative and based on my own personal experience and research, but hope it can serve as a starting point for media specialists and desktop users alike considering the jump to Linux.

Digital Imaging: The major player in Linux is GIMP, but I (and other zealots) still don't consider anything else the equal of Adobe Photoshop. I've had success running Photoshop 7 in WINE (excluding the ImageReady component); "emulation" of Photoshop is still the prefered path for professional work (imho), even though Photoshop with WINE can be tricky to set up. I'm currently using VMWare to run a virtual XP environment in order to use CS2. (VMWare is also a wonderful tool for running virtual networked environments; highly recommended for edumacayshunal purposes.)

3D Graphics: The 3D industry is well-covered in Linux. After trying quite a few 3D apps over the years, it's my biased opinion you won't find anything finer than Alias Maya, which has worked in *NIX environments longer than many 3D apps have worked in Windows. Fortunately if you don't like Maya, there's other great commercial options also running natively such as Softimage XSI or SideFX Houdini. If you don't like high price tags, there's Blender (it's become much more sophisticated recently with release 2.4, including character animation functions, particles, fluids, dynamics, hair, etc).

Effects & Compositing: Nothing Real's Shake was a must on the Windows platform, until they were bought out by Apple and discontinued on Win32. Luckily, Apple Shake runs natively in Linux, and recently the Disreet heavyweight, Flame, was ported (both commercial). Either is a solid choice.

Video Editing: In Windows I was partial to Adobe After Effects, but as usual, Adobe has declined to port this fantastic app; it doesn't do well in WINE either. So from what I understand, the best offerings are MainConcept's MainActor (commercial) and Jahshaka, neither of which I've fully tried yet; other contenders I often hear about are Cinelerra, and Kino.

Audio Editing: There seems to be no shortage in this area. I used Adobe Audition in Win32 (formerly "CoolEdit" pre-acquisition), and have also tried Sony Soundforge (formerly offered by Sonic Foundry). The ones I've heard the best rants from seem to be Audacity and Sweep, both I'm pleased to say are under the GPL.

Web Development: Hands down, Dreamweaver is the industry leader. There seems to be a good multiplatform WYSIWYG editor off to a good start called NVu- it already seems to be better than Frontpage, but still falls short of Dreamweaver's capabilities. There's limited success running Dreamweaver under WINE. (I've personally run MX with an older WINE build but encountered some annoyances... perhaps this has improved?). NVu is adequate if you're like myself and still do a lot of old-school designing; it can read CSS fine, but doesn't offer much support in editing styles (or adding Flash). There seems to be a newish CSS/html/script editor called CSSED worth looking into as well for the areas NVu lacks. (You could just run MX 2004 in VMWare too.)

Media File Management: I've always organized my media into neat little hierarchies, so "albums" (database-driven organizers similar to Adobe's "Album" offering) were uneccessary for me. In Windows, I opted to look at thumbnails right in Explorer, and view them in the default image viewer. Linux has Konquerer and Nautilus, both of which come with most distros and do an excellent job, and with more style and customization. However, if you require fancier media organization, DigiKam is your best bet, and it's free.

Eye Candy: Okay, now I'm starting to get into the desktop user realm, as many real professionals (unlike my amatuer self) will always sacrifice style for resources. I've never been a vanilla guy, and ran alternate shells like LiteStep and several Window enhancements such as StyleXP, WinowBlinds, Konfabulator, IconPackager, ObjectDock, etc to get a sleeker look. Linux has a large array of window managers of every stripe, ranging from low-resource ones like Fluxbox, to the standards KDE (my fav) and Gnome, as well as resource-intensive ones like Enlightenment (for those craving the ultimate in customability).

DVD Media: I honestly have not gotten into DVD authoring yet (though DVD decoding was spawned on Linux to the dismay of the MPAA), but for simple playback, Xine is equally as good as any other Win32 player (but unlike PowerDVD or WinDVD, Xine and other Linux players are free). Note: no modern OS comes out of the box with DVD support, not even Windows; see this for more info.

Music Players: iTunes is to XP/OSX what amaroK is to Linux- great app with database functionality; it's customizable, it organizes podcasts, it walks your dog... it even links to band Wiki's. (However I still can't use my iPod with it, which is more the fault of the kio_ipodslave module... gtkPod works fine for syncronization though.)

Television Tuners: I love running deinterlaced TV in the corner of my screen (or an entire monitor) for some "background noise". On Windows I used DScaler; now I use TVTime, which gives equally impressive quality with even more features.

Burning and Imaging: I shouldn't have to remind anyone (especially content creators) the importance of backing up data (I won't include ripping and decoding here). The Linux CD/DVD burner of choice is K3B, and it does a damn fine job (it's as good if not better than Ahead Nero, and it's free). The two main imaging proggies I used in Windows were Alcohol 120% (which I used for mounting ISO's or BIN/CUE's on a virtual drive) and TrueImage for backing up to an image. Alcohol 120% does not seem to have a Linux equivalent, but there is a suitable script/module for my needs called Mount ISO Image (which uses the CDemu kernel module). TrueImage can actually clone my ext3 filesystem (unsure of Reiser support), but there are a plethora of backup imaging utilities for free which I'm going to explore later.

Spreadsheets, Presentations, and Publishing: I don't do a lot of this kind of work, so Openoffice.org (OOo) works fine for my needs, and (big surprise) it's free. If you really need MS Office, it looks like WINE emulates everthing relatively well, and the commercial version of WINE (Codeweavers Crossover Office) seems to offer full compatability.

Virii and Spyware and Hackers, Oh My: In Windows, I used freebies to meet all of my paranoia needs (Grisoft AVG, MicroSoft AntiSpyware, and ZoneAlarm firewall). A definate plus for Linux is it doesn't suffer from some of the same afflictions as far as virii and spyware go, most likely because they don't drive about 90% of the OS market. Spyware isn't really an issue, but if you're really paranoid, you can purchase a firewall with spyware filters called Astaro (I wouldn't bother though). Antivirus might still be a good idea; the one currently with the most acclaim is ClamAV. Firewalling has always been superior in Linux (albeit combersome to configure); chances are your distro at least uses iptables (SuSE uses SuSEfirewall2, which is based on iptables).

Internet Applications: Firefox and Thunderbird (even Sunbird)... I used em all in Win32 and still use em in Linux (same with Azureus) crossplatform apps are a beautiful thing. In Win32, there's Trillian; in Linux, Kopete. In Win32, there's eMule; in Linux, aMule (though it's a bit slow for my tastes).

Video Games: You don't even have time for games you slacker; get back to work. I do like the occasional RPG, but Linux falls short of running the newest and the best. There's another commercial WINE product especially for gaming called Cedega... but maybe it's about time to get that Xbox 360 anyway? (Bill needs another summer house!)

Well, if you're still reading this, I have to compliment your stamina (ie. the fact you weren't bored into a coma); hopefully you may have gleaned a little info. I'm still rediscovering the Linux OS myself after a 2-3 year hiatus, so I'm sure there's lots to say and lots more to learn. Just testing out the peripherals and devices in my fresh installation instilled a lot of confidence in the new USB-friendly 2.6 kernel:

Apple 60GB iPod- Instantly detected and mounted as an external drive (though as mentioned syncing has been problematic).
Casio Exilim EX-Z750- Instantly detected and mounted as 2GB removable media.
Canon i900D Printer- Works fine despite not having the exact i900D driver; also cannot get accurate ink-cartridge stats (will work on this later).
Canon Canoscan n1220u- went through a quick wizard in the hardware manager, and my scanner works beautifully (using one of the many KDE scanner interfaces).
Wacom 6x8 Graphire3 tablet- was configured by SaX2 during installation.
CrystalFontz 631 LCD- Doesn't work, but I didn't expect an easy fight; LCD4Linux shows promise though.