Because 2% of desktop market share -_-

Maya makes more sense because big studios obviously want to use Linux for their render farms so moving the whole chain to Linux is less of a step (and has more obvious benefits).

SteamOS (and the shitness of Win8/direction of MS) might eventually bump that 2% up to something respectable though.

I can't really even use alternatives anyway, they'd have to be absolutely 100% compatible and whatnot :(

They have a rendering engine Mental Ray (which also renders 3DSM & Softimage) as a separate product. Plus many studios have their own, custom engines.

Apple has proven with Aperture and Final Cut that adobe does not have a lock on the market -- all the more reason for adobe to move out of the walled garden.

You put up with GIMP but complain that Inkscape's UI is bad? wtf man :D

(I have limited needs to Acorn is fine for me on the Mac, and I ... don't mind the Inkscape UI at all, although I've never used Illustrator so I guess I don't know what I'm missing out on)

Final Cut seems to have taken a bit of a beating lately, professionally speaking at least. While becoming more accessible to the home user. I've used it a bit a few years ago but didn't really get on with the interface. Motion and Livetype were kinda fun timesavers.

Regardless, it don't much matter - everyone I work with uses Illustrator/Photoshop/After Effects and assorted related plugins. It's bad enough when Adobe updates a version, never mind trying to mix up semi-compatible alternatives.

At least my Office needs are generic enough that I don't need a 'proper' version of that.

Oh and
...ah man, Linux  :') 

Clearly got to be Butter Face.

I've still not got my head around a potential Windows 8 roll-out here in this School.  I can't get the tile start menu doing exactly what I want for user profiles.

Gimp's not that bad any more. Certainly no worse than Photoshop, which was always pretty dreadful. Illustrator has a decent interface though, whereas Inkscape is just... yeah, bad.

w3rd.

GImp, though much improved, is certainly still much worse than Photoshop*. My biggest complaint about PS is that all the stupid do-dads they've bolted on since about version 6 should be offered as optional plug-ins. And the drm and now cloud bullshit.

But the interface is actually about as good as it gets for such a complex and powerful set of tools. There's loads of people (mainly professional photographers) who only need to perform a few rote enhancements to their boring pictures of weddings, corporate smurfs and hamburgers. So for them the GUI and learning curve could be significant drawbacks. But hey, that's what instagram is for.


* full disclosure: I love using gimp.

I guess I put up with Inkscape (and its bad performance on the Mac) because it's the only vector drawing thing I've found that has a decent amount of features. I forget what exactly but I looked at several and they were all missing some obvious feature that I use a lot (and by "a lot" I mean "a lot on the rare occasions I actually need to use a vector drawing program").

And as to Gimp, well, no Layer Styles = no good tbh.

Pro photographers would probably do better using Lightroom if they're only doing rote enhancements. Way quicker.

Windows Ain't. It sucks.  :-(

One thing I really like about Inkscape is that it's quite powerful for doing conversions and stuff on the command line.

Received the invitation to "upgrade" to Windows 8.1 yesterday. Painfully slow process, what with all the verifying, tidying, evaluating, cleaning, applying, finalizing, tidying a few more things... ugh. Probably could have accomplished the same things in less time in other ways as I already use Classic Shell.

Just don't like Ain't. I have no need for the Metro/Live tiles silliness (to me) on a laptop/desktop. Of course I probably would still be OK with Windows 2000.  :-P

Had my first look at it yesterday when I had to install some fonts on my boss's new dell desktop. Weird shit. In font previews they looked ok. Word 2013 displayed the fonts in the menu correctly, and it printed the fonts correctly, but in actual document display reverted to generic sans with weird kernings. These are fonts that work with no issues on Win7/Word 2013. After several tries I worked out that 8.1 doesn't support postscript fonts, only TT. Way to go, Microsoft!

You'll probably find that it supports OT too. I have a funny feeling that, with the advent and acceptance of OT, PS may be going the way of the dodo.