Of necessity, I was recently forced to migrate to a new computer. My laptop has become flaky, shutting itself down without notice at random intervals throughout the day. I have my jacked-up alienware box that I use for my home studio and decided to dual purpose that for music and work. At the same time, I have shut down my server here at home and moved my website, development environment, and email to a hosted service. Lots of changes this week, and not the fun kind.
This all went exceptionally well, with the exception of my blowing out an extra 250GB hard drive by plugging the wrong power source into it–the smoke coming from the back was a dead giveaway. But what makes this a more interesting experiment is that rather than digging through boxes in the attic to find my old MS Office and Photoshop discs, I have downloaded and installed as replacements the open-source tools OpenOffice and GIMP.
OpenOffice is an office productivity suite that mirrors the offerings of MS Office. Included in the bundle are sisters to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and several other applications. Each of these applications can save and open native MS documents. I am delighted to report that so far these tools work seamlessly with MS products. I have found no limitations (although I am admittedly not a MS power user), and at the cost of no dollars I am now a believer. (I should note here also that I did try Google Docs for an hour or so, but had to forget about it when it refused to accept formatting I had done in Word–these things need to play nice with the rest of the world).
GIMP was even more of a surprise. I remember using GIMP on a linux machine years ago, and abandoning it quickly because it was so different from my beloved Photoshop. I found the learning curve too steep. But having used GIMP for a few hours the other day I can say the product has definitely matured to the point where I can use it for everything I need. The interface also has become more intuitive. I’m not sure if GIMP is to the point where it can be used by Photoshop professionals, but for what most of us need it is definitely all there.
I’m not ready to take the jump to a Linux desktop, but these open-source tools fill a huge gap in my working toolset, and remarkably, they’re free. (As with any open-source offerings, they do gratefully accept donations, both monetary and development contributions).