Building professional websites with Linux
Most web design pros wouldn’t even consider the possibility of doing their work without industry standard tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks, let alone on a platform such as Linux. Nonetheless, professional results can be achieved. I’m not going to be using this site as an example, in fact I’m not going to be using any examples at all. In this article I’m just going to address some of the pros and cons of creating and designing websites with Linux in a professional environment.
To start, lets talk about the tools. The most popular open source pixel-based image editing program by far is Gimp, but there are others such as Krita, and there is also Pixel which runs on Linux but it’s not open source, so we won’t discuss that here. I’ll take the base assumption that Gimp is the best available alternative to Photoshop. As far as vector graphics go, I think Inkscape takes on most of the duties you would typically employ Illustrator or Quark for. So assuming that Gimp and Inkscape our are best choices, and if we want to reduce licensing cost to a bare minimum, then there is no better choice than Linux for our OS. If you already have Mac OS X or some version of Windows and you’re comfortable with that, that would be fine too.
Designers coming from a background of using Adobe products, often scoff at the poor interface of Gimp and odd keyboard commands. Of course this begs the question; if you’re coming from a background of using Adobe products why would you want to switch? There could be many reasons for this: maybe you’ve used Adobe products in school and can’t afford them currently, you might prefer to work on a Linux or Unix platform, maybe you never enjoyed working with them in the first place, or maybe you’d like to contribute a new function or tool to an open source project.
Whatever your the reason for choosing to run open source design software, I think main benefit is the $0 dollars in licensing cost versus hundreds or even thousands for using the proprietary counterparts. Are the end results that different? I argue no. In my opinion an artist is able to make art on whatever medium or platform they are provided with. Many people coming from a Adobe background might be quick to point out that Gimp has a very poorly designed user interface, it’s keyboard commands are different, and it’s not in anyway designed to work with or be similar to Inkscape (whereas Photoshop and Illustrator have a very similar workspace and keyboard commands). These are valid concerns, but for someone without a background in Adobe products, these complaints aren’t often made. I would argue further that if we didn’t have Adobe products running design studios, we would still be seeing very similar end products.
Making the broad assumption that a skilled user of Adobe’s creative design suite would make the switch, problems in the workplace are of course inevitable. If you’re working for yourself, that fine as most of your clients aren’t going to care whether your producing SVG and XCF file format images rather than AI or PSD, but your boss and colleagues probably will. Most web design companies expect (or even require) their designers use Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks, etc,. Basically I don’t see any way around this unless you either work for yourself, or somehow find a really cool boss (which can happen). But if you’re committed to running Linux, a cool boss might not even be able to help you, because they’ve probably already bought you a new iMac, and the words “Linux” and “iMac” in the same sentence probably won’t be taken kindly.
However, if running Linux is something you’re permitted to do, there are still other obstacles. The primary being that your going to need to be working with PSDs, AIs, and other file formats that aren’t native to you open source design software. That’s not to say they aren’t going to work, but you might run into some problems (like crashes, data loss, and corrupted files) if you aren’t using the software it was created on. With this in mind, you really only have a few options: dual boot, use Wine, or use virtualization software . I really don’t think any of these are good options. Dual booting is slow, and disrupts work flow. Using Photoshop CS2 on Wine works (well), but Illustrator doesn’t (it installs but doesn’t run), and virtualization software is just to slow in my opinion.
Of course these options all kind of sidestep the whole idea of using open source applications to build websites. So where does this leave us? I can only guess. It’s my opinion that the problem isn’t that the open source programs available to Linux users aren’t good enough to produce professional results, it’s just that people don’t want to deal with anything they’re unfamiliar with.
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