in my heart, i know that selinux is a good thing. deep in my heart. really deep. while trying to debug some issues at work, i ran into an selinux issue and trying to understand how the whole system works is just a little frustrating to me. i just don’t get it.

while i was doing research on selinux, i happened to stumble across a blog about linux photography. i made the statement about 5 years ago that i didn’t think that linux was really ready to compete with windows or macs in mainstream use. i still believe this to be true. there have been enormous leaps and bounds made in KDE that really make XWindows look pretty good. i will admit that much to be true. and yes, firefox and thunderbird have both been ported to linux, so the two main programs that i use to access the internet exist.

but here’s what doesn’t exist: anything photography-related. the gimp project has been a pretty ambitious, popular, and successful solution to image manipulation on linux. it’s true that it has made great strides in the past few years. but there’s just no way that gimp can compete at adobe’s level. photoshop is such a powerful tool and it just has so many resources behind it, that using anything else just feels like i’m restricted from doing what i really want to do. i know, diehards are going to say that you can do anything in gimp that you can in photoshop, but the question is how much easier is it to do in photoshop than gimp?

people who do their entire workflow in linux are, in my opinion, masochistic. how many programs do you need to use to convert an image from a raw image (that is, if you even can!) to a finished image? my entire workflow usually is done with just photoshop and an image browser. linux is still a ways away, but it is good to see that there is still development being done and strides are being made. maybe it’ll be another 5 years before it gets there, but once it does, having an open source/free solution would be pretty amazing.