-
An open letter to Adobe
A year and a half ago I initiated a thread that sparked an interesting discussion on Linux and Adobe’s CS suite. I’d like to re-introduce that proposal again since the subject is even more valid and timely now. It’s an idea I’d like to call the Adobe Ubuntu Production Suite.
It’s priced the same as the Windows or OSX versions and comes bundled with Ubuntu. The DVDs install both Linux and the Adobe Production Suite at the same time on an empty hard drive. Adobe would offer a specific list of accepted hardware they would support with optimised video, sound card, motherboard (etc.) drivers installed in the OS.
The bundle comes with a year of support from Adobe, and they support both the OS and their Creative Suite. If your hardware is not on their list, you’re on your own. That alone should make support cheaper than Vista or XP, for which there are an infinite variety of Video cards, sound cards, networking and so forth.
There is a Production Suite Premium version which adds premium versions of specific programs like AfterEffects along with one other perk. There are four one-gig USB thumbs configured with a barebones (text) version of Ubuntu and a render farm engine for AfterEffects. These can be inserted in any computer on the user’s network to speed larger rendering projects, booting from the thumb and saving data to a network drive. They would ignore the local hard drive and so ensure that the client PC wouldn’t be changed in any way. Additional thumbs would be available at $49.95 each. Each thumb would be copy protected so you couldn’t duplicate it. This would provide you with an on-demand rendering farm, free for the first four computers and $50 per PC thereafter. Such a deal! But I digress. Back to reality.
It’s only in the last month that I’ve finally been able to run Premiere in a virtual machine (on Linux) with the newest version of VirtualBox. But honestly, it’s a hassle to run XP inside a VM and I still haven’t figured out how to write to a DVD or print from inside VirtualBox, and of course, there are performance issues. Granted, it’s better than nothing but I’d like to be able to run Photoshop, Premiere, and AfterEffects natively within Linux. It would make my day, and maybe even my week.
I’d upgrade to that in a minute. Would you?
Ron
-
1 Reply
-
I second that proposal, windows is not a stable platform and I don’t really like Mac.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up