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The European Union's interoperability page reports:
Using open source in school greatly reduces the time needed to troubleshoot PCs, [as indicated by] the case of the Colegio Agustinos de León (Augustinian College of León, Spain). In 2013, the school switched to using Ubuntu Linux for its desktop PCs in [classrooms] and offices. For teachers and staff, the amount of technical issues decreased by 63 per cent and in the school's computer labs by 90 per cent, says Fernando Lanero, computer science teacher and head of the school's IT department.
[...] "One year after we changed PC operating system, I have objective data on Ubuntu Linux", Lanero tells Muy Linux [English Translation], a Spanish Linux news site. By switching to Linux, incidents such as computer viruses, system degradation, and many diverse technical issues disappeared instantly.
The change also helps the school save money, he adds. Not having to purchase [licenses] for proprietary operating systems, office suites, and anti-virus tools has already saved about €35,000 in the 2014-2015 school year, Lanero says. "Obviously it is much more interesting to invest that money in education."
[...] The biggest hurdle for the IT department was the use of electronic whiteboards. The school uses 30 of such whiteboards, and their manufacturer [Hitachi] does not support the use of Linux. Lanero got the Spanish Linux community involved, and "after their hard work, Ubuntu Linux now includes support for the whiteboards, so now everything is working as it should".
[...] Issues [with proprietary document formats] were temporarily resolved by using a cloud-based proprietary office solution, says Lanero, giving the IT department time to complete the switch to open standards-based office solutions. The school now mostly uses the LibreOffice suite of office tools.
[...] "Across the country, schools have contacted me to hear about the performance and learn how to undertake similar migrations."
As I always say, simply avoid manufacturers with lousy support and FOSS is just the ticket.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Tuesday May 26 2015, @01:42PM
- FOSS is generally less capable that proprietary software. Photoshop vs. Gimp. LibreOffice-Impress vs. PowerPoint.
I can't speak for Impress vs. Powerpoint, and I'm not interested in discussing the rest of your comment, but I'm going to rant a bit about the Photoshop vs. Gimp comment, because it's so outdated it's not even funny. Everyone still acts like Gimp is the only open source graphics program, and that hasn't been true for a long time. In fact, it hasn't been the best FOSS graphics tool for years, because it's long since been surpassed for nearly every task by other FOSS options.
The open-source graphics powerhouse has been Krita [krita.org] for a few years now, with no sign of it changing any time soon. Functionality-wise, it's somewhere between Photoshop and a more painting-oriented program like Corel Painter. Depending on what you use Photoshop for, it's your best option for an FOSS-replacement, and for some workflows it even surpasses it.
It handles high bit depth images, non-RGB colour spaces, has non-destructive layer filters and transforms, GPU-accelerated canvas, has a bunch of different brush engines that are insanely configurable, and so much more that it would take far too long to write it all out, with more being added constantly. Just about any "Gimp doesn't have this, it sucks" you can think of will be in Krita. Also, it's Qt, rather than being stuck on gtk2 like gimp, so the UI is less flaky, more configurable, and also works better in Windows.
The OS X support is lacklustre, but that's about the only failing I can think of vs gimp. Krita's easily on par with paid graphics software. In fact, they put a special variant -- which has a switchable tablet+desktop UI -- on Steam with a price tag, and people actually do pay for it. Not only that, but they did a Kickstarter last year that got enough support to fund a developer for a year, and they're doing another one [kickstarter.com] that met its goal before the first week was over. (Which still has about a week left to make stretch goals, if anyone's interested in supporting)
Of course, there are plenty more tools beyond those, depending on need. Blender is insanely polished and powerful; Inkscape is a great tool for vector work; Synfig is available for animation; and MyPaint is a nice painting/sketching oriented app that has an infinite canvas and a decent brush engine.
Seriously, try something other than Gimp, it hasn't been worthy of being considered the FOSS flagship graphics tool in a very long time. It hasn't had enough developer interest in a while, and it's been crippled by its reliance on gtk2 for almost as long. I hope that if I and others rant about this enough, people will finally start to notice and try something good instead of acting like gimp is the entirety of FOSS graphics software.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday May 26 2015, @02:55PM
People that do painting, probably already know about the FOSS options (and mostly don't care, as it's as free-as-in-beer as a pirated photoshop).
Poeple that do photography, where gimp is the major competitor with photoshop, are actually stuck with photoshop. Source: i do some photography.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2015, @10:33PM
You miss-spelled "anecdotal" there.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:17AM
Yup. As in: I know from experience, but that's just my experience. Isn't that a sufficient disclaimer?
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(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday May 27 2015, @04:00AM
People that do painting, probably already know about the FOSS options (and mostly don't care, as it's as free-as-in-beer as a pirated photoshop).
That's bullshit right there. That's sort of like arguing that jobs are a waste of time because "people that need money probably know about employment options, and mostly don't care because robbing a bank is more useful for them."
Plus there are better proprietary painting apps than Photoshop, so if you're going to pirate, at least pirate the right tool for the right job.
Poeple that do photography, where gimp is the major competitor with photoshop, are actually stuck with photoshop. Source: i do some photography.
For most photography uses I've found digikam* to be more than good enough, with the added bonus of having tagging and other organisational features on top. Between that and opening the file in krita I haven't needed gimp for photos in a while. Digikam for sorting, tagging, and basic edits that don't need the weight of Krita (basically anything but touch-up stuff), and then Krita (which has RAW support) if it needs something more involved.
I'm not saying that will work for everybody, of course, but that wasn't my original point. My original point is that nobody even tries, they just use "gimp vs photoshop" as a quick way to dismiss FOSS graphics apps as a whole. Sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes trolling, but it needs to be fought either way.
* Actually, I should have mentioned digikam in my original post, because it's another really nice program that deserves more attention. Good FOSS photo management are really hard to find and it's probably the best one I've found.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday May 27 2015, @08:23AM
DIgicam is for organizing, much like Lightroom from Adobe, not for editing. Last time I tried Krita, it was no good for photoediting, I might as well give it a try sometime.
The only problem I have with Gimp for photoediting is non destructive editing / adjustment layers. There's just no game. Anyway, now that I finished studies, might as well contribute to some of the softwares I use, instead of complaining, eh?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Wednesday May 27 2015, @09:34AM
DIgicam is for organizing, much like Lightroom from Adobe, not for editing
I'm aware, but it also has a built-in editor, called ShowFoto, that covers a lot of the basics (like levels, curves, some various transformations) without needing to pull out something heavier. A lot of the time, that really is all one needs, and it acts as a good starting point for firing up something else when you need more.
Unrelated, but I wouldn't be surprised if a really casual user could manage without ever needing a proper editor at all. KDE's viewer, gwenview, has the most common stuff like cropping, resizing, and rotation. Some people might never need more than that. Kind of interesting to consider.
Last time I tried Krita, it was no good for photoediting, I might as well give it a try sometime.
The only problem I have with Gimp for photoediting is non destructive editing / adjustment layers. There's just no game.
Krita's actually been doing a lot with non destructive editing the past few versions. It's recently added transform masks (non-destructive transforms) and has had filter masks (same for filters) for a while. Transforms are pretty obvious, and some of the filters are obvious because they're standard things like blur and sharpen, but it also has "filters" that let you non-destructively change colour, saturation, contrast, brightness, and one (that I love) will convert a colour to alpha.
It's still painting first and foremost, as a design decision, but it has enough feature overlap with Gimp (plus extra things that Gimp can't do) that I can usually use Krita instead, even for general image manipulation. Which is good, because it gets really annoying using it without a working mousewheel (bug I mentioned in another comment).
I still like gimp well enough, and in fact I prefer its multi-window mode to the more common MDI or tabbed designs. It's just been stagnant while others have continued to improve, so it's not quite the shining star it used to be. At this rate, the painting program (Krita) will gain photo editing feature parity with Gimp before Gimp manages to get proper support for something other than 8bit RGB.
Anyway, now that I finished studies, might as well contribute to some of the softwares I use, instead of complaining, eh?
Hey, don't knock it. Sometimes complaining to the right people is contributing. At least, that's what I tell myself when I put in feature requests. :)
(Score: 3, Informative) by danomac on Tuesday May 26 2015, @04:00PM
I just thought I'd point out they aren't stuck on gtk2... gtk is an acronym for the GIMP Toolkit, it was written specifically for GIMP.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Wednesday May 27 2015, @03:36AM
I just thought I'd point out they aren't stuck on gtk2... gtk is an acronym for the GIMP Toolkit, it was written specifically for GIMP.
Yes, I'm aware of gtk's history, possibly better than you are -- gtk+ got the "KFC" treatment and hasn't been "the gimp toolkit" in many, many years[1] -- but you apparently didn't notice that I said gtk2 specifically. I also didn't say they were stuck on gtk, I said that the reliance on gtk2 is crippling it. First release of gtk3 was early 2011, four years ago, and there's still no support, much like the long-promised full GEGL support. At this rate, by the time gtk3 support comes everyone else will be using gtk4.
While in theory there's nothing wrong with using a project that's in maintenance mode like that, it's a problem with gtk2, because it has a lot of odd problems that will likely never be fixed because testing and development has long since moved on to gtk3. It has problems with non-wacom input devices, for example, because it's a market that exploded around gtk3's release.
Another example: the odd way gtk2 handles input devices also causes its share of problems that don't occur in gtk3 because of design improvements in 3 vs 2. With the last two mouses I've owned, I haven't been able to use the mousewheel at all in gimp as a side effect of this. It may be related to having a non-wacom pen display, but it's not a problem with gtk3. It's annoying enough that I've completely stopped using gimp if there's any way to do something in one of the other programs available, at least until the gtk3 port finally surfaces.
Due to the heavy investment in gtk, it makes sense to stick with it, but sticking with gtk2 realy hurts it right now. Not just because long-standing design problems will never improve, but also because the vast majority of gtk devs use and know gtk3 now, so the developer pool is constantly dwindling.
Meanwhile, Krita's managing to pump out new features while still working on the Qt5 port on the side. If Gimp had enough developer interest to do the same, most of my comment probably wouldn't even have been necessary. It's unfortunate, but projects can stagnate, and Gimp has long been showing signs of it.
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[1] Brief history lesson: the last gtk to be the "gimp toolkit" was the gtk1 series. By gtk2 (in 2002) it had already been rewritten and renamed to "gtk+", with development focused on more than just the needs of gimp. In fact, I looked it up and the rewrite and name-change in 1999 when gtk+ 1.2 was released. So, it hasn't been the "gimp toolkit" for 16 years; I think it's time to get over it and just go with "gtk+" like the rest of the world.
Too bad we don't have some kind of 0-score "Outdated" mod (like Disagree is) for when people post ancient information. You don't deserve a downmod but there should be some way to flag old info.
(Score: 1) by stormreaver on Tuesday May 26 2015, @09:29PM
The open-source graphics powerhouse has been Krita [krita.org] for a few years now, with no sign of it changing any time soon.
The last time I tried Krita, a few years ago, it had one major show-stopping problem: it was unbearably slow. I had several large images I wanted to touch-up. I started Krita, selected the first picture to load, and waited. And waited. And waited.
After getting tired of waiting on that first image, I loaded the first picture in the GIMP, did the touch-ups, and saved it. I checked on Krita, and it was still loading. I loaded the second picture into the GIMP, did the touch-ups, then saved. Krita was still loading. I repeated that for several more pictures in the GIMP, then Krita finally finished loading the first picture.
Krita has great potential, but was so slow that it was unusable. It's been a couple years, though, and I had all but forgotten it still exists.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday May 27 2015, @04:39AM
The last time I tried Krita, a few years ago, it had one major show-stopping problem: it was unbearably slow. I had several large images I wanted to touch-up. I started Krita, selected the first picture to load, and waited. And waited. And waited.
Not surprising. I've been following it for a long time, and the Qt4 port started out really rocky. The 2.4 release (in early 2012) was when it really started to shine, and anything before that was basically unusable. They've been doing somewhat regular updates since, and speed-ups have been a major focus.
I don't know how large you're talking, but currently even 600dpi images with dozens of layers (using 80+mb of disk space) open pretty well -- well for not being stored on SSD, at least. Canvas interaction used to be slow at large sizes too, but it's had OpenGL acceleration for the canvas for a long time, which helped tremendously. That's around when I really started using it instead of just checking it out occasionally to see progress.
On my (crappy dual core) system it can still be rough using certain brushes or layer operations on 600dpi images -- though it's better than it was at that, too -- but everything else is pretty fast. Performance boosts for large brushes on large canvases seems to be a major theme with the current Kickstarter, so I'm looking forward to seeing that improve more.
That's what I meant before: Gimp's moving at a snail's pace while Krita's been evolving rapidly since 2.4 and other projects have likewise grown quickly. The landscape's completely different but nobody seems to have noticed yet. It's a good time to grab some of the alternatives and poke at them a bit to see what works for you.