WildWestDesigns said:
That's strange, X5 worked fine on my Win 8. Did you upgrade or did you do a fresh install?
This was a fresh install of X5 on a new Dell PC with Windows 8 loaded. The installer wouldn't even run. It would get blocked with a dialog box saying that version of CorelDRAW was incompatible and that a newer version (X6) was available that would work. So I had to buy an upgrade.
We had older CS3 and CS4 licenses of the Design Premium and Production Premium suites. Some of those apps were flaky with Win 8 so we moved on to the Creative Cloud thing. Flexi 7 was also an issue, so there was another costly upgrade for one machine. Here just a few days ago we upgraded another of our old Flexi licenses from 7.62 to Flexi 12 just to run that on an old Win 7 machine, the previous machine running Flexi was an old Win XP box.
WildWestDesigns said:
That is true. Mainly due to differences in resources as well. One of the great things that has drawn me more to Linux last year was that you could get a lighter weight distro that works on older or more resource scarce hardware and still be current.
The problem with Linux is none of the mainstream graphics vendors (Adobe, Corel, etc.) are supporting it with any native Linux coded software. Which distro would they even support if they wanted to make Linux ports of their apps? You can run "virtual machines" inside Linux to support Windows software, but emulation is at the core of it. Emulation can rob performance and create compatibility headaches with things like drivers. It's not a user friendly approach either.
If I was going to do any platform switch anytime soon I would go Mac, even though that too would involve dual booting Windows. I have no idea if or when Corel will try to release another Mac version of CorelDRAW. The Mac thing only appeals to me out of a standpoint of security. The user base of Windows is so huge it makes the platform a giant target for criminals. A couple or so days ago one of our suppliers got their computers hosed with a piece of ransom-ware that locked and encrypted every disc drive it could touch. Macs aren't 100% trouble free in terms of security, but since the OSX platform has such a small share of the market very few hackers try exploiting it.