Ease of installation
What does it take to get each app running?
Much as you’d expect, the ease of installation of any given application depends on its popularity. Web browsers are readily available for almost any Linux distribution, whereas some specialised scientific applications may exist only as a source tarball.
Vector graphics tend to fall between the two extremes, meaning that if an editor is in an active state of development, such as Inkscape, it’s widely available in any packaged format and for any Linux distribution.
LibreOfficeDraw receives far less attention from developers, but being a part of a bigger package, it’s generally distributed with almost every Linux distro. For those who prefer installing straight from the official LibreOffice site ( www.libreoffice.org) rather than their package manager, there are fresh builds for 32- and 64-bit Deb and RPM systems available.
Karbon is also part of an office solution, but Calligra is quite a bit less widely used than LibreOffice, so you might not find a pre-packaged version in some lesser-known distros.
SK1 is a very promising open source project, but it hasn’t been updated for nearly two years. This isn’t as much of a problem in the world of specialised graphics software with its unhurried development cycles, but sK1 is only known to a very small group of developers and community members: even some Linux graphics enthusiasts haven’t heard of the application.
As a result, SK1 offers loads of precompiled packages for a dozen flavours of Linux, but frankly most of them are outdated. We managed to install packages for Ubuntu 11.04 on our 12.04 LTS based system, but we had to manually resolve some Python dependencies and use dpkg to install sK1 packages. You might find it better to build it from source.
XaraXtreme is even more elderly than sK1 – its website looks to have been last updated in October 2008 – and on top of that, it comes in the fairly exotic Autopackage format. In the late 2000s this was a quite promising way to ship Linux software in a distroindependent way, but although you can try Autopackage and play with it, the chances are that something will go wrong – it doesn’t really work well now after years of neglect.
Thankfully, there are enough Deb and RPM packages. You can try http://pkgs.org to find xaralx binaries for your preferred flavour of Linux. However, the application runs without any major problems once you select its latest version.