TimburyDotOrg

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There is going to be a second set of papercut fixes, divided into ten rounds of ten bugs each, the first three of which will actually be about Karmic fixes that didn’t get into the release.
Round four will be specifically about Empathy.
Round five will be about Gwibber. That’s right, Gwibber is going to be a default app in Lucid.
Round six is going to work on sound and video, including PiTiVi. Again, that means PiTiVi will be included.
Round seven will target F-Spot since The GIMP is definitely out of Lucid.
Rounds eight, nine, and ten will work on notifications (fixing the location?), Compiz, and “etc.,” respectively.

To summarize — GIMP out, Gwibber and PiTiVi in.

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You may have heard that GIMP and F-Spot aren’t safe for inclusion in 10.04. 700MB isn’t much space to work with Why not question all the applications in Ubuntu, then? What should be in the default installation? I’ll look category by category, but I’ll talk a little about why the current defaults are chosen first.

Ubuntu is first and foremost a GNOME distribution. It takes GNOME applications unless there’s a definitive reason not to. For example, Firefox was originally used instead of the GNOME default Epiphany browser because Epiphany was in a terrible state at the time, and FF is still preferred because it’s a very poplar browser and serves as a familiar signpost to switchers. But mostly, you’ve got Totem, Nautlius, Evolution, and all the gang. Ubuntu thus looks much like any other GNOME distribution.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The questions about The GIMP are great — they represent a critical look at what should be included. How many people do advanced photo editing? Few, probably. I would guess that the same can be said for PIMminess. Has the average user even even opened Evolution? Most home users handle all their personal business through web services like Yahoo! or Google.

First of all, UBuntu needs to decide whether it wants to be a home or professional operating system. Pro users want different things out of the box. Trying to please  both sets of users with one CD is an exercise in frustration. Take a look at the table below to see what groups I think want various features (and keep in mind that it’s easy to install these bits if you are an exception).

Using very rough calculations (via apt-cache show‘s size), the home user profile above would shave 75-80MB. That’s more than enough to add more themes, a video introduction on first run, a video editor, cool games, or other things deemed useful for the home user.  The corporate user will only get 60MB or so, but you could then make a case for removing Tomboy so that Mono could be ripped out, saving even more space. What would go in instead? Certainly the would be tools for connecting to directory services. Tracker should be installed and Nautilus should have Tracker functionality re-enabled.

Ubuntu devs are constantly fighting amongst themselves about which applications deserve to be on that tiny, 700MB disk. Serving two different customer bases with one CD just makes that problem worse.