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Ubuntu 10.04: Lucid’s Papercut Redux Reveals Much

Daengbo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 13:36:00 +0000

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.

What Applications Should be in the Standard Installation?

Daengbo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:56:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

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).

Application Class	Current Choice	Home User	Professional User
Accessories	Printing, Calculator, etc.	Yes	Yes
Games	GNOME Games	Yes, and more	No
Photo Manager	F-Spot	Yes	No
Bitmap Editor	The GIMP	No	No
Vector Editor	OO.o Draw	No	Yes
Image Scanner	XSANE	On insertion of a scanner	On insertion of a scanner
IM Client	Empathy	Yes	Probably no
Personal Information Manager	Evolution	Not likely	Yes
Web Browser	Firefox	Yes	Yes
Remote Desktop	VNC Client and RDP Client	No	Yes
Bittorrent Client	Transmission	Yes	No (a hundred times, "No!")
File Synchronization and Back-up	Ubuntu One	Yes	Yes, but not this one
Presentation Software	OO.o Impress	No	Yes
Spreadsheet Software	OO.o Calc	Maybe	Yes
Word Processor	OO.o Write	Yes	Yes
Disc Burner	Brasero	Yes	Maybe
Video and Audio Player	Totem	Yes	Yes
Music Manager	Rhythmbox	Yes	No

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.

The Fate of Photo Editing in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Daengbo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:14:00 +0000

You may have started to hear rumors that The GIMP and F-Spot aren't safe for inclusion in 10.04 Lucid Lynx. "What?!?" you say. "The GIMP has been in every GNOME distribution since GNOME existed (sinceGNOME is written to GTK, which stands for the GIMP ToolKit)." Well, well. Good idea. Not likely to move forward.

The argument goes like this:

Not many people actually edit photos.
Fewer people use GIMP to do the editing, since the interface may be difficult for some.
Most of the editing people want to do on photos is available from within F-Spot, and thus GIMP is duplicating functionality.

I think getting rid of The GIMP in the default install is a great idea. It takes up precious space on the Ubuntu Live CD. It's easy to add later by searching for "graphics editor" or "photo editor." Unfortunately, getiing rid of the GIMP means that F-Spot needs to be examined, and it has been in a terrible state for several releases.

It didn't work at all on 8.04 AMD64 at release time.
It had an awful "the sidebar has zero width" bug for two other releases.
It doesn't categorize or edit photos that aren't imported, even if those photos are in the ~/Pictures folder.

The sharks circle F-Spot and say "since we're removing The GIMP, let's replace F-Spot, too. $Foo is a great project," where $Foo is one of:

gThumb has been around for a long time (and is still the default for Fedora), but was replaced with F-Spot on Ubuntu several years ago. Are the Ubuntu developers going to admit that moving to F-Spot was a mistake? Are they going to appear to cave in to the Ubuntu users that oppose Mono apps in the default installation?

Shotwell is a new photo management app for GNOME written in Vala, and it gets decent reviews. Still, it's new, untested, and doesn't support tagging or real editing options. Check out the Shotwell PPA by entering "ppa:yorba/ppa" into the Software Sources -> Third-party tab.

So ... I don't think it's going to happen. I'd like to see this change (along with some others in the default application area), but there's not a clear path forward, and definitely not enough agreement to get a real plan.

My preference? Leave 10.04LTS alone, get it as stable and bug-free as possible, and look to replace F-Spot with Solang (install Solang) in 10.10 when GNOME 2.X gives way to GNOME 3. Debarshi Ray has put a lot of work into this project. It's a photo manager which stores tagging information in Tracker, and he's written a Nautilus plug-in which handles Tracker tags, as well. Wouldn't it be nice if the information you entered in your photo manager was available to your other applications, and to Zeitgeist, as well?