New Application Stack in Ubuntu 10.04
Ubuntu 10.04, which will appear next April 2010 as Canonical’s long-anticipated third LTS (Long Term Support) release, will feature substantial changes in the lineup of applications installed by default. Here’s a look at the biggest ones, with some thoughts.
Judging by the controversy over the replacement of Pidgin with Empathy, many Ubuntu users do not take kindly to decisions to modify the application stack in a default installation. Even when the change arguably does not compromise important features and despite the fact that 35,000 applications are always just an “apt-get install” away–for those who have the bandwidth, at least–change tends to spawn a lot of ire.
That’s why the revisions in the works for Ubuntu 10.04, listed below, are likely to be a topic of passionate debate.
Goodbye, GIMP
One of the biggest changes planned is the removal of the GIMP image editor from the default install, on the grounds that it takes up a lot of space and provides functionality that the average user doesn’t need.
Personally, I won’t miss the GIMP much. It’s an extremely powerful tool for those interested in heavy-duty image manipulation. But most people, whose editing needs center around getting the red eye out of their photos, have little need for it.
Moreover, it’s one of the more unfortunately named applications of the free-software world that Ubuntu would do well to disassociate itself from.
Farewell, F-Spot
Update: although there had initially been discussion of removing F-Spot for Lucid, the developers ultimately decided to keep it. Thanks to Darcy for pointing this out in comments below.
The F-Spot photo manager is also slated for removal, which is long overdue, in my opinion. Written in Mono, the application isn’t doing anything to help resolve the legal and philosophical dilemmas plaguing the Ubuntu community. It also has a habit of failing to detect my camera, and organizes photo collections in a way that makes them difficult to export to other applications or folders.
In addition, like GIMP, F-Spot suffers from a poor name. Beyond not making sense to most people, “F-Spot” is just one letter away from another kind of spot that we can’t discuss on a family-friendly blog.
With all these downsides, the replacement of F-Spot by a more functional, better named, Mono-free application like gThumb will be a welcome change.
Hello, video editing, backup and music store
The removal of the GIMP and F-Spot will open the way for new applications. Currently, these potentially include:
- The PiTiVi video editor
- An as-yet-unspecified application for backing up files
- The Ubuntu One Music Store, whose details remain sketchy but which offers some exciting possibilities for Ubuntu users
None of these changes will hurt. Some might argue that the average user doesn’t need a video editor installed by default anymore than she wants an advanced image editor like GIMP, but even Windows has shipped with a rudimentary application for creating movies for some time now (on the other hand, its native image manipulator hasn’t changed much since 1985). Having one in Ubuntu is not a bad idea.
Similarly, backing up files has long been a weakness of Ubuntu. Unless you like rsyncing from the command line, there’s nothing installed by default for easily and efficiently copying files to external media.
Having a reliable graphical interface for this task would be great. It would also help focus development on whichever particular application Ubuntu decides to ship, instead of the dozens of Linux backup programs currently available, most of which remain half-baked.
Finally, while I don’t want to speculate too much on what the Music Store might entail or how the obstacles to implementing it might be overcome, having a way to purchase songs from within Rhythmbox would address one of the chronic deficiencies of Ubuntu in the eyes of non-geeks, namely, its lack of a complete clone of iTunes.
Currently, Rhythmbox does everything iTunes can do, with the exception of allowing users to purchase songs. Adding that functionality would be great. (iTunes’ other unique features, including taking forever to start and installing other Apple software without asking, can be left out of Ubuntu.)
There’s still plenty of time for Ubuntu developers to rethink or modify the changes discussed above. Stay tuned to WorksWithU in the weeks and months to come for more developments, and for a more detailed look at the new applications slated for inclusion in Ubuntu.
Do you have a reference for the claim that F-Spot is being dropped? That’s definitely not what I heard in the discussion at UDS…
Darcy: I’ve read in several places that F-Spot will be dropped, e.g ubuntu10-04.blogspot.com/2009/11/f-spot-will-be-replaced-in-ubuntu-1004.html. I haven’t traced it back to the source, however, so this may well no longer be accurate.
I will look into this more and update the post if necessary; thanks for bringing this point to light. If you happen to have a link to an official source on the F-Spot issue, I’d be interested to see it.
Uhm…. rhythmbox does let you buy music. Both Jamendo and magnatunes have plugins in rhythmbox that jet you purchase music and those plugins are included in Ubuntu’s version.
For reference see:
http://git.gnome.org/cgit/rhythmbox/tree/plugins
http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/i386/rhythmbox/filelist
I would personally recommend buying the Red Hat Summit compilation album from magnatunes.
-jef
Agreed.
1. A backup application is sorely needed. I’ve been using Simple Backup Suite, but it sucks.
2. F-Spot should be dropped.
3. “GIMP” is an incredibly stupid name, and it still has a poor user interface, even if it’s the only image editor I use.
Christopher: Sure, the blueprint that came out of UDS is up on Launchpad. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Lucid/DefaultsApps
Far from dropping F-Spot, it looks like they’re going to add features to allow more basic editing functionality.
If they make changes like this, it might be nice to have an installation option that pulls down the things they removed that were there pre-10.04. Just sayin’…
As others above, UDS made the case very clearly in the opposite direction regarding F-Spot. The newly re-written gThumb is everything F-Spot is and then some and i’d love, for one, to see it replace F-Spot but as far as i’m aware that is not the case…
I had thought that at the UDS the developers were pushing F-Spot as the “replacement” for GIMP.
Chris, I agree with you that F-Spot is both a poor photo editor and photo organizer. It looks and in many ways works like iPhoto, but since I don’t like iPhoto that isn’t something that moves me into the F-Spot column.
And while I like the GIMP quite a bit, it erases the IPTC metadata in JPEG images, which makes it unusable for my work editing the images of photojournalists, who universally use the IPTC framework to store caption and credit information.
I’ve been bleating for months about the lack of a good FOSS image editor that can edit this data.
While Krita can’t do it, the KDE photo-organizing app digiKam does handle IPTC metadata well with its Kipi Plugins. I’m not super-crazy about the UI, but it does the job.
What I discovered over the past couple of weeks (and my lack of love for F-Spot prompted me to look around) is that gThumb not only is an excellent photo organizer that doesn’t do all that database/directory lock-in of F-Spot and iPhoto, but gThumb is a MUCH more powerful editor than F-Spot and in my opinion would be a excellent replacement for both F-Spot AND the GIMP.
With gThumb, I can organize the images in traditional directories the way I wish, and as a result be able to easily access the images with any other application, something the database/folder method of F-Spot makes very difficult indeed.
GThumb allows me to resize, crop and rotate images. More importantly, through its “comment” field, I can both see and edit the main “caption” portion of the IPTC metadata. I can’t edit the credit portion of the metadata (like digiKam can do), but some of the metadata is better than none (and way better than a save destroying that data, as the GIMP, Krita and MtPaint do).
So all of this ferment/torment has caused me to discover a great GNOME app — gThumb.
Three things that for me would make gThumb nearly perfect:
— the ability to sharpen images
— access to the IPTC metadata for photo credit
— less awkward way to crop images to exact pixel dimensions
These are rather minor. Right here, right now, gThumb, not the GIMP, is my main image editor. F-Spot isn’t even close.
Regarding a GUI backup app, it’s a huge, gaping hole in the Ubuntu app stack. I use rsync, and I’ve written and re-written shell scripts to do it, but for the average or new user, that’s just not acceptable. Ubuntu needs GUI backup very, very badly.
I am a fan of Rhythmbox, but I hope that Mozilla’s Songbird will develop into a worthy alternative.
I don’t understand the Pitivi move. I don’t think any Linux video app is anywhere near ready. I haven’t checked out OpenShot yet, but that is one that we all should keep an eye on.
My needs in terms of an IM client are very slight, and I think Empathy does the job well.
After a couple of weeks using Empathy, I removed Pidgin.
I find UbuntuOne to be a curiosity at best. I’d rather have an open version of JungleDisk that backs up to the cloud, over a network and to a local drive.
I’m still struggling with how I feel about Mono, but F-Spot and Tomboy aren’t exactly ringing endorsements for the framework. I could lose both and not be bothered at all.
I can already purchase music with Rhythmbox (before the Ubuntu Music Store) with jamendo or magnatunes. I have only ever launched F-Spot once to see what all this hub hub was about and I say good riddance! As for the GIMP I use that a minimum of 3 days a week and I can not understand why they are removing it. They should help expedite the development of the new UI the GIMP team is working on, not just remove it! For backup I use ‘Simple Backup’, it is simple enough and I would recommend it to noobs. It does not have a lot of features, just enough, and did I mention just good, simple backup.
Darcy: thanks for the link. Post updated.
the new Gthumb is just amazing, it rewritten from scratch and got all the functionality of F-Spot + EOG and it opens faster than both. so THUMBS_UP
cont.
forgot to mention that gThumb is completely blended in the Gnome environment.
Good changes. Although I prefer OpenShot over Piviti. And for sure gThumb over F-spot. I would reinstall Gimp as I need it, but I can understand beginners won’t.
Furthermore I think Ubuntu really needs some better ‘desktop’ search functionality.
F-Spot is crappy as hell! They should remove it long time ago…
If Ubuntu has a problem with space on the LiveCD, no removals should take place until everything mono has been removed.
One could go on and state that Gnome has become monofied, but it’s not there. Yet.
The mono devs are working very very hard to get mono into Gnome wherever they can though, and the love for mono is interesting bearing in mind the resistance against Qt/KDE on basis of Qt being a threat to Linux/Opensource was so important to Gnome.
Ubuntu penetrates the market far better than opensuse and it is extremely important for microsoft/novell to get mono into Ubuntu. Without mono penetreation through Ubuntu mono will fail.
mono is beneficial to novell/microsoft. It helps microsoft products staying on servers. It does NOT replace microsoft products with Linux/Opensource. It just keeps microsoft in the game. The profit pays for their war against Linux/Opensource.
Ubuntu and Gnome are the tools used to gain acceptance for mono amongst endusers.
You don’t have to fight a war if you remove the resistance because the enemy becomes a walkover. Linux and Opensource is defined as a enemy by microsoft.
Ubuntu: Do not become a walkover. Resist.
@Flo: I agree in every way. The motivations behind Mono are obscure at best. We have had Miguel de Icaza post here, saying how childish it is to attack here, and how wonderful Microsoft is.
I am really, really, truly disappointed to see Ubuntu not make a strong point here. Being a Kubuntu user myself, I am not even close to use any Mono app, but I share your view that having the most popular distro endorse Mono is a big win for Microsoft, which immediately poses a threat to the Free Software community, in general.
The simplest way out would be for Ubuntu to shift the default distro to be KDE based (because Qt is a better toolkit, and now it’s not just fully GPL, but even LGPL, and it not entrenched with Microsoft).
Errata: I meant to say ” … how childish it is to attack Microsoft …”
Jef: regarding your comment on a music-store plugin already being available for Rhythmbox etc., you make a good point. But in my experience at least, Jamendo and Magnatunes offer a very limited selection of mainstream music as compared to iTunes, which is a problem for some people. I’m envisioning the Ubuntu Music Store offering a better selection.
Of course, at this point the information on the Music Store is too limited to know whether that’s a realistic expectation, and overcoming the legal and commercial issues involved is perhaps more than a relatively small company like Canonical could handle. But hopefully Canonical is thinking along these lines; otherwise, as you point out, the Music Store would offer little value beyond what’s already available.
Chris:
The gods of irony are pleased… a niche open source operating system advocate complaining about support for only niche open music retailers. Hey if you want to spend money on music in a way that supports the large music labels and restrictive copyright licensing instead of having your money reach the actual musicians and let you share music socially without it being a crime….that’s your choice.
Both Jamendo and Magnatune support artists who are choosing non-commerical use Creative Commons licensing. Isn’t that worth supporting? You know sharing music with your friends without it being a copyright infringement? Personally I hate being a criminal, but I like sharing music with my friends. Finding music on jamendo and magnatune lets me share music without breaking any copyright laws. I wonder how Canonical’s UbuntuOne music store is going to handle the conflict of mainstream licensing and social sharing.
And both magnatune and jamendo have 50 % profit sharing with artists…not the record labels…the actual artists. When you buy a song on itunes how much of that money actual goes to the artist? When you buy music from the UbuntuOne store.. how much of that money is going to go to the artist?
Anyways…other than the lack of “mainstream” content.. do you have a problem with the rhythmbox music store plugin on any technical grounds?
Apparently Canonical does… though they haven’t really bothered explaining what’s wrong with the current interface. If you read the wiki page spec for the UbuntuOne Music store… it does not reuse the existing Rhythmbox plugin interface… nor does it give any explanation as to why the current rhythmbox store interface is technically unsuitable. Canonical is going to be producing a web browser based interface to shove into rhythmbox…instead of reusing the existing music store plugin interface. It sounds to me like the UbuntuOne Musics store isn’t going to have a rich open API and is going to be web browser interface bound.
What more, as of October of this year the upstream rhythmbox developers aren’t even aware of Canonical’s desire to work on a store plugin. Yippie for upstream communication! Let’s hope Canonical actually works with upstream on the plugin.
ref: mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2009-October/msg00001.html
That upstream email brings up another point…. Online music stores can be country specific. Will the UbuntuOne store be globally available? If Canonical partners with someone like Amazon Canonical might not be able to provide a globally accessible storefront.
-jef
Jef: I wasn’t trying to start a discussion about the morals of the mainstream music industry. I would personally be in your camp on this issue, but I think it should be clear that there are a lot of other people who don’t care about these philosophical issues and just want to buy mainstream music like they’d be able to do on Windows or OS X. Not having a good way to do that in Ubuntu is a problem that Canonical’s Music Store may or may not be able to address.
[…] New Application Stack in Ubuntu 10.04 Ubuntu 10.04, which will appear next April 2010 as Canonical’s long-anticipated third LTS (Long Term Support) release, will feature substantial changes in the lineup of applications installed by default. Here’s a look at the biggest ones, with some thoughts. […]
Ditching GIMP is a bad idea. It’s a staple of the Linux distro. The name might not mean much to the uninitiated. But it can’t be that hard to figure out. It is in the graphics section of the applications menu.
A more important problem to resolve is Ubuntu Software Centre. It’s too slow. I don’t like the way it works. I prefer the old Add/Remove.
Yes that might be because it’s what I’m used to. But the fact is Add/Remove was faster and easier to navigate. Software Centre needs to improve a lot before I’ll like it.
Now if F-Spot is going because it’s written in Mono then why not TomBoy Notes? Canonical built in a special synching service to Ubuntu One for TomBoy Notes. And speaking of Ubuntu One. That also needs improving. A lot! It’s not a patch on DropBox.
I was at the UDS discussion about this and F-Spot was
1. Never going to be removed, someone mentioned it but we immediately dismissed it.
2. Never considered as a replacement for gimp. F-Spot is a simple editor and viewer thats all and thats all we want. Users dont want a thing that does everything, they want something that does what they want to do and they want to be able to do it quickly.
We also didnt talk about a backup solution by default.
Watch the meeting its here http://blip.tv/file/2876109
Removing the Gimp on grounds of HDD-space issues and users not needing advanced functionality.
(Ask all the people who have Photoshop illegally to crop their pictures!!!)
The people want to have it all, in a user-friendly package.
Oh, actually the real strange thing is to keep Mono with some crappy, buggy slow as hell applications.
Really can’t understand why Shuttleworth doesn’t do anything (yet).
Ubuntu should ditch Tomboy notes.
We got OpenOffice.org Writer and gNote.
Also ditch F-spot, replace it with gThumb.
GThumb works much better, faster,…
The legal minefield is obvious, Mono stuff should be dropped.
(Why has every Mono project ex-MS Employees, or aren’t they ex-employees? Hmn, suspicious.)
@dsgdsghd : are you aware of any initiative to propose this? Maybe an ubuntu ideastorm entry or something? I would love to see this happen NOW, but I guess it is too late for Lucid 🙁
Well, this is what I found so far:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/No-Mono-by-Default
Also: it looks like Fedora is removing Mono
http://osgeex.blogspot.com/2009/07/fedora-my-new-distro-of-choice.html
@Christopher, my previous post is awaiting moderation, maybe because I included a couple links?
Leo@28: Yes, the links pushed your comment into our moderation section. Sorry about that. Your comment is posted now.
-jp
Get rid of Evolution! Pretty please!
“The legal minefield is obvious, Mono stuff should be dropped.”
I really don’t see why this should be necessary to remove Mono. In a matter of facts – I believe we should embrace it. No – I am not a ex-MS Employee, but I really love the C# language. Mono helps us developers who love C# to make cross-platform apps and to make i clear – It does an excellent job.
I have some points i want to make clear:
1) Mono does not make applications slow. Sure some apps is a litter slower, but mono can accelerate apps tremendous. Mono can use multiply cpu cores without me making any changes to the code itself. Mono is also making sure that memory and dispose is done right ! This is extremely important for us who build very large apps
2) To me it seems like Microsoft is reaching out to us developers and users of linux so we all can come to together and make excellent apps. Both parts will benefit greatly from mono if we accept it.
Please rethink your statement about mono.
Leo:
It’s a bit of a mischaracterization to say Fedora is dropping mono. Fedora has never had mono or any mono based application as part of its Desktop livecd. What Fedora is doing is making gnote the default note taking application primarily because its a better trade-off between functionality and space requirement on the livecd image. Tomboy has never been a part of the Fedora livecd so its not correct to say that gnote is replacing tomboy. Gnote is simply less resource intensive and can fit on the livecd without sacrificing something else. Mono is still available in the Fedora repositories…like it has been since its introduction as a set of packages.
You don’t have to invoke difficult legal issues for mono to be problematic for distributions. Every high language framework that you build applications on has a system resource cost…and mono’s resource burn is pretty high considering the very narrow application landscape it supports. Sure there are fans of banshee and tomboy or f-spot..but compared to the vast array of python based applications or java apps..mono just isn’t very compelling a framework to support from an applications stand point.
For mono to really shine as a robust application framework, there is a need for a project like OLPC, Moblin or Android or Maemo that makes mono a foundational framework on which userspace applications are built..instead of python or java. And I don’t know of any project that is trying to make mono a foundational technology as part of interface design.
-jef
Consider,
C# is a great language, and Mono is a great library. Many developers today happily write code in C#.
I just opened up the new(2.10.11?) gThumb but still didn’t see a way to fluidly move through my database of many thousands of photos from the last several years. F-Spot has its quirks, but it presents a good way to move around in your photos regardless of what directory you’ve placed them in.
If you don’t like the way F-Spot directs where photos are stored, then make your own “Photos” folder, move your photos from your camera into folders in there “Photos” manually using Nautilus, and in F-Spot just tell it to rescan/reimport from your “Photos” folder and it’ll leave the photos where they are on disk but recognize them in your photo database. It’s great.
@Jeff and Mark: the issue is not really technical but political. Many among us just don’t trust Microsoft, and I think their history of bullying the competition and particularly trying to discredit and threaten open and free(dom) software makes it a natural reaction.
Sorry, I meant to direct the previous message at Mark and Rino
@Jeff: thanks a lot for the clarification. I also found a Fedora mailing list along these lines …
@Leo:
Its political for some but not for others. For the people making the decision regarding mono inclusion, is it political for them? Doubtful.
But there are technical issues as well, I would encourage you to focus on anything but the political issue if your goal is to actually get anyone to change their mind and to see policy changed.
As a card carrying “trouble maker” I think I’m qualified to impart the following wisdom. Once differences of opinion concerning political issues are identified, focusing on the political is a sure fire way to make sure you don’t change anyone’s mind. You have to accept that the people making decisions with regard to mono’s inclusion in Ubuntu do not share your political viewpoint and thus will not be influenced by political arguments.
Raising political arguments can sway people to choose sides that are still on the fence. But once a side is chosen, political arguments only harden points of view. And in this discussion, popular opinion doesn’t really matter much. You’d have to wage a pretty brutal popular opinion campaign against Ubuntu decision making for popular opinion to be decisive. I don’t think anyone in the Ubuntu community has the stomach to wage that sort of internal political fight inside their own community over mono and its guaranteed to be rather destructive.
At this point if you want to influence decision making concerning mono, you’ll have to find a non-political argument that speaks to other priorities such as space savings on the livecd if mono is removed. If Ubuntu took out all mono from their livecd and replaced f-spot with gthumb and replaced tomboy with gnote… how much smaller would the livecd be?
-jef
It’s a pity that F-Spot is now staying. I started using it but I didn’t like the way it organised and saved photos. Gthumb was alot simpler, logical, and fast. I knew how everything was saved, it just a file viewer. All gthumb needed was a few tweaks and team committed to development.
F-Spot, get rid of it.
GIMP I didn’t use much, and be downloaded anyway.
GIMP is fantastic, but if people want a CD size image, cut have to be made.
Well I am a little late, why would removing the GIMP be a good thing? It absolutely is not large or something that would make someone remove it to free space… It also is not comparable to F-Spot (Photo Viewer which allows basic / simple editing features). I never looked at F-Spot as an amazing application, I mean its a photoviewer, . If anyone at Canonical was thinking of replacing a image manipulation program with a photoviewer,, possibly they should not be on the dev team =).