[Cooker] rpmsrate discussion [2]: default Gnome desktop

[Frederik Himpe]

Some time ago, I gave my opinion about the choice of applications installed by 
default in a standard KDE install in Mandriva. In this second part, I'm 
presenting my opinion about the default Gnome installation, in the hope of 
starting a constructive discussion to improve the default Gnome desktop.

1. Graphical viewers: The default Gnome installation, contains three different 
picture viewers: eog, gthumb and f-spot.

F-Spot has a rather unique feature set amongst these three (creation of an 
organised photo collection), and should remain in the default Gnome install 
IMO.

eog and gthumb  are used for similar purposes on the other hand: viewing 
individual pictures, and viewing directories of pictures. The first use case, 
actually is fullfilled also by F-Spot, the second is not (F-Spot requires you 
to import all pictures). So we still need either eog or gthumb.

In favour of Eog is the fact that it's Gnome's default picture viewer. On the 
other hand, for viewing a directory of pictures, gthumb is much handier: it 
shows all thumbnails in a nice large overview, and when you double click on a 
thumbnail, the picture is shown full screen. Eog tries to show both the 
selected picture and the collection at the same time, but this makes that you 
have to scroll much more in the collection view. So personally I would vote 
for gthumb as default, although I could perfectly understand if eog was 
chosen. But please don't install both of them, as that's too much 
duplication.

2. Digicam importers: we have four programs which can import pictures from a 
digital camera: f-spot, flphoto, gthumb and gtkam. flphoto is ugly compared 
to native GTK-programs and does not have any added functionality to the other 
programs (at the same time it can be moved to contribs and upgraded to 
version 1.3). GTKam is also a simple importer without unique features, so no 
reason to install it by default.

My proposal for point 1 and 2: install F-Spot and Gthumb by default, do not 
install eog, flphoto and gtkam by default anymore. (PS: I verified after I 
have written these two points: this is also what Ubuntu is doing by default).

3. Web browsers: We have Epiphany and Firefox in the default install. I think 
Mandriva is besides Debian the only big distro installing these two by 
default. These two browsers use the same engine, and Epiphany does not have 
unique features which do not exist in Firefox. Furthermore Firefox is much 
more known. So personally I do not see any reason to install both, it just 
clutters the Web Browser menus. (Even when installing both, is it really 
necessary to create a seperate menu item for Epiphany's bookmark manager? I 
have never seen somebody starting his bookmark manager to start browsing the 
web...)

4. CD Player applications: We currently have three applications which permit 
you to listen to music CDs: gnome-cd, rhythmbox and sound-juicer. Is 
gnome-cd-player really still necessary? Rhtymbox could be launched 
automatically for audio CDs. At least Ubuntu does not install gnome-cd by 
default anymore, just rhythmbox and sound-juicer.
This would mean we would have to split gnome-media package: not a bad idea 
IMHO: it would also permit us to not install vumeter anymore, as that 
application seems also rather useless. 

5. gftp: This package is installed by default, but upstream development seems 
to have come to a halt, and it does not work very stable. Personally I 
experienced often random crashes when using it in the past, and now there is 
this blocker bug: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=29073
Unfortunately, I don't know of a good GTK-alternative at the moment. Maybe we 
don't need a graphical FTP-application in default install?

6. We're installing blogtk by default now. This application has not been 
updated for two years, and I think it's target public is too limited to 
install it by default. This is only useful to people having a supported blog, 
and even then I don't think a lot of people really bother using a seperate 
program instead of just using the web based administration panel of their 
blog.

7. cdrdao-gcdmaster: It is a burning application for audio CDs. It seems an 
application with an extensive feature set for rather specialized work. Would 
not a more simple application like brasero or serpentine be more appropriate?

-- 
Frederik Himpe