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

[Frederic Crozat]

Le samedi 03 mars 2007 à 19:28 +0100, Frederik Himpe a écrit :
> 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.

Thanks for doing so.

below, I'll snip your analysis and add my own analysis if it differs.


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

Here, we are comparing apples and orange.

F-Spot is focused only on Photo management and it is doing it really
well. Its interface is clean and I could put it in my mom hands without
any problems (compared to gthumb). The only problem is the import thing.
But it contains also a viewer only mode for non imported photos. 

It is really an application which need to be shipped.

Gthumb is nice to handle lot of graphics (photos or not) and its authors
are trying to follow F-Spot feature list (which is a little sad, since
we might end up with two apps doing the same thing).

EoG is just a very simple graphic image viewer in KISS philosophy (IMO).

So, we must ship F-Spot. But which app should be keep between EoG or
Gthumb. Since it is quite easy to have the equivalent of a thumbnail
list with Nautilus, there is no need to ship gthumb by default.

And since F-Spot has a simple image viewer too, I'm wondering if we
couldn't drop EoG by default too.


> 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).

Let's just install F-Spot.

Importing photos in gthumb isn't really user friendly IMO.

> 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...)

For a long time, we couldn't install epiphany without installing
Firefox. With libification of firefox, we can.

For Epiphany bookmark manager, I agree we should hide it.

Firefox as default browser under GNOME and KDE has always been a
marketing request we (R&D) didn't like, because we felt it was a
regression in user experience in both environments. So, we complied this
request but we didn't want to kill "native" browsers.

We still can't ship a desktop without Firefox installed (most people
coming from Windows wouldn't understand, and it was one of the biggest
complain before we shipped Firefox). And I still think we should push
for native browser (like Epiphany that I love) so I think we should keep
status quo.

> 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. 

Gnome-CD can't be uninstalled without splitting gnome-media in several
small pieces. It was supposed to die and be replaced by sound-juicer but
it hasn't happened yet. Same for vu-meter (split in several pieces). I'm
not confortable changing that so late in the cycle.

> 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?

Let's drop it. People should use nautilus and report bugs if it doesn't
work.

> 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.

Marketing decision, I have no idea why this app was chosen and I won't
comment on it.

> 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?

No idea. I think nautilus-cd-burner is nice by default :)

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat@mandriva.com>
Mandriva