Yes, but F-spot sucks. It is no iPhoto. It is not good for anything. It can
crop and rotate and not much else. But the worst thing is that it
over-writes important EXIF metadata. If you are a photographer, avoid
F-spot. Use Digikam or anything but F-spot. Even Krita is better. The
decision to remove the GIMP is lame when there is no good replacement.

The GIMP is the programme that gave us GTK which is what GNOME is written
in. The G in GTK stands for GIMP. Besides being the cornerstone of GNOME it
is an open source icon and one of the programmes that introduces people to
free software. Yes, you can still install the GIMP, but it is a kick in the
face for developers who have worked hard to improve the interface and add
new features that make it almost as good as Photoshop. They would not say so
but you know that it has to hurt.

There are other decisions that could have been made. They could have removed
Mono and saved tons of disk space. In Brainstorm the removal of Mono gets
many more votes for than against. Yet it stays. You have to wonder why.
There are replacements for most Mono programmes except GNOME-Do which I
suspect most people don't use anyway. F-spot is the only one that people
would miss but I have already covered why it is useless anyway.

The really laughable decision is to include the buggy PiTiVi. Now how many
people edit videos compared to the number of people that install the GIMP? I
am sure that the GIMP is one of the most downloaded programmes and PiTiVi is
one of the least. This is the biggest joke of all! F-spot was already
included so it seems that PiTiVi is one that pushed the GIMP out. So the
GIMP which is a first class photo editor is being tossed aside for a bug
ridden video editor and Ubuntu users are being sold a false bill of goods
that F-spot is up to the task of doing photo editing.

I am a photographer and I would not use F-spot if it was the only programme
available. Fortunately I use KDE and have neither Mono nor Fspot to worry
about. But it isn't me that I am worried about. I am worried that Canonical
is being driven by a few Mono zealots and that their decisions are not in
the best interests of users.

What saddens me more than all of the above is the decision to switch to
Plymouth from usplash and this affects me and many others in a big way. Most
users are not aware of the problem, but I run both Kubuntu and Fedora and I
know first hand. I have an Nvidia 3D card and with Plymouth you cannot run
proprietary Nvidia drivers because Plymouth uses KMS and Nvidia drivers do
not support kernel mode setting. That means that I must use Nouveau and be
stuck with a 2D card in Fedora. Guess what? Canonical plans on using the
same Nouveau driver.

I will have to decide between having Kubuntu 10.04 in 2D or running another
distribution to get 3D. I won't be alone. Unless Nvidia comes to the rescue
I will be running another distribution. I do much work in both 2D and 3D. It
isn't just about not having Compiz and 3D effects.

I am already in the process of checking out other distros, so that I can
keep all options open. I don't think that Canonical can be so stupid as to
cut off all Nvidia users, but the afore mentioned decisions make me wonder
where their head is at.

Roy



2009/12/3 Daniel Eggleston <[email protected]>

> Just imagine if instead of iPhoto, Macs came with Photoshop -- that would
> scare a lot of people.  Gimp is inarguably a more powerful image editor, but
> it has far too many features for your average computer user looking to
> retouch photos.
>
> Ubuntu wants the desktop market, and decisions like this one are positives
> in that pursuit -- make it work for the majority of people. Make it *easy*
> for the majority of people. Let your power users take care of themselves
> (and they will!).
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 1:59 PM, Shaun Marolf <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2009-12-03 at 11:30 -0800, Alex Xavier wrote:
>> > just read an article about the decision the was taken recently at
>> > Ubuntu Developers Summit
>> > that the next version of UBUNTU lucid lynx won't have the crowd
>> > favourite GIMP bundled with the distributed CD
>> >
>>
>> Makes sense when you consider that GIMP is not an everyday tool really.
>> I use it daily but then I'm not just doing simple photo retouches (which
>> F-Spot does well.)
>>
>> F-Spot is a basic photo viewer editor which for most users is fine,
>> while GIMP is a full scale graphics editor that can really scare a few
>> folks. It will be in the repositories so you can get it if you want it.
>> I see this as one of the better decisions from Canonical.
>>
>>
>> --
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>
>
>
> --
>
>           Daniel
>
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