Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell 361
climenole writes "Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."
On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
For fuck sake, editors.
EDIT!
Stupid remarks (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me.
Do we need such silly commentary?
I'm using Kubuntu btw, so I couldn't care less about F-Spot.
Isn't it all about options? (Score:2, Insightful)
Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.
I take issue with this last line. I LIKE c#/.net. If I get to use it in more places, this is a good thing.
Isn't the whole shtick about open source the fact that we get more options?
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:1, Insightful)
Nobody cares whether you like programming in C#.
The question is whether people like having Mono installed on their system, and the answer is no. It's like requiring Java or Flash. Besides which, Mono will never be anything but a half-arsed implementation of what's available on Windows. We already have enough lame-duck copies of things on the Linux desktop. We don't need another one in Mono.
F-Spot was a pathetic attempt to justify the existence of Mono, and it failed miserably. Nothing else of any relevence uses it, so now we can move on. :-)
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:5, Insightful)
The concern is not so much about the language itself as with Microsoft. They've *said* they won't sue anyone using/writing for Mono, but since they've threatened to do some very similar things and I'm not so sure I trust them.
In any case, the intensity with which Icaza has been pushing Mono, plus his ties with Microsoft, scare the crap out of me.
So please, feel free to develop with it. But I'm not so sure I'll be installing Mono to run your app, because I try to keep it off otherwise.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:4, Insightful)
Meh, as long as F-Spot and Mono remain in the repository, I have little issue with them moving to Shotwell if they feel it's the better product (for whatever reason, be it phantom legal issues, or legitimate stability issues).
Re:Stupid remarks (Score:3, Insightful)
Curing Mono (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm always glad to hear about mono being used less on Linux.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:3, Insightful)
Open source is about options, true. So you're saying that Mono should be included as a required dependency in the base system of Ubuntu because you like it, but fuck all the people who don't like Mono for various reasons? This clearly isn't about more options. Leaving Mono "optional" is about more options.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:5, Insightful)
> I LIKE c#/.net.
Someone always pops up saying something like this anytime Mono is mentioned. But if C#/.Net/Mono is so great why hasn't anything really great been created with it in all the years it has existed? Remember when Microsoft was going to recode pretty much all of their userland? yea right. Reminds me of when belief in the Java hype pushed Corel under as they thought they could write a cross platform office suite with it. So show me something Mono/.Net based that that is awesome and where the choice of platform was something more a technical than a political/religious decision.
But beyond that, the fact is we are talking about a technology controlled by Microsoft. Many people simply do not trust them, and for good reason. So using Mono to allow otherwise foreign code to run is unobjectionable. Creating core subsystems of the Free Software/Open Source environment isn't. Any distribution that breaks if Mono is removed is going to be unacceptable to a large enough subset of users that it simply isn't likely to happen in any of the top ten distros.
Re:Curing Mono (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm always glad to hear about mono being used less on Linux.
Yup. I've got nothing against people using it, but I completely agree with the FSF [fsf.org] and would never use or install Mono myself.
We've still got people like Horacio Gutierrez (Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel) making statements like this [microsoftontheissues.com]:
...smartphones are a product of the ‘open innovation’ paradigm – device manufacturers do not do all of their development in-house, but add their own innovations to those of others to create a product that users want. Open innovation is only possible through the licensing of third party IP rights, which ensures that those who develop the building blocks that make a new technology possible are properly compensated for their investments in research and development. After all, technology just doesn’t appear, fully-developed, from Zeus’s head. It requires lots of hard work and resources to create.
...now the industry is in the process of sorting out what royalties will be for the software stack, which now represents the principal value proposition for smartphones. In the next few years, as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device.
(16 March 2010)
Do you still think Microsoft will allow competitors like Google (Android) and Nokia/Intel (MeeGo) to use Mono's .NET implementations for free?
Re:On the other hand... (Score:3, Insightful)
>For fuck sake, editors.
"Trolling is a art" - Anonymous
--
BMO
Shotwell is beta (Score:5, Insightful)
Features (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never heard about shotwell, so I went to its website (it would be nice if the article actually included a link to that). As far as I can tell, there are some important features missing from shotwell. Namely, there is no information about raw, integration with ufraw or another raw developing software, editing photos in external editors (GIMP), or running external filters on photos.
Also, it does not seem to have as many export options as f-spot.
I am definitely not happy with f-spot, and always keep looking for a replacement, but so far I was unable to find one, and, as far as I can tell, shotwell with its current set of features is not going work for me.
Re:Curing Mono (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. The first thing I usually do when installing Ubuntu now a days is:
sudo aptitude purge mono-gac libmono2.0-cil -y
This also removes F-Spot, Tomboy and Gbrainy, none of which I particularly miss.
Good, I hated F-Spot (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Shotwell is beta (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Features (Score:1, Insightful)
DigiKam is amazing. Best photo manager I've ever used, regardless of OS.
Re:um who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ubuntu bashing is amusing, but pretty infantile. Fedora uses pretty much the same programs, with a different non-universal package manager, just as DEB isn't universal (a major gripe of mine about Linux standards and software accessibility on Linux, but off-topic).
Now, it shouldn't matter to any distro users, and none of this should be news worthy, because users should be able to get the latest version of any program easily without relying on someone to create a PPA (which still haven't been made ultra-easy to deal with, and confounds new users), but again, that's going back to the above off-topic point. The sad reality is the default apps that distros ship does matter to distro users users because they will most likely not get the new version, and many not even know Shotwell exists until they install or upgrade to the newer distro version.
Re:Yet another application rewritten in Gnome... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the single biggest failing of the FOSS ecosystem.
Someone starts a piece of software and gets some of the desired features working. Shortly after that, someone else, either working on the project or using it, decides one of several problems plague the program. Either it's development is too slow, it has crummy architecture, someone else thinks they can do better, philosophically or technically, or they are half-baked programmers who look at existing code, can't figure it out, and decide to start over from scratch. Or maybe the project's lead(s) decide that their way of doing things, technically or philosophically, is the only "right" way, and hit would-be contributors over the head with attitude (I'm looking at for example developers of VLC and cdparanoia, not to mention the issue of Linux kernel schedulers and sound subsystem).
So we end up with multiple half-baked programs all doing sort of the same thing in different ways but none of them doing the whole job. Naturally, when someone sees the situation, the first reaction is "All this mess! I'm going to start a NEW project and do it RIGHT this time!"
If we FOSS users and developers are lucky, eventually there will be a tipping point when a majority gravitate to one project and things get more or less sorted out. If not, well, we can always use ANOTHER, say, media player; some college CS major can tackle it as a senior project, release it, and then forget all about it. If Amarok, Audacious, Beep, BMPx, Banshee, Kaffeine, Miro, Rhythmbox, VLC, Winamp, XMMS, xine and whatever else I'm forgetting don't offer enough choice for you.
Glad to see that yet another category of software is joining the party.
Re:who cares if it uses mon or not (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't do PNG? What, are they writing their own image handling codecs from scratch? What kind of half-assed project doesn't build on the existing available libraries to handle low-level things like image formats? Even the first draft release of an image app should be able to just collapse all the format stuff behind an abstraction and get all of them in one swoop. Sure, they might not handle at the application user's level all the odd bits and extensions and tricky stuff (alpha transparency comes to mind, for example) but to just not support it? Sounds like someone needs to review a college first year CS textbook.
Re:Curing Mono (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a managed and widely available language and framework, why you don't just use Java, Python, Php, Perl, Ruby and so on, which are completely free, which out any patents and are community controlled? There are available today, well tested, have a lot more tools and libraries as C#/Mono. In addition, you are not using a tool that is constantly behind the one company that is controlling all aspects of C# and
The other question is, why anyone should even use Mono in the first place? The only reason for what Mono is good, is a replacement for
You are right, MS is interested that anyone using C#/.NET everywhere; but only if they are using it on Windows.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is whether people like having Mono installed on their system, and the answer is no. It's like requiring Java or Flash.
... or Perl, Python or Ruby. When did you last excise those from your system? Do you avoid using GUI apps written in Python as a matter of principle?
Besides which, Mono will never be anything but a half-arsed implementation of what's available on Windows.
Well, no, not really. Gtk#, for example, is available on Windows, but only as part of Mono.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for competition, and if the CLR is superior to the JVM, let it win! I just don't understand why it hasn't been pushed into the Unix space. Are IBM, HP and Oracle wrong?
No, they just don't want to embrace a competing technology, especially the one where design choices are by and large made by said competitor.
And Microsoft isn't exactly interested in providing first-class CLR experience on Unix for obvious reasons.
So you end up with Mono, which is largely volunteer-driven. Of course that is going to lag behind a major commercial project such as Sun JVM.
Re:Shotwell is beta (Score:3, Insightful)
Why try to re-invent the wheel at all with Shotwell, what's wrong with digikam? The disk space required for KDE libs is insignificant on modern computers (especially compared to the size of the average person's photo collection).
Is it the irrational fear that non-technical people will be confused by a GUI interface that looks slightly different? Because that's what they get in Windows all the time and they seem to cope.
Wrong criteria (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:who cares if it uses mon or not (Score:4, Insightful)
> I would assume the purpose of the application is to handle the user's own photo library, and how many digital cameras store photos in the PNG format?
Why just limit this to JPEGs? People have a lot of images from a lot of different
sources. It's foolish just to restrict an image manager just to one class of images
or a very narrow use case. This is especially true on Linux where you could have
all sorts of oddball end users all doing their own thing.
Any "manager" should handle everything and make that management as free of bother
as possible.
Re:who cares if it uses mon or not (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shotwell is beta (Score:2, Insightful)
Ditto for digikam. Swapping out f-spot for digikam is one of the first things I do on a new Ubuntu install.
As a rule, I don't use any media manager that "imports" my media into its own database or filesystem structure (I'm looking at you, iTunes, f-spot, and rhythmbox). Digikam respects my directory structure. It does basic editing, tagging, organization, and easily exports to external editors. It's fast, it's clean, and it's mostly stable. If it dies, it doesn't take my photos with it. It sounds like Shotwell is just more of the same.