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."
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:3, Interesting)
The real issue is with patents. Stallman wrote about this last year.
http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono [fsf.org]
Similar to WINE in a way, it's good to have an open source project to allow us to run more software. However, that doesn't mean that software developers should make their applications depend on them when specifically targeting a GNU/Linux environment - it's an unnecessary risk.
Re:Picasa (Score:3, Interesting)
You're just walked square into the middle of the "free software" vs "open source" debate. Now they've got you right where they want you, there is no escape!
Picasa is free (and awesome) but not open source - so Ubuntu and Fedora will never ship it.
I think you have it backwards. The "open source" crowd would happily use non-free software if they believe it is the best. The "free software" crowd would not touch Picasa. See this article [kerneltrap.org] for an example (jump to "bitkeeper issue").
You may be confused because of the two meanings of the word "free". It is sad that in the English language, the word for a concept as great as "freedom" is the same as the word for the meager idea of "no cost".
Of course, there are several shades of grey in between the two camps, but that is the main difference.
(That said, neither Ubuntu nor Fedora are very strong supporters of "free software"... specially not Ubuntu. It wouldn't surprise me that one of them decided to include picasa)
Re:who cares if it uses mon or not (Score:5, Interesting)
just had the same experience. png support will be added in 0.6. it's kind of ridiculous, but whatever, it's in 0.x. also going to fullscreen and then back appears to totally fuck the interface (ubuntu lucid).
also: no way (?) to zoom into images.
I don't know if I like the event paradigm. They should combine it with a date-based view like f-spot. My pictures are a combination of daily snapshots and events. Also I'd like a "random crap from the internet" dumppile which is totally separate from my life... Kind of like keeping Playboys away from the family photo album. :-/
Re:Next on the list... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is, I believe, that majority of people using GIMP for image editing would not use these buttons (I use GIMP quite heavily, and I know I would never use them), so for them (us), such buttons would just end up cluttering already pretty complicated user interface.
People often complain about GIMP user interface, which in my opinion is pretty good. The main problem IMHO is that the user interface is not flexible or configurable enough. For example the toolbox. When I bought my actual toolbox, the kind that sits in your garage, it came with a bunch of tools. I tossed half of them out, and replaced them with other tools, more useful for the way I work. However, I cannot do that with the GIMP toolbox. The same with menus. There is no easy way to reorganize the menus. I would like to, in addition to the existing menus, create a menu that would contain all commands that I use on daily bases for photo editing. In another menu, I would put all the command for creating and editing certain types of mathematical graphs, and so on.
GIMP is very flexible and powerful program, but its user interface is rigid and does not allow you to easily use all the flexibility and power. Unfortunately, most people complaining about the GIMP user interface seem to want even more rigid interface, with a single window and some sort of MDI interface. That, IMNSHO, would be a huge step backward.
Re:Features (Score:3, Interesting)
There also seems to be no support for hierarchical tags or for having many tags in general, just a linear dump of all tags you've got. Not so much fun when you have tags in the many hundreds, and when you want one tag to actually generate two or more tags in the final taglist.
And little to no support for having multiple versions of an image; the only thing seems to be this: "Shotwell stores your edits in a database and applies them on the fly as necessary.". Which is great fun, I guess, if your original image is a 300Mb MF film-scan and you have to wait for 30 seconds while edits are applied whenever you want to see another of your versions. In fact, doesn't this feature pretty much preclude using external tools altogether?
F-spot is pretty stable for me by now, and it can cope with the amount of images I have in a way that no other organizer tool I've tried on linux can. There's a few missing features still - a "light table" mode, where you can collect and compare a set of images directly would be great - but it works fairly well if you have to keep track of a largish number of images from very different sources.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a few developers who I feel indebted to. Icaza is one. I use Midnight Commander every day. I give these developers "the benefit of the doubt". Icaza is up there with Bram Moolenaar (VIM). VIM is more important, but MC also "gets it done". And has for almost 15 years.
So, when Icaza said "Mono is important", I tried to suspend my disbelief. And, it was difficult for me; the JVM also had a 15 year history for me.
I'm STILL trying to see it. I "dutifully" installed Moonlight into Firefox. I've tried F-Spot. But, there appears to be no broad-base support for the CLR, even now. No CLR support for Unix... To quote a Microsoft MVP
"Shinma,
I would not recommend trying to run .NET on a unix platform. While
there are attempts (there is a CLR based on a source project released by MS
named ROTOR, and there is also the MONO project), not all of the
functionality is there.
What are you trying to do? Which parts of the framework do you want to
leverage? I think that there might be an ASP.NET implementation up and
running.
--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]"
Now, MONO claims to have Solaris support, but I haven't yet tried it (can you get support for this from Novell?) And what about AIX and HP-UX?
JAVA supports these platforms, and so appears to be a more universal delivery system.
Was Icaza wrong? Maybe. It is possible that the CLR offers features that are not possible with the JVM (I don't know, the only thing I have personally done in this space is a COBOL to JVM system, and I haven't ever really looked at CLR -- after all Alchemy offers a commercial COBOL to CLR compiler already).
Now, I have never stressed F-Spot, but what I did try appeared to work just fine. 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?
Just curious on the thoughts of some fellow developers here. Especially from those companies. Some insight would be valuable.
Thanks, Ratboy666
Re:Great, now get rid of XSANE (Score:4, Interesting)
XSANE should never be made available. The GUI is a complete mess, looking like something that belongs on the Amiga. Also, it has yet to work with a single scanner or webcam I throw at it.
xsane, or at least its libraries, forms the core of every scanner program for Linux worth using. The GUI is about the same as typical scanner programs released by manufacturers, which is to say it's weak but functional. Also, it has worked with every single scanner I have thrown at it for years and years... HP, Canon, Mustek... and I've been through about eight or nine scanners since I dropped Windows. In fact, my current scanner is an HP scanner for which there is no Windows 7 driver, the last release was on Vista, so the prior owners sold it. My prior scanner was another HP scanner for which there were no drivers after Windows XP. The one before that was a Mustek scanner which also last had XP drivers.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but you're outnumbered.
Yet another application rewritten in Gnome... (Score:3, Interesting)
When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?
Re:Shotwell is beta (Score:3, Interesting)
And in that vein, why doesn't Ubuntu go back to gThumb? That was the default camera app till 8.04 Hardy. F-Spot as introduced was comparatively bloated, crash-happy, and didn't respect the directory structure so many of us already had our pictures in. The switch to F-Spot didn't make sense then, and I'm not surprised it's being dropped now, but why Shotwell-beta over going back to gThumb?
Like, is it personal? Or are there actual feature reasons for avoiding gThumb that I've managed to miss?
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ubuntu seems to have decided that the best time to make risky decisions is the release immediately after a LTS because if it ends up sucking people can stay on the lts without any worries about support disappearing.
Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Curing Mono (Score:3, Interesting)
The promises are largely meaningless and empty.
http://www.osnews.com/story/21858/FSF_Microsoft_s_Community_Promise_Empty_ [osnews.com]
the mono framework is inferior crap, F-Spot regularly crashes and often brings down x display manager with it.
you MS shill boys are amusing. Microsoft has done so much evil over the last 20 years, stifling innovation and competition, and you want to pretend it's professional and balanced to treat them as a normal company.
gthumb (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Next on the list... (Score:4, Interesting)
> GIMP is awesome, but it dosen't really fit into the "lightweight" niche.
If you are dragging in the rest of Mono just to have an image editor, it kind of does.
GIMP could sorely use some sort of "bookmarked UI" so that recently used stuff is
up front in a manner similar to iPhoto but without it being static. GIMP does some
stuff better because it's more sophisticated about how it does anything. The UI is
a bit of a drag though. Finding stuff can be cumbersome.
It's like searching through 1800 videos to find that show that you were watching
and didn't finish last night.
Re:On the other hand... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not impossible, it just always results in this: http://xkcd.com/716/ [xkcd.com]