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Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell
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."
For fuck sake, editors.
EDIT!
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.
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.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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).
I'm always glad to hear about mono being used less on Linux.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
As much as I like having one less set of libs to install I have to say shotwell is way behind F-Spot on the usability front. I would say Shotwell needs another year to mature before it gets even near what F-spot is "now". Ubuntu is a key representation of Linux on the desktop and if users have to deal with a very beta experience of shotwell I dare say it wont reflect positively on Linux as a whole (I personally prefer Digikam over F-Spot).
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.
AccountKiller
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.
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.
> 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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.