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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."
So the summary is just copy/paste from some blog.
Gnome made the change, not Ubuntu.
That version of Shotwell has been out for well over a month.
This is not news, for nerds or for anyone.
For fuck sake, editors.
EDIT!
Shouldn't it then be named G-spot? If a program of such a name were to exist, would any male users be able to find it, let alone use it?
"Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 will be Shotwell. This is a much needed change. F-Spot was simply not enough. Most times when I tried F-Spot, it crashed on me. Shotwell on a other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."
There, fixed that for you. Now it's in English.
A lightweight equivalent of MS Paint. GPaint for example has all kinds of flashy transformations, yet lacks something as basically necessary as edit "undo" and "redo" functions.
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.
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?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Is Google's Picasa for Linux stable yet? I would much rather see a piece of free software from a company that will continue to develop it over the years and that is cross-platform. Seriously, isn't this the second or third time it has changed. They should use either software that is developed and supported by a major company (like Google's Picasa), or they should assign some developers to the project they choose and not change it.
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.
or what ever they call it now
I just downloaded shotwell from the PPA in the blog and here is my little test..
I made a folder with some random images. I put all the images in a sub folder and made another subfolder with an extra copy of one of the images in a different folder. I did this because this best represents my photo folder. It has lots of images in different places and some of them are the same image because an early version of f-spot messed it up.
I then loaded up shotwell and did an import, then got this error..
The 2 photos that it successfully imported were the same photo. F-Spot has a feature to not import the same photo twice even if the filename differs which is handy. For me this is no where near f-spot technically.
It can't even import PNGs. What use is an photo manager that can't import images..
Works with my camera (Logitech 9000) and my scanner (Canon u1240n aka Lide30) without any issues. The scanner was a nice surprise because installing the windows drivers for that was voodoo. Yes, Canon and Linux, it just works (tm). (I really didn't expect it to.)
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. :-/
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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
I have never tried it with a webcam (so far, I have not had a need to use one), but I have used xsane with a number of scanners, and I have never ran across one that would not work with it.
AccountKiller
There is this discussion from 2009..
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2009-December/010173.html
and this one from May 2010..
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2010-May/002569.html
Apart from that I can't find anything about a decision being made.
It's worked with all the scanners I have tried (3 different multi-purpose devices) without any trouble. It may not be the best piece of software in the world but it works fairly well - what are you going to replace it with? Or should users just go without completely until there is scan software meeting your standards? I can tell that if there was no XSane or equivalent I would not be using Ubuntu on any of my machines (currently 5 running various flavours of Ubuntu).
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
F-spot makes duplicates of my photos. Good riddance! One copy of each pic is enough, thank you!
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I thought they did. My last install of ubuntu I am sure excluded it.
. .
As long as developers keep rewriting apps from scratch every 2-3 years, they'll never become truly stable or usable. And they won't progress much beyond tech demos or the basic feature checklists.
When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?
And people wonder why Ubuntu hasn't caught on yet...
xsane, or at least its libraries, forms the core of every scanner program for Linux worth using.
Exactly. I no longer use my (currently Epson) scanner very often, so I have a tendency to take it for granted as something that "just works". But if the parent can point us in the direction of anything better, I will be very glad to hear of it. The only scanner I have had that is not supported by SANE/XSANE was an old UMAX parallel-port machine that had already been flagged as problematic.
Well, we are talking about a photo manager that wasn't in Lucid Lynx, and will be in Maverick Meerkat, which is in a whopping Alpha 1 state right now. Point: maybe that's why it wasn't included, and maybe it will be more featureful and finished once 10.10 is out.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
And 10.10 is four months away from release.
The difference is that media like the ones you listed can be converted with relative ease, consuming only CPU time. If the owners of codec related imaginary property threaten to sue, it's mostly a matter of transcoding stuff to alternatives like Theora, Vorbis or VP9. Programs written in C# or another .NET dependent language however can't be converted to a different language without a lot of actual human work.
When I said VP9 I actually meant VP8.
Simple Scan is the shizzle.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Is anyone _really_ wondering... about either?
From the blog you posted...
Firstly, F-Spot doesn't require you to import photos, there is a checkbox that says "Copy files to the Photos folder"
Secondly, Shotwell has the exact same tickbox and is enabled by default exactly like F-Spot.
Personally I prefer something this works rather then a program whose only remarkable feature is "it is written in Vala". So they're replacing Microsoft dependent Mono with Gnome dependent Vala, sweet..
The GUI for xsane is perfectly adequate, if a little dated...
And as you pointed out, most scanner manufacturers supply something similar but the problem is you get something different with every scanner... At least xsane is consistent across devices.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Lets see, check check..check and check, but no matter...
While you can easily get away with installing software which is patented (at least in the stupid United Corporations of America), corporations, since they have a lot of money, are the targets of lawsuits by patent holders/sharks/trolls/etc, so they can't include them and it is simply dangerous. So, when and where you are able to, convert your things to truly open formats. While I could also argue using patented things may actually help companies try to fight software patents, not using them of course removes the power these patents have as well. While I'd prefer the law was changed, sadly the latter might be the better choice because the more money which is at stake, the more lobbyists there will be, so it will be less probable that the laws will actually be overhauled intelligently.
Any way, I converted all my media away from patented formats long ago. There are several, for example, MP3 to OGG converting programs available, and while lossy to lossy conversions are normally bad, it works surprisingly well. Not to mention, OGG Vorbis is just fucking kick ass, and MP3 should have been vanquished long ago. I don't care if your ipod can't play OGG, maybe you should be buying something like a Cowon instead then.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
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.
On Windows, at least, there is a stock image scanning app these days, and many apps dealing with documents (e.g. Word) can do scanning with text recognition, too. I don't recall when I last used the manufacturer-supplied thingy.
XSANE should never be made available. The GUI is a complete mess, looking like something that belongs on the Amiga.
Aesthetically unappealing I would agree, but in terms of actually getting the job done — for medium to high volumes of scanning — I've found that it works surprisingly well. (Better than the alternatives I've tried so far. Not tried Simple Scan yet.)
Also, it has yet to work with a single scanner or webcam I throw at it.
You do realise that XSane is just a GUI, and will work with any scanner iff you have installed an appropriate backend driver for that scanner? Switching to a different front end may improve the aesthetics, but should make no difference to which scanners work and which don't.
(That's the whole idea of SANE — that you can use any front end with any scanner — as opposed to TWAIN where every manufacturer reinvents the wheel (usually poorly) and you are stuck with the results.)
Your observation is spot on, and part of the cause is the iron fist of the original devs, often imitated by for forkers.
In time, they learn how to do things better, but (possibly sadly) a new cohort of devs come along ready to learn the same lessons.
It may not be good for the code-base but it's good for the humans.
So we see how coding helps anti-social computer geeks learn how to be better humans! Pretty neat!
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I've been following developments of gthumb lately and I've seem a significant increase in improvements the last year. I'm pretty sure it's triggered by competition with F-Spot and possibly Shotwell. The main reason for me to use gthumb is the superior import facility for your digital photos. You can store them in your own hierarchy/folders in the way you like it.
Some how I doubt they'll add the features and debug the problems I am talking about in less then the two months they have before the feature freeze.
Unfortunately it seems that shotwell doesn't import f-spot's tags database. That's a big annoyance for anybody who tagged an extensive photo collection and it could be a motivation to keep using f-spot. The ability to import data from competing software has been a very important feature for any new program that wants to divert users from an existing one (Firefox imports IE bookmarks, Thunderbird imports mails and address book from Outlook Express, etc) so I'm surprised the shotwell didn't do that from its very first release.
Yesterday I started using Shotwell after spending months using a combination of f-spot and Picasa.
F-Spot is the worst photo manager I've ever used. There are two main issues: it doesn't scale, and it's unstable. It doesn't scale in that I have about 15 000 photos (I'm into photography) and scrolling is terrible, importing hundreds of photos at a time is slow and unreliable. When I restored from a backup and asked F-Spot to import the images from a folder, I just gave up after 5 attempts.
F-Spot crashes frequently. This is mainly when importing and exporting images. It's full of bugs, and this makes it unusable.
Picasa under wine scales perfectly well. I just don't like its approach (grabbing all images from your disk and using tags to organise them), plus its non-native interface looks ugly.
Shotwell is relatively simple. It works, it has a cleaner approach than F-Spot to organisation, and it doesn't crash. It lacks features and its "enhance" button is useless, but I'm sure it will improve over time. By far the best Linux photo manager I've tried.
Regarding some other comments: supporting PNG is failing irrelevant for me. Advanced editing is a job for the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
Who gives a tinker's spit about "managing" your "photos"? I want to edit images, so I'll install GIMP and set all the filetypes back where they belong. Iff I connect my camera, then perhaps I want to invoke something to offload selected pix and file them by date. F-Spot was about as useful as a wet paper bag at managing photos, with an incomprehensible interface and no editing.
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.
I think I see your problem.. Stop throwing stuff. Peripherals tend to last longer without sudden impact.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Seriously, it gets the job done and if you need more you inevitably have to go all the way to GIMP. Constantly being asked to use F-Spot has been aggravating as hell so hopefully shotwell is less intrusive, but I just use EoG + GIMP and that covers all my usecases.
Well... this is a way lesser evil. But still vala is not in my heart, and tomboy has to go away too: gnome official dependence on mono must become optional.
Worked like a charm with a hp officejet d145 all-in-one color printer (overall it felt ten times as fast as scanning from Windows Vista).
10.04 has simplescan nice and clean and easy to use. Does what's needed acquires images and uses libsane.
5 minutes with shotwell
Shotwell photo manager is a very simple and generally fast viewer, for some reason rotating a picture to the right is a lot faster than the same operation to the left.
Theres no keyboard shortcuts for the rotate feature instead its mouse orientated using the right mouse button a lot.
There is an enhance command but what it does I don't know.
other tools are available once you select a single photo for editing.
It's crop tool is pretty good but other adjustments are pretty basic and easy to make pictures appear worse.
The export to picassa feature is useful too.
shotwell isn't as good as f-spot but doesnt use mono
picassa wipes the floor with both of them but isn't native using wine.
picassa is my preference but shotwell can catch up its also available on windows
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It is relevant because the reason they took GIMP out by default in Lucid was because people can edit images in f-spot. Now if they're replacing f-spot as well you can no longer by default edit PNG files and whatever else Shotwell doesn't support. That includes screen shots you take.
One day, a scorpion looked around at the mountain where he lived and decided that he wanted a change. So he set out on a journey through the forests and hills. He climbed over rocks and under vines and kept going until he reached a river.
The river was wide and swift, and the scorpion stopped to reconsider the situation. He couldn't see any way across. So he ran upriver and then checked downriver, all the while thinking that he might have to turn back.
Suddenly, he saw a frog sitting in the rushes by the bank of the stream on the other side of the river. He decided to ask the frog for help getting across the stream.
"Hellooo Mr. RMS!" called the scorpion across the water, "Would you be so kind as to give me a ride on your back across the river?"
"Well now, Mr. MS! How do I know that if I try to help you, you wont try to kill me?" asked the frog hesitantly.
"Because," the scorpion replied, "If I try to kill you, then I would die too, for you see I cannot swim!"
Now this seemed to make sense to the frog. But he asked. "What about when I get close to the bank? You could still try to kill me and get back to the shore!"
"This is true," agreed the scorpion, "But then I wouldn't be able to get to the other side of the river!"
"Alright then...how do I know you wont just wait till we get to the other side and THEN kill me?" said the frog.
"Ahh...," crooned the scorpion, "Because you see, once you've taken me to the other side of this river, I will be so grateful for your help, that it would hardly be fair to reward you with death, now would it?!"
So the frog agreed to take the scorpion across the river. He swam over to the bank and settled himself near the mud to pick up his passenger. The scorpion crawled onto the frog's back, his sharp claws prickling into the frog's soft hide, and the frog slid into the river. The muddy water swirled around them, but the frog stayed near the surface so the scorpion would not drown. He kicked strongly through the first half of the stream, his flippers paddling wildly against the current.
Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.
"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"
The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.
"I could not help myself. It is my nature."
Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.
Self destruction - "Its my Nature", said the Scorpion...
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Okay, this is going to get a "cry me a river" response, but I don't care which - F-spot or Shotwell - can *anyone* get it to build on anything other than Linux?
I'm really big on having my stuff cross-platform, and since my laptop is a mac and my desktop is Ubuntu, I'd really like to have it work on both. You'd figure a mono app like F-spot would build without too much hassle on OSX. Wrong. :(
Shotwell - I guess we'll see. Anyone want to try today? I'll give it a go..
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Well, that went well. :(
I must be losing it. I've ever even *heard* of the Vala compiler.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Ah, fair point on the PNG relevance to Ubuntu's overall plan - I just meant as a photographer I didn't care much about it. Hopefully Shotwell will be better at editing by then... maybe?
try ranger instead of mc. It doesn't have VFSs but it is much faster and nicer. I especially like the tree traversal key strokes, and the fact that each directory remembers marked (tagged) files separately, so you don't lose your Ctrl-T tags just because you temporarily dipped into a subdir to see what it contains.
And the multiple tab feature is very nice too...
... but mine tastes better.
*TaDUM* *Crash* *Thud*
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.
Try the fish.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Both Shotwell and F-Spot have dependencies on various Gnome libraries. (Maybe just Gtk+?) But Vala is only a compile time dependency. Not a runtime one. You don't have to have a Vala dll installed.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
> 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.
If they are going to copy something, they might as well copy Picasa.
It is FAR less annoying.
Sure, take a hierarchy of photos and flatten out the organization
so scared housewives can't cope with it anymore so they end up
burning their photo archive onto CD instead.
There should be something in the HID guidelines about intentionally
subjecting end users to unnecessary information overload.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You mean the Linux fanboys that have been saying "it's the year of Linux" since 1998.
Get real. It doesn't take a fanboy to see that Windows still completely dominates the desktop market and will continue for several more years.
Gone!
Heh, yes, I know what you mean! This one's tricky, and I agree with you in principle: If you want to play video on Windows, just use DirectShow (and on Linux, standardize on... something. Gstreamer?). But in practice, for some reason, people have a much easier time with players like MPlayer and VLC which contain all their own codecs (or in the case of MPlayer have their own modular codecs separate from e.g., on Windows, DirectShow's), and by contrast have all sorts of difficulties with DirectShow codec packs like Klite. More generally, people talk about 'DLL hell' on Windows and 'dependency hell' on Linux and elsewhere. So, somewhere, it seems that modularity starts to fail and you get more reliability by making individual pieces of software as self-sufficient as possible -- even if this results in a bunch of code duplication. Arguably, this is what one does by running Firefox instead of Internet Explorer or Konqueror in the first place.
> 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.
SANE has worked for a wide array of scanners for YEARS AND YEARS.
I don't quite so much care about whether or not the UI looks like it came from the Amiga so much as I care about how useful it is.
If you don't want to scare n00bs with options then support scanning from the panel buttons on the scanner (like WinDOS).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
geequie (or gqview) is almost exactly the same as irfanview. But it's better, cuz it's not windows.
Vala
There are always exceptions made to the Feature Freeze, and since this is a major initiative for 10.10, I have no doubt they'll be able to keep updating it until the RC.
http://www.mhall119.com
If they didn't seem to have such a hatred of KDE, they might consider digikam, which reportedly also has native ports to OSX and Windows now.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I'm not disputing your technical assessment PNG. But why are RAW and DNG included already? I can make the same argument about Shotwell's lack of support for them as for PNG. It's the 21st century and this is Linux. Link in a few libraries, add a VERY small bit more code to manage the application code's interface to them, and you can have as many image formats as anyone could want. Even more to my other point, if someone wants to be purist about formats and never use PNG, don't exclude it from the application on philosophical basis when the implementation is so brain-dead simple.
I want all of my images available through one viewer. Some of those images are PNGs for whatever reason.
Like I said, I'd like a date/event viewer for photos of my life; and a separate "pile" for pictures my friends have drawn; random pictures from the internet; scans from journalism sources; &c. Many of the latter are PNGs. Is that too much to ask?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Given the haphazard coding implied by the flaws I see, that's cutting it dangerously close.
Then again, it's not like I'm going to tempt fate by upgrading to 10.10 on release... (shudder)
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I just tried shotwell on Fedora 13. (It's the default image manager for F13, too.) It imported all the files in my F-Spot directories except .GIF and .PNG. Oh, come on!
--Steve
I haven't tried the Vista/Win7 scanner app, but the Kodak Imaging application with Windows XP was worse than xsane.
I'm willing to believe the new app is tolerable. But does it do everything xsane does? Not that it matters, I'm not going to be hooking my scanner up to my Windows 7 machine, there's no drivers :) (And mind you this is a fairly recent HP scanner with TMA etc.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm willing to believe the new app is tolerable. But does it do everything xsane does?
I don't know, to be honest. It does everything I need it to do, but then so does XSANE (or did when I was using it several years ago, anyway).
Anyway, while XSANE UI does look like an aftermath of an anti-tank mine explosion on the button factory, I'm not sure where GG..P was getting his complaints about lackluster scanner support from. If anything, this is probably the area of Linux hardware support which gave me least troubles - a pleasant surprise when I was dealing with it for the first time. It also seems to be one of the most stable in a sense that not only things were working to begin with, but they kept working as time went past, despite major kernel upgrades, switching distros, etc.
>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.
I completely agree with this, even though it may not have seemed so from what I wrote. The intended meaning was that I think it is a good idea to focus on developing features, rather than just dropping in support for all kinds of obscure formats, before the project is useful enough in itself. At that point adding in support for absolutely everything should be easily doable using their respective libraries.
Looking at Shotwell's dependencies, I can't actually see any image libraries in the list, but it depends on libwebkit. That seems like a really weird thing to do, unless it's for the functionality to publish to Facebook and other online sites.
As I wrote, at the current state the project seems like it still has a ways to go, and putting Shutwell in a distro as the default image organizer seems like a stupid thing to do for the time being. On the bright side, this will probably fuel development.
Alright, enough already with that useful information nonsense. I for one demand that you reveal your login name. I cannot stand the suspense you've created with those three asterisks!
I accept I know nothing. Insulting my ignorance is wasted on me.
I've never used a photo organizer for anything but personal pictures, and recognize that different people have different needs. What you want is definitely not too much to ask for, but then again I don't feel like the application is ready for widespread use in its current state.
Great now they add more buggy software by default...
http://admincentralforums.com
Actually if you look at my post I said that FSpot also failed for my wife.
You are right but not being written in Mono isn't a feature if the program is broken or lacks vital features.
Not supporting png for example is a vital feature.
My point is that what it is written or not written in doesn't matter.
What matters for all software should be.
1. Feature completeness. Does it have the features that the tasks requires.
2. Usability. Does it make more work than it solves?
3. Reliability
and last is
4. Value. Is it worth the price and effort.
Only when those minimums are meet do you have a good solution. Everything else is just a problem.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You mean the Linux fanboys that have been saying "it's the year of Linux" since 1998.
Nope.. Only Windows fanboys still expect anybody to take the whole year of Linux thing seriously. It's kind of like the old " when did you stop beating your wife" question. Challenging someone to defend something that they never proposed in the first place.
If such a thing ever does happen, it will be seen in retrospect, so this year may not be the year of Linux, but some year in the future may very well have been the year of Linux. Depending on what criteria one uses.
Next few times you see someone mention it.. Look carefully. Are they a Linux user making some grand prediction, or are they a Windows/OSX user trying to make fun of a Linux user?
Get real. It doesn't take a fanboy to see that Windows still completely dominates the desktop market and will continue for several more years.
Who said it didn't. Or were you being defensive?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I mis-read your post. My bad. :)
Gone!
I just have a suspicion that once (if?) the UI evolves to have a reasonable date slider, it'll end up nearly as bloated as f-spot. :-/
Here's hoping for the best. It does feel snappier for now at least...
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
libwebkit depends on libcairo, libpng, libjpeg, and libgstreamer (among others). ;-)
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Ah, the irony of Slashdot UID's - it's the only dick measuring contest where the winner is the smallest one...
Interesting coincidence though that in the /. digits contest most people are around six though. Plus, I've heard people have paid to enhance their UID (sure four digits might be worth braggin about but paying to have yours made one digit is absurd).
No problem.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
I'm sorry, by "most" I didn't mean 50% or more, I meant "majority".
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
I don't understand all the bitching about Mono, it is a nice platform and runs very well in my experience. I love F-Spot and never have it crash, with my 100's of photos i take and import into it and export to my smugmug account. Also, Tommy Boy is a very well put together application that works great. Also, last i heard Shotwell was not as feature complete as F-Spot is, which is a stupid move, hey should we use this app that does 100% of what the users want and need as well as being pounded on for awhile being it was included in, at least, the defacto linux install for most linux users, or go with this new thing that does about half? That is a easy choice, lets remove functionality and throw out the more validated application. just stupid
It's not at all like that. The difference is that Firefox is browsing random websites, it's possible that any of the hundred of video decoders in your OS might have a security exploit. Theres no way to sandbox 3rd party decoders. If there is an exploit in an old out of date proprietary codec that no one updates anymore then it's screwed. Even if the codec is still maintained you are relying on the whims of that company. Shotwell is an offline photo viewer, your only going to be viewing photos you specifically want to look at.
Even if you just whitelist a few codecs (ie H264, Theora, Webm), there is still no way to update/secure those specific codecs. When was the last time you heard of a H.264 codec update for Windows.
It's also being done for idealogical reasons. The internet needs to remain open, accepting H.264 codecs (with Firefox being the only real holdout against it becoming the defacto internet standard by having %35 market share) basically means that every single internet capable device now has to pay a licence fee to over a hundred companies holding thousands of licenses. There are also potential problems in the future, what happens when those companies decide they wan't more money. They agreed to giving free licensing until 2016 or so, that 5 years short of the patent expire date. How much would we have been up for in those if it was a basic requirement of internet browsing. Those companies would have been wanting to make up for the missed money in that time. Firefox holding out gave Google time to get and open VP8. I also wouldn't be surprised if they where prepared to defend it by taking it all the way to the supreme court if possible and try and get software patents themselfs overturned (remember Google isn't actually a software company, its an advertising company).
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Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me.
Thanks, we now know you are biased. This is something based on personal experience, much like how Linux would "not work" for some people on some computers.
Less Mono is good, though. Better speeds, less dependencies.
I am not devoid of humor.
For me this is no where near f-spot technically.
Aside from the two features you tested, you mean? Granted, lack of PNG support IS a big thing. I'm surprised it doesn't just rely on any helper libraries to handle many different formats.
I am not devoid of humor.
Anyone who considers PNG for storing pictures needs to stop, right away. PNG has one advantage: it's a lossless format (as opposed to JPEG). But then you could use TIFF, or DNG.
I tried shotwell with .tif files and it wouldn't import them. So, realistically, jpg is the only file format it reads.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I didn't actually mean that Shotwell had any support for it (I've never used it). I simply meant to say that "If you're going to be using PNG because it has lossless picture encoding, you might as well use TIFF or DNG".
I understood that. I was just pointing out that there is only one file type that shotwell can use. As far as I'm concerned that makes it useless.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
s/majority/plurality/. Majority means over 50%.
Wikipedia says "plurality", except in British English where it means the same as "majority", means the greatest subset, not 50%. So I meant non-British plurality then. But whatever. =P
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Another APP that doesn't us MONO is alway welcome