Review of featured applications

[Didier Roche]

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 8:04 AM, Robert Ancell
<robert.ancell at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> These applications seemed really good candidates:
>
> cheese (photobooth)
> homebank (banking)
> stellarium (planetarium)
> gnome-do (fast keyboard based access)
> deja-dup (backup)
> eclipse (IDE)
> gimp (bitmap graphics)
> inkscape (vector graphics)
> blender (3d graphics)
> audacity (audio editor)
> gufw (firewall tool)
> frozen-bubble (arcade)
> fretsonfire (Guitar hero clone)
> pingus (Lemmings clone)
> moovida (media center)
> liferea (feed reader, lack of threading is awful though)
> arista (media transcoder)
> gtg (task management)
> freeciv (turn based strategy)
> supertuxcart (racing, but 100M download)
> chromium-bsu (2d arcade space shooter)

apart from the IDE discussion below, here is my feedback on the list:
- agree at 95% :)
- I didn't know at all moovida, it seems to be pretty good (see the
tabular, even if it's in French, should be self-explanatory:
http://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/media_center). I think the lack of browser
support compared to the very popular mythtv is ok on a desktop, so
fine (not on a media center server).
- if you put some kind of gnome-do there for fast keyboard access, I
think their should be some complaints about "why gnome-do and not a
dock?". So we should maybe include on of both kind or none?

>
> I wanted to add one IDE to the list but it was very hard to choose one.  It
> seemed the best candidates were monodevelop, geany, eclipse and anjuta
> (omitting Eclipse because it is so big and as a "well known IDE" people
> shouldn't have trouble finding it anyway).  I don't use an IDE so I don't
> feel qualified to make a recommendation.  The important factors seemed to
> be:
>
> Ability to work with popular languages
> Fast and reliable
> Access to debugging tools

The issue for anjuta is the lack of real support for python, which is
one of the favorite language we advise in Ubuntu. geany maybe?

>
> I also wanted to pick one FPS but they all seemed difficult to use.  The
> problems seemed to be similar:
>
> Huge downloads
> Opening and choosing first menu (e.g. "single player") often didn't work,
> there were no bots
> Very slow load times

Right, from my research (1 year and half ago), we don't have any FPS
with bots by default. We should download some bots and install them
manually we don't find the Featured goal. There are a lot of very good
multiplayer FPS (even if I'm not fan of those games), so, if we want
to include one of them, I'll go for Nexuiz or Tremulous.

>
> The following applications are good applications, but I either thought their
> audience was too small to replace the above applications or they had
> bugs/configuration that made them difficult to use "out of the box".  These
> are loosely ordered best to worst - anyone who is familiar please comment on
> how good you think these are.
>

I've just commented where I think it was needed. Lack of comment means
"I agree" ;)

> gramps (genealogy, niche?)
right niche, but the reference on GNU/Linux. It just depends how we
want the list to be long to :)

> teeworlds (2d multiplayer shooter, bit laggy)
> glob2 (isometric strategy game, doesn't seem to install data correctly)
> openarena (FPS, bots don't work)
> imagination (DVD creator, niche?)
> virtualbox-ose (virtual machine, niche)

> recordmydesktop (desktop recorder, niche)
-> I don't agree. A lot of people asked for "I want to record my
desktop and send a video". I think this kind of apps should be
represented

> wesnoth (complete, but niche?)
> gftp (FTP client, niche?)
> filezilla (FTP client, niche?)
> jokosher (multi-track studio, crashes on startup)
> scribus (DTP, QT)

> hugin (photo-stitcher, niche?)
-> very good app for diaporama creation for instance. But it's
difficult to see how it works the first time as the GUI isn't great.
That's another thing that people wants to do when they take picture,
create diaporama (we have a bunch of questions in the french forum
about that)., but I'm not sure as well that there is one app which
enables that easily

> glchess (chess, pimping my own app, pychess instead?)
> parcellite (clipboard manager, niche?)
> rednotebook (desktop notebook, dupe of tomboy?)
> dia (diagramming, no compelling advantage over OO)
There are a lot of avantages for electronic schemes in particular. But
niche to mee.

> gaikosaurus (thesarus, no icon)
> wammu (phone manager, niche?)
> armagetronad (tron game, gameplay limited, quickly became boring)
> celestia-gnome (universe browser, more scope than stellarium but harder to
> use and more niche?)
> flightgear (flight simulator, *huge* download, play very open-ended.  Felt
> like it needed "missions" to play)
> extremetuxracer (butchered Tux racer, no clear levels)

> yofrankie (3d platform, no clear objectives - boring!)

This game has been pretty popular when it was out and I think we
should really include it in the first link. For those not aware, it's
the game from the blender fundation which released this game some
weeks after "big buck bunny". The game is short, but it shows that you
can do some nice 3D effects on GNU/Linux

> scorched3d (3d tank game, too complex)
> uqm (arcade game, lots of gameplay but old)
> beneath-a-steel-sky (adventure game, too old?)
> flight-of-the-amazon-queen (adventure game, too old?)
> eclipse (IDE, overkill, will be searched for anyway?)
> wxmaxima (too complex, niche?)
> saurbraten (FPS, rendering errors)
> warsow (FPS, slow, first single player didn't work, didn't know my
> resolution)
>
> Applications I thought failed the "out of the box" test:
>
> mythtv (media center, too big, complex and hard to install - needed
> system-wide MySQL installation and service)
> pioneers (turn based strategy, too hard to set up)
> simutrans (transport simulator, too old)
> spring-mod-kernelpanic (RTS, too hard to set up)

> gnucash (accounting, too complex)
-> gnucash is more company oriented.

> amule (file sharing, file sharing too dodgy)

-> if you look for "emule" in the software-center, you find it in
first place. So, I think people looking for it will find it. No need
for inclusion :)

> nemiver (debugger, nice, but just stick with an IDE)
> easytag (MP3 tagger, too niche)
> bzr-explorer (BZR gui, niche, just stick to an IDE)
> pychess (chess, fails to start)

> miro (media player, don't see the value over totem+websites)
It's approximately the same than if you say "I don't see the added
value to an RSS reader VS firefox + going over all my blogs/planet". I
completely disagree for that one.

> torcs (racing, too slow)
> compizconfig-settings-manager (Compix settings, too tweaky, target audience
> will find it anyway)
> wine (Windows emulation, haven't had good results with it)
> ardour (audio editing, too complex, issues with audio setup)