Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Martin Pitt]

Jason Warner [2011-11-08  9:17 +1030]:
> Areas of concern in Banshee were stability, start-up time, the overall
> resource intensive nature of the application and how responsive an
> upstream they were to Ubuntu specific needs.

That's actually not true -- we sent patches, and they were discussed
and accepted. Certainly not within a day, but that's fairly normal in
the OSS world, and RB (or GNOME) patches often take very long to
review as well.

The problem that was raised is that the package doesn't get well
maintained in Ubuntu (but is maintained well upstream). It did get
quite a lot of uploads in oneiric, though.

I tried banshee when we introduced it and during oneiric again, and
both times it was very unstable and rather slow, and did not get my
collection imported without crashing. Henceforth I noticed that wiping
my configuration improved the stability quite a bit, that might
explain why it's working better for others.

My main reasons why I like to switch back to TB are:

 * Spending ~ 30 MB of CD space for a music player seems rather
   excessive (if you count in the Mono stack)

 * There is no sign of GTK3 support yet, which keeps the old GTK2 and
   much more importantly webkit-gtk2 on the CD (which alone is 8 MB).

 * Our ARM team says that the current versions still work rather
   poorly on ARM.

 * We have shipped Rhythmbox in many previous releases, so while
   constantly switching back and forth is certainly bad, LTS->LTS
   upgraders will at least have consistency, and other upgraders won't
   lose Banshee either.

 * With the recent layoffs, Mono's future remains a bit fuzzy. I heard
   the developers founded a new company, so it's certainly not going
   away soon.

I also personally prefer RB's UI, but I hardly have a technical
argument for it.

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)