Default Music Player in Ubuntu 12.04

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Iain Lane <laney at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 05:14:46PM +1030, Jason Warner wrote:
>> Hi Everyone -
>>
>> Thank you all for sending feedback[1][2][3] on the default music player for
>> 12.04. It is clear the right decision for 12.04 is to make Rhythmbox the
>> default music player. Thank you, above all else, for keeping the
>> conversation cordial and making the decision about what is best for Ubuntu.
>
> Sorry, but it doesn't seem 'clear' to me. Please explain more.
>
> More constructive would have been sound technicals argument that could
> have been presented to upstream. Things they would have been able to
> work on.
>

>From this thread, I think the summary of the issues raised and the responses is:
1) Banshee has been crashy
  - This seems to have been a gconf bug, which is fixed.  Better
communication between the Banshee maintainer and the desktop team
would help resolve future problems like this more rapidly.
2) Banshee is slow to start
  - A fairly simple change to the mono packaging scripts can enable
AOT compilation, which significantly reduces start up time,
particularly where IO is much cheaper than CPU.
3) Banshee uses GTK+ 2
  - The GTK+ 3 port is much further along than I thought, and looks
like it could be ready by an early Alpha.
4) Mono sucks on ARM
  - I got nothin'.  Xamarin's business model relies on mono not
sucking on ARM, though, so this seems like something that should be
fixable.

It would be reasonable to say something like “shifting to GTK# 3 for
the LTS release is too drastic a change, and we won't ship with GTK#
2”, but I don't think - at least without additional rationale - that
the reasoning for Rhythmbox is obvious from this thread.