Replace Tomboy with Gnote?

[Dmitrijs Ledkovs]

2009/6/21 Mackenzie Morgan <macoafi at gmail.com>
>
> If you're just viewing them, we've already got that.  It's called Eye of GNOME
> (or "eog"), and it's been in Ubuntu for a good long time.
>

GIve me a photo collection manager that can handle movies and I'll
switch from dual booting Mac for iPhoto until then i'll just hide ;-)

>
> They were in my Japanese class going "ooooh" at the linking between notes ;)
> Most of my computer science classmates don't know what LaTeX is / how to use
> it anyway (sad, yeah...).
>

To be fair I've only used Tomboy notes to leave them out for someone
else if I want them to do something on my computer. Apart from that
LaTeX all the way. In my engineering & math department there are 4
professors and as far as I know I'm the only undergrad using LaTeX, so
sad, true. But I'm still struggling to create random figures and
approximate figures during the class any point to a good app would be
welcome. And as far as notes go..... Latex or Emacs Org mode all the
way.

Back to the topic though note-taking apps on Linux are great (look
well, perform well, give Linux edge over other OS at default install).
But they do remind me a think that people are playing around with for
a while and then give up to do "real" work. So I'm not fast at all if
is in the Default Install it certainly doesn't make it worse. An
analogy can be made with "widgets" and "dashboards" out there. They
come default on Mac, Vista, KDE (plasma) but I think KDE are the only
once who did right by making your actual dashboard (some what a bit in
your face) and for the first time I actually started using it  for
widgets and stuff (I know that KDE has overlay dashboard as well).

So who is up for keeping / creating a welcome note in Tomboy and
making it open for the live cd users? If this has been already done
than sure there would be a lot of compatability issues to switch from
one to another implementation. 99% existing users that will upgrade
will stay with their apps as they are, others who do clean install
make dpkg-list backup anyway to install everything afresh. And the new
users will not notice a difference if there is / isn't / is different
note-taking app, even if they have tried Ubuntu before (because loads
of things do change between the releases, I can say for sure more
people notice theme changes over app changes).

And the whole mono thing..... can we stop being so brown about it. Qt
had licensing issues in the past, Linux kernel as ship by ubuntu has
binary blobs, Flash and Codecs are still not free and while mono in
your opinion is not gNewSense-free it is still much better than binary
blobs, flash and codecs. This issues never stopped us or Debian not
ship KDE, Qt, Linux or wrap-packages for flash, or un-official
official repos with codes (medibuntu & debian non-free). From Human
point of view as long as it is apt-getable it's fine.

>From development point of view developers are trying to meet the
demand of the users. And one point Gnome got a note taking app (new
whiz-bang feature) so we included it in the default install and it
works well. Now fixing something that ain't broke is most likely gonna
end up with new bugs.

So far I didn't see how switching to Gnote will make Ubuntu _Better_
Isolating issue to Tomboy<->Gnote does not have any affect on the Mono
being or not being there (mono is currently ubuntu-desktop dependency)

If on the other hand mono dependency of ubuntu-desktop is being
discussed than it is completely different story and it will be very
hard to do it for Karmic or Karmic+1 because it is one of the Gnome's
dependencies. Just as we strive to have small delta with Debian it
makes a lot of sence to have small delta with Gnome. They are one of
our big upstreams. Changing default note-taking app is just too small
to justify it (or one can argue too small to be noticeble) removing a
core dependency IMHO is HUGE. It's hard enough to get a new dependency
in Gnome and then it is assumed to be there for a long time. Look how
hard their working at depreciating / removing obsolete dependencies in
Gnome 3. It is very painful. (glade, bonobo and others).

I strongly suggest to take this discussion to the upstream. There are
loads of the Gnome mailing lists and I think there are more people
there who have very good technical and UX reasons to keep tomboy in
default gnome for now. I wish you all the luck pushing such or similar
change in Gnome it will be an appreciated open-source contribution
which will then most likely be "synced" to ubuntu and other
distributions out there.

ps. I've promised myself not to reply to this thread..... Oh well we
make promises to break them =)

--
With best regards


Dmitrijs Ledkovs (for short Dima),
Ледков Дмитрий Юрьевич