Mono required by ubuntu-desktop

[Scott James Remnant]

On Tue, 2006-08-01 at 23:09 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> Im not saying we should not include mono apps like tomboy by default but 
> all I ask is please keep the default sane for a 256MB machine. If mono 
> apps can run comfortably on such a system then great!
> 
> (A lot of people actually use Linux cause its memory demands are lower 
> than XP - it would be crazy to change this IMO. Im also sure thin 
> clients and third world systems would benefit from keeping the default lean)
> 
The argument here appears to be caused by a confusion of user stories...

Users who own reasonable digital cameras, take a large amount of
photographs with them, want to sort, catalogue, modify and tweak those
files, etc. are also likely to have reasonably powerful machines.

Digital photo management takes a lot of resources; the owner of a Canon
Eos Digital SLR and a complete lens set is not likely to then try and
fiddle with those on a 486 with 32MB of RAM.

The simple metric here too is hard drive space; a large photo collection
takes a lot of disk space.  An older computer isn't going to have the
disk space to hold the collection, let along the grunt to manage it.

F-Spot is an application for this group of users; it allows arbitrarily
massive photo collections to be browsed, tagged, filtered, modified,
etc.  It's an application for those with reasonable cameras and an
equivalently reasonable computer to store them on.


On the other hand we have the users who have a few photos they've been
sent over the Internet (perhaps a friend scanned them in for them), or
taken using their budget digital camera or mobile phone.

Their computer is probably a little out of date, with not much grunt to
do the extensive cataloguing and photo manipulation that the f-spot user
would be doing as a matter of course.  But that's ok, because their
interest is going to be just keeping a few of them around, maybe
printing them out or looking at them occasionally.

A good metric here is hardware support; the older computers probably
won't support USB2 or even USB1, so we're dealing with the older kind of
digital camera that used a serial cable and could store only a handful
of photos at a time.

I would argue that this user group is going to have the photos in one or
two directories, and will just use the file manager to view the
thumbnails and double-click them to look at them or print them (using
eog).

	(aside, I did a user test with this to ensure I wasn't
	 talking bollocks ... I asked a friend to show me how he managed
	 the photos on his computer.

	 He had them all in one directory and viewed them by
	 highlighting them, clicking the File menu and then selecting
	 "Open with Image Viewer".  He used the Next and Previous
	 buttons to move between them, and also used eog's slideshow
	 feature.

	 This user didn't know what GThumb was, and when showed it,
	 thought it was more complicated than what he did and didn't do
	 anything else he needed.)


The third group of users, the geeks, is, as always, irrelevant to this
discussion.  Geeks will always ignore the default set of installed
software and install whatever they want, they are not the target for
ubuntu-desktop and almost certainly never will be.  This is the user
group who tend to spend $2,000 on a camera and plug it into a computer
they built from obsolete spare parts ;)

Scott
-- 
Scott James Remnant
scott at ubuntu.com
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