Pinta by default, someday?

[Maia Kozheva]

Disclaimer: I'm not a core developer, I'm not on the desktop team, I'm 
not in any way involved with making decisions about default software, etc.

The decision to remove GIMP in Lucid left a usability gap that F-Spot 
doesn't really fill; it has only a few basic photo manipulation 
functions. And now F-Spot is on the way of being replaced with Shotwell, 
which offers even fewer editing options. We could ship gpaint, but... 
yeah. It's a joke, even compared to MS Paint.

Pinta ( http://pinta-project.com ) is a simple, Paint.NET like 
cross-platform image editor based on Mono/GTK#, with no dependencies 
beyond that, whose aim is "to provide a simplified alternative to GIMP 
for casual users".

The code, from what little work I have done on it, looks sane and well 
malleable, reusing standard GTK and Cairo functionality wherever 
appropriate. There is still work to do (I filed 9 bugs today alone, 
mostly about GNOME integration), but what is there is already impressive 
and, in my opinion, quite enough for casual users. It's not ready for 
inclusion into the default install right now, but later in the Maverick 
cycle, who knows? Especially if Ubuntu puts work into it.

Just my two kopecks.