A few words on Santiago Roland's suggestions

[Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

On sunnuntai 02 joulukuu 2012, Santiago Roland wrote:
> I didn't know about the license of VLC, i thought it was open-source,
> anyway we lack a good video player for ubuntoos and that is a hard fact.

Even Ubuntu doesn't include VLC.  It's in Universe, not in Ubuntu
main repositories.

The comments on this thread about video players were about video
compatibility and that is a patent minefield.  Ubuntu cannot legally
distribute all codecs, the best it can is to use something like
gstreamer underneath with a facility that pops up a dialog when
a codec is missing so that user can install extra codecs (e.g.
buy them, or if user is in non-patent-encumbered country, install
them from external repos).


> Even more! One of the studies i cited, stated that the
> best color scheme is black text over subtle grey, guess what color
> scheme the macs have? They are not stupid, they have all figured out.

While what you say is mostly true, the studies you referred were not
quite as clearcut as you say.  E.g. When the background lighting is
low, light text on darker background starts to be better, especially
when one looks at the screen longer.

 
> About the music player: It is difficult to integrate with XFCE because
> is a GNOME app? it seems very integrated to me, i have my notification
> area icon and works very well. If it is about performance, lets run
> mp3 through terminal and say no more. Banshee allows to have internet
> radios, find duplicates for files, and tag information fix tool that
> is great and it downloads artwork, searching tool is fast and it never
> crashes. Performance? there are other things besides performance,
> banshee is intuitive and it looks very good to the noob.

Before proposing applications, please have a look at their dependencies:
	http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/banshee

Banshee depends on the Mono (C#) framework.


> I see arguments about LibreOffice and stuff. Someone said "Libreoffice
> is slow". So, tell me how i'm i suppose to have a libreoffice
> replacement or an openoffice replacement or office suite that does not
> get slow? Every suite is slow! Abiword and Gnumeric are great, but
> they are not an office suite!

Why not?

Or do you mean that Xubuntu (default install) should include also rest
of the pieces in "Gnome Office" and have all the same apps as
Libre/OpenOffice has (diagram, presentation, database and math
applications)?


> So by adding of libreoffice i think
> Xubuntu would improve the usability very much and it would be a
> serious possibility of installation by many people. Look at the
> example of thunderbird! it is a great app! but it is a quite slow for
> a P3 whatsoever. But it supports openPGP and so many things that make
> Xubuntu very good by having thunderbird by default, and quite the same
> for Firefox.
>
> Somebody said recently something that there would be great a cheese
> like app in Xubuntu, that's it! It seems to me that we are at war with
> the DVD. I think that if a machine is 10 years old Xubuntu is not
> good, maybe DSL or puppy, just like that. Xubuntu should focus for P4
> and up but that's a different discussion. Software code and libs and
> features increases and maybe a DVD is better, it makes Xubuntu
> complete out of the box.

If you want all *pre-installed* apps to be most featureful and mature,
you should install another distribution, Xubuntu/XFCE default install
isn't that.


> And remember that with time, there were some other derivatives of
> ubuntu that make the job better than Xubuntu, like Lubuntu using LXDE.

For my laptop from 1998 (96MB RAM), Debian/Lubuntu was better choice, but
Xubuntu was fine for re-install of my old desktop computer from 2003
(= 9 years old, 1GB RAM).

Xubuntu was also best for a laptop from 2007 (= 5 years old), because Gnome
and KDE desktops are too slow on 1GB RAM + Intel IGP machine.  Unity
screen layout is also bad for 15" 4:3 laptop screen, it seems to be
designed for higher resolution wide-screen displays.

For my desktop from 2010, I had installed KDE [1] because Xubuntu
applications were too immature.  While Firefox/Thunderbird/Gnumeric were
fine, other Xubuntu apps like Disc burning, archive extractor, camera app
etc lacked features and didn't always working properly, unlike Qt/KDE
apps.  Xubuntu panel also wasn't robust enough [2].

However, I think these issues are slowly being fixed.


IMHO Xubuntu default apps are fine for www + email workflow (Firefox &
Thunderbird are best of class) and other Xubuntu pre-installed apps
are fine if one uses other things in a light-weight manner.

I think Ubuntu documentation should somehow reflect this, tell that
the pre-installed Xubuntu is a bit barebones and what it's good for.
And explain why Xubuntu default install is barebones.

Then there should be separate documentation dedicated on what one needs
to get good work flows for other things:
- photo manipulation / image creation (gimp, inkscape, hugin etc)
- video / music / sound consumption (vlc etc)
- sound / music production (audacity, Qsynth, vmpk, hydrogen etc)
- MS-office compatibility (LibreOffice)

These pages could have short descriptions and screenshots of the programs
involved in these workflows and a link to a page telling how to use
Software Center to locate and install these apps.


	- Eero

[1] I had originally installed Xubuntu, but switched to KDE when I noticed
that to get things done  I had installed as many Qt/KDE apps as what was in
Xubuntu; Digikam, K3b, Lyx, Vlc, Qsynth, vmpk, rosegarden etc.  There are
also Gnome apps I like, such as Gnumeric, Dia, Gimp, Hugin, Inkscape, but I
don't think Unity usable, and as Gnome-shell of that time had issues, I
ended up with KDE on that machine.

[2] If OOM-kills panel applets and one has session saving enabled, on reboot
user doesn't get (full) panel back.  As a result, relative was for few
weeks starting apps from right click on desktop until I came ot fix
the issue.
    -> Session saving should concern only applications, panel applets should
       be handled separately, with panel configuration.