Wish list for Xubuntu 13.04

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hi,

On Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:17:23 +0100
PK <pliniusminor at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> As suggested by ochosi on IRC, I would like to discuss this wish list
> for Xubuntu 13.04 with you:
> 
> 1. LibreOffice in the iso instead of Abiword and Gnumeric. Xubuntu is
> a full fledged alternative for the big boys Unity, Gnome and KDE. So
> it needs to have a professional office suite by default. Note that I
> *like* Abiword; heck, I even translate it upstream. But it's natural
> place is in a mini like Lubuntu...
> 
> 2. Synaptic and GDebi in the iso. Especially Synaptic is such a cool
> professional tool...
> 
> Of course you can install it afterwards. But first impressions are
> important: the default installation of Xubuntu should be a powerful
> statement about it's coolness.

To be honest the default applications should be dealt with in a different, and probably subsequent, thread. Without a decision for a larger ISO-size we don't have any space left to include anything in addition to what's there in 12.10 (might even have to cut down more stuff).

> I suppose this would mean a DVD iso instead of a CD iso. But CD's are
> dying anyway; when I go to a store, it's nearly all DVD+R and DVD+RW
> that I see on the shelves. Somewhere tucked away you can still find
> CD-R's, if you're lucky.

I'm not sure whether CD and DVD are really the only two alternatives. Personally I'd prefer to go for a 1gb image as Ubuntu already did with 12.10. While I see some benefits in fitting on a CD, our next release is not LTS, therefore I personally wouldn't consider trying a new iso-size a huge problem. At least – and that's my personal understanding – that's what regular releases are for, more experimenting and seeing how it works out. This way there would be enough time to go back to CD releases if we get really bad feedback about this or if we discover problems we didn't anticipate.

I would go for a 1gb image for the next release, it would give us more "space to breath", we could consider bringing back applications that we dropped (mostly due to size issues and without a real discussion, as there was no alternative) for 12.10 or doing something else.
One example for how limited we are at the moment is the transition to a png icon-theme. Converting to png would approximately cost us 6mb, but even that amount of space might be hard to find with the current situation. (The benefit of png is that it's far more responsive and fast, as it doesn't have to be scaled or rendered like svg.)
Obviously there are things we can hopefully drop again soon (mostly python2), but from what I gather this is far from certain. Also we'll have to stick with Gtk2 for quite a while longer, so we won't be gaining space with that anytime soon (probably not even before our next LTS).

So yeah, I think we should discuss this, and I'd especially love to hear from our two technical devs :)

Cheers,
Simon