----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro(a)gnome.org>
To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop"
<desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 2, 2016 10:27:38 PM
Subject: Proposed default app changes for F24
Hi,
Hope you had a good holiday season.
I propose again some changes to the default apps for F24:
* Empathy - remove without replacement. I use it myself, but I think
I'm a minority -- we don't need to have a chat app installed by default
anymore, since not many people are using the chat protocols supported
by Empathy nowadays. A prominent exception is IRC, but that's only
popular for Fedora/FLOSS developers, not for software developers in
general. Empathy's UI is also looking quite dated. As part of this, we
would remove chat integration from the Online Accounts panel in system
settings. (This is easy; I've already done it for an unrelated
project.) If you want Empathy you can still install it.
I completely agree. Empathy has several design issues in GNOME 3, mainly it's a
multi-window app which is quite difficult to use in GNOME 3. Moreover it's not
actively developed any more and doesn't keep up with new popular services (Telegram,
Whatsapp,...) unlike the good old Pidgin. I think last time I proposed removal of Empathy
we agreed on that, but the problem was that some parts of GNOME (Contacts) depended on it.
I wonder if there has been any progress in this. We can't keep Empathy in this state
forever.
* Shotwell -> GNOME Photos. Photos works well for me, and Shotwell
is
unmaintained upstream for almost a year now. I'm going to package a git
snapshot for us to get in some security fixes, since I don't expect an
upstream release anytime soon. If you want Shotwell for more advanced
features, you can still install it.
I also agree. And if GNOME Photos is not mature enough, we could use gthumb. It would
still serve us better as the default app than Shotwell.
* Rhythmbox -> GNOME Music. I'm using it every day. It works
great and
doesn't look like a database frontend. If you want Rhythmbox you can
still install it. There are a couple rough edges left, but it's much
nicer than Rhythmbox overall. One blocker, though: this would need to
be conditional on getting GNOME#747953 (information leak via plain text
HTTP connection) fixed first.
I prefer Rhythmbox because it supports Internet radios, dunno whether it's an
important use case for us. Otherwise I don't have a problem with Music being the
default app.
Jiri