I do use the boring ones that no one seems interested in maintaining or promoting though, like Evolution 

Kind of random of me to jump in here but I really have to agree with the above. Evolution is awesome and can actually claim to be a real workstation app due to it's Exchange and Office365 integration. Even this integration needs some work but at least it's functional. 

Most users these days use media apps associated with their mobile platform Apple/Android.  This is why some laptops don't even ship with cd-rom drives, because most people just use iTunes, Google Play or one of the many streaming services.  So unless GNOME music has built-in support for existing proprietary codecs or DRM schemes I don't think including a media app is worth the time or effort.

Recently I tried using both Pidgin and Empathy to connect to Lync services and they didn't work.  At least Pidgin could do simple chat but that was all.  I couldn't do video calls and couldn't connect to meetings.  If I had a meeting via Google Hangouts I could just use Google Chrome.  Just want to note that despite being the most used browser worldwide Chromium still isn't included in the official Fedora repositories yet.

Given the limited resources of the Workstation group I think it's best to focus on just two well maintained apps with large developer communities and really integrate them very well.  It seems that Chromium and Pidgin fit this description.  For Pidgin finalizing the port to GTK3 would be good as well integration with services like Skype for Business would be a great place to start.

It would be pretty amazing to just install Workstation and be able to immediately out-of-the-box actually join business meetings and have normal video/voice calls with colleagues running Windows and Mac OS.

Thanks for reading this!
  

On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 4:13 PM, Richard Turner <rjt@zygous.co.uk> wrote:

On 4 Jan 2016 8:51 p.m., "Liam" <liam.bulkley@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd expect most users wouldn't use GNOME Photos/Music/Contacts/Maps, but without metrics we're only speculating.
> Speaking of, usage stats would be really helpful in making these decisions. Obviously this would all be opt in, but it's better guide than nothing.
>>

For what it's worth, I don't use any of those apps. I do use the boring ones that no one seems interested in maintaining or promoting though, like Evolution and Empathy. Mine genuinely is a "work"  station, where I need email filtering and corporate XMPP and shared calendar support and could hardly care less about video and music codecs, browsing photos or perusing a map.

I think it's a shame that Empathy is in a state of neglect and that there's no decent alternative. For home users it's probably totally unimportant, but IM does still have a place at work. I'll just install it myself if it's not installed by default though.

--
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."


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