Canonical hosted its biannual Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) last week in Dallas, Texas. I was one of many open source software developers who attended the event and participated in the collaborative process of planning Ubuntu 10.04, the next version of the popular Linux distribution.

An important part of the 10.04 roadmap that emerged during UDS is a tentative plan to remove the GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Tool, from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision is viewed by some as controversial, the reasoning behind it is valid. The removal of a niche professional graphics editing tool reflects Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users.

How UDS works

Ubuntu adheres to a six-month development cycle that follows the GNOME release schedule. At the start of each cycle, Canonical hosts a developer summit that brings together its own team, a multitude of community contributors, and upstream developers from prominent open-source software projects. The event primarily consists of planning sessions that address specific features or technical issues. Proposed changes to the platform are described in "blueprint" pages on the Launchpad development site.

During each session, participants flesh out the blueprint and take notes in a shared document that is written with Gobby, a collaborative text editor. Remote participants who are not in the actual room can still be involved in the process by accessing the Gobby document, connecting to an IRC channel for the session, and listening to a live audio stream of the discussion. To understand how many Ubuntu development decisions are made at UDS, it's important to recognize that the process is extremely inclusive and transparent. The event is open to everyone who wants to be involved.

The decision to remove the GIMP was made during a morning session last Wednesday called "Application selection in the default install." The session itself was videotaped, so you can actually watch the discussion for yourself. I was there in person, along with a few upstream GNOME developers and many members of the Ubuntu community. There were also several people who took part in the discussion remotely through the IRC channel.

The reasons for removing the GIMP

The GIMP is an impressive software application and is arguably one of the most profound achievements of the Linux desktop ecosystem. In our past coverage of the GIMP here at Ars, we have highlighted its increasingly viable status as a serious contender in the field of professional graphic editing.

The GIMP's strengths are precisely what make it unsuitable as a default component of a mainstream operating system. Its expansive assortment of rich features necessitate a complicated user interface that is intimidating to inexperienced users. It is also saddled with a lengthy startup time due to its large collection of plugins. As one would expect of a high-end graphic editing tool, it also uses a lot of disk space. Its size footprint is especially problematic for Ubuntu, because the distribution ships as a CD image and has a very limited amount of space.

Providing professional-grade editing capabilities is a goal that is mutually exclusive with Ubuntu's requirement of a lightweight and intuitive tool for simple editing tasks. There is no practical way for the GIMP to serve both uses cases. Trying to adapt it to make it serve as a mainstream tool would only impede its ability to advance towards its goal of providing a top-notch tool for professionals.

The GIMP developers who have expressed views on the subject seem to agree with Ubuntu's plan. Sven Neumann, a respected GIMP developer and the author of the GIMP Pocket Reference, voiced approval on the GIMP developer mailing list.

"That is pretty much in-line with our product vision. GIMP is a high-end application for professionals. It is not the tool that you would advise every user to use for their casual photo editing," he wrote.

Even though I personally run the GIMP on a very regular basis to create images for my articles, I only use and understand a slim fraction of its capabilities. I suspect that this is common among regular users. There is a clear need for a lighter editing program that will start faster and eschew features that are unnecessary for a majority of users.

F-Spot for editing

Consensus emerged very quickly during the UDS session that GIMP does not belong in the default Ubuntu installation. The important question, however, is what to offer as a replacement for the most frequently used features of the GIMP. There doesn't seem to be an abundance of lightweight alternatives. The F-Spot photo manager has been identified as the most likely path to a viable solution. F-Spot, which is already included in Ubuntu, has basic editing features such as cropping and color adjustment. It also has popular photo fix-up capabilities like support for red-eye reduction.

The downside of using F-Spot as the primary image editor is that its management mode, where the editing features are accessible, is a bit too heavy for users who just want to do quick in-place editing of a single image. F-Spot has a special view mode that allows it to be used without the overhead of its iPhoto-like management tools. The editing features, however, were not previously accessible in this mode.

Fortunately, the F-Spot community has already stepped up and done the work. After learning of Ubuntu's plans for 10.04, F-Spot contributor Stephane Delcroix made it work in only an hour and a half of coding. He demonstrated the change in a blog entry published yesterday.

"I plugged the main F-Spot editors inside the single view mode. And that worked quite well," he wrote. "Of course, F-Spot editors are nowhere close to Gimp's, and don't even aim to. But they cover 90% of your daily usage and are (probably) simpler to use than Gimp. And even more, you can write (read contribute) some additional ones in very few lines of code."

Delcroix has made it possible to use the editing features directly from the lightweight viewing mode, making F-Spot into an ideal mainstream alternative to the GIMP for basic editing tasks. There are still a handful of important features—such as support for resizing, simple painting, and text annotation—that still need to be added, but the system itself is pretty solid and appears to be easy to extend. If they can improve it to the point where it is an effective tool to make lolcats, then I think that will indicate that it is good enough to support most mainstream use cases.

Still easy to get the GIMP

Some of the people who are criticizing the decision to remove the GIMP from the default installation seem to be confused about what that actually means. It's important to understand that the GIMP will still be in Ubuntu's repositories where it will be easily accessible to users who want to install it through the package management system.

Although it won't be installed automatically on every new Ubuntu system, it will still be available through Ubuntu's Software Center. It's also important to note that it won't be removed during software upgrades. Users who have Ubuntu installed today and eventually move to 10.04 by using the software upgrade process will still have the GIMP installed.

There are also some ways that it can be made more visible to users who might benefit from its capabilities. For example, it would still likely be shipped with Ubuntu Studio, a derivative that focuses on multimedia capabilities. There was also some discussion about making a special area of the new Software Center to promote good and popular applications that aren't installed by default, including the GIMP.

Decisions

A number of other things were discussed during the session in relation to the GIMP removal issue. Participants talked about alternate image viewing and editing tools that could possibly be adopted to replace F-Spot, including Shotwell and GThumb. We also contemplated the possibility of dropping the EOG viewing tool and using F-Spot for that too. We determined that F-Spot is the most comprehensive photo management tool, but EOG is still a better stand-alone image viewer. EOG will continue to be used by default as the image viewer, but it will supply a menu option that will launch F-Spot's viewer to be used for editing.

In addition to image decisions, we also evaluated a number of other applications for potential inclusion. The Ubuntu community wants the distro to ship with a lightweight video editor, which led to a discussion about Pitivi, which has been tentatively tapped for inclusion. There are some concerns about Pitivi's maturity and suitability, but it's generally a pretty good application. Developer Edward Hervey has responded to some of those concerns in a blog entry this week.

There seem to be some people who think that Ubuntu is "swapping" GIMP for Pitivi. It's important to understand that the decisions are largely unrelated. The goal is to offer a diverse set of basic applications to fulfill mainstream usage requirements. Adding Pitivi to the mix certainly contributes to that as handheld flip cams are becoming more popular.

Games to include by default were discussed extensively, but there haven't been any major decisions made in that area yet. There is strong consensus in favor of games that have support for collaboration and network multiplayer functionality. My own program—an open source microblogging client called Gwibber—has been tentatively approved, though it will need some serious bugfixing to meet the high standards of robustness that are implied by an LTS release.

For more details about the default application decisions, I encourage interested community members to read the blueprint notes and check out the video of the session. I think that when people take a step back and objectively assess the implications of removing the GIMP from the default installation, they will see that it is really the right decision. I also think that the decision was made in a very open and constructive way.

Further reading