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And what about digiKam?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 9:32 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
Parent article: Giving up the GIMP is a sign of Ubuntu's mainstream maturity (ars technica)

One of the main complaints about this seems to be that the obvious replacement - F-Spot - is a Mono application. However, there is another candidate: digiKam. Perhaps some of the people who feel sufficiently strongly about Mono should be looking to see if they could port digiKam to use Gnome instead of KDE? This wouldn't necessarily mean using Gtk+ instead of Qt, as Qt can fit in pretty well in a Gnome desktop these days. And it would be a great precedent for cross-desktop co-operation.

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Posted Nov 26, 2009 9:35 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Additional thought - perhaps it would even be possible to engage Nokia's enthusiasm about this? I'm sure that the additional visibility of having Qt as part of a default Ubuntu install, with the resulting additional coverage and potentially code contributions, would not harm them.

And what about digiKam?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 17:07 UTC (Thu) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]

> I'm sure that the additional visibility of having Qt as part of a
default Ubuntu install

I think Qt is already part of the default install, unless Ubuntu is no
longer one of the LSB certified distributions.

And what about digiKam?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 17:16 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

A cleanish install of Karmic in a VM here doesn't have it. (The host system does in order to run VirtualBox).

And what about digiKam?

Posted Nov 26, 2009 17:21 UTC (Thu) by krake (subscriber, #55996) [Link]

Ah, interesting.

A quick check confirms that the last version which was LSB compliant
enought for certification was 6.06
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/LSB_Distribution_Status

Yes, digiKam

Posted Nov 26, 2009 12:04 UTC (Thu) by freemars (subscriber, #4235) [Link]

I've been using digiKam with my Gnome installation, and the only modification I've had to do is change the permissions on my serial port to be able to talk to my clunker digital camera. Other than that one minor flaw it installs and runs just fine.

Yes, digiKam

Posted Nov 26, 2009 12:54 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

I was thinking more on the lines of changing it so that it uses Gnome libraries instead of pulling in all the KDE libraries, which would be a bit of a biggy (one or two hundred megs) for the Ubuntu live CD. Or better, so that it uses cross-desktop-platform libraries that will interface with either. As in "there is no problem in computing that you can't solve with another layer of indirection" :)

And what about digiKam?

Posted Nov 27, 2009 14:17 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

This wouldn't necessarily mean using Gtk+ instead of Qt, as Qt can fit in pretty well in a Gnome desktop these days. And it would be a great precedent for cross-desktop co-operation.

Now that the Qt licensing even supports the fantasy licensing model of various corporate GNOME advocates - the insistence that "ISVs" (you can deduce enough about the mindset from the mere use of such a term) would only write proprietary software using "suitably licensed" libraries, despite the predominance of Qt-based applications in that particular scene (from companies who presumably didn't mind putting up a bit of cash to deliver the goods) - perhaps GNOME's days are numbered and the time of desktop convergence is upon us, at least as far as the heavyweight desktop environments are concerned.

Such thoughts might seem somewhat provocative, but given that the last time I looked at what the most visible GNOME developers were up to, using their blogs as evidence (naturally), everyone's energy appeared to be focused either on choosing the victim of some witch-hunt or other - the victim of the day being Mark Shuttleworth on the most recent occasion - or on upholding Miguel de Icaza's supposedly curtailed "freedom" - where a curtailment of such freedom is apparently someone criticising someone else.

At least the KDE developers exhibit apparently genuine enthusiasm about the actual technology, which must be why digiKam is as good as it is. And Gwenview is pretty nice, too.