ubuntu-gnome team mailing list archive

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I am switching the default web browser for the Ubuntu GNOME Remix from
Epiphany to Firefox and the default office suite from Abiword &
Gnumeric to LibreOffice, according to the clear concensus of Ubuntu
GNOME developers and users.

Although Epiphany is part of GNOME Core, GNOME doesn't seem to mind
too much if most distros ship Firefox instead. (I think this is an
indication that Epiphany shouldn't be in GNOME Core but anyway...)
With Firefox, we can benefit from the existing Firefox stable release
updates. On the other hand, WebKit is rarely updated in Ubuntu stable
releases. Firefox is clearly the best choice for security updates.
Epiphany also is not as well suited for power users with poor support
for switching between lots of tabs for instance.

While I see value in the simpler interfaces presented by Abiword &
Gnumeric, better support for reading and writing to a variety of file
formats is more important to most of you. And there isn't really a
presentation app equivalent to LibreOffice Impress. LibreOffice is
well maintained upstream and in Ubuntu. Notably, Fedora has also
recently switched to LibreOffice (download image size was a blocker
for a long time).

As before, the default web browser and office suite are "recommends"
which means you can easily install other apps and even remove the
default choices if you don't want them.

I apologize for the delay in responding to the requests to switch the
default apps. I had been meaning to test what effect these changes
would have on the download image size but I think that the Xubuntu
ceiling being raised to 1GB makes that test unnecessary.

I am interested in your thoughts about not installing an email client
by default because many people just use webmail while others prefer
Evolution and others prefer Thunderbird.

Also I think we should limit the number of games. An email thread [1]
a few months ago suggested aisleriot, iagno, mahjongg, sudoku, and
tetravex as a reasonable selection.

[1] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/games-list/2012-November/msg00001.html

Thanks,
Jeremy