60 replies to this topic

[+Stocker360]

Hey guys and girls, apologies for the delay in any new posts coming through, work has been taking over my life atm

Right, now we have a few parts down, I suppose the next part to tackle is the default apps that we are going to include.

This should be, web browser, email client, IM, office, media player etc.

This thread is for proposals and discussion of what apps to use.

[+Majesticmerc]

Web browser: How about a browser ballot screen? Many people here on Neowin complain that Microsoft gets a bad rap for bundling a browser, why not provide a choice of several?

Email/IM: Aren't Evolution and Empathy parts of the Gnome set? Perhaps it would be wise to use those. That said, I'm an XFCE user so I could be wrong.

Office: LibreOffice

Media Player: VLC?

Others to consider:

• An option to install WINE during the install. Have an option during install for "Install Windows compatibility software" or something.
  
• Pulseaudio. Opinions are mixed on whether or not PulseAudio is any good, but I quite like it for its ease of use, also include the graphic equalizer plugin.
  
• Xfburn, or another CD burner software. This would probably be a detectable trait during install, so if a burner wasn't found, it could be omitted from the install process.

I wouldn't add much else, lest we start to make it a bloated distro.

[+Stocker360]

Majesticmerc, on 28 July 2012 - 23:45, said:

Web browser: How about a browser ballot screen? Many people here on Neowin complain that Microsoft gets a bad rap for bundling a browser, why not provide a choice of several?

Email/IM: Aren't Evolution and Empathy parts of the Gnome set? Perhaps it would be wise to use those. That said, I'm an XFCE user so I could be wrong.

Office: LibreOffice

Media Player: VLC?

Others to consider:

• An option to install WINE during the install. Have an option during install for "Install Windows compatibility software" or something.
  
• Pulseaudio. Opinions are mixed on whether or not PulseAudio is any good, but I quite like it for its ease of use, also include the graphic equalizer plugin.
  
• Xfburn, or another CD burner software. This would probably be a detectable trait during install, so if a burner wasn't found, it could be omitted from the install process.

I wouldn't add much else, lest we start to make it a bloated distro.

Thanks for the suggestions, lets go through the points here:

• I do like the idea of a ballot screen, would put more choice to the user, which is always good (most of the time )
  
• Regarding Evolution and Empathy, it probably looks like those would be the ones to use, seeing as Thunderbird has been dropped now.
  
• I agree with LibreOffice, is there anything else even near good enough?
  
• VLC I love, so its in
  
• As for the Wine suggestion, one of the goals is to get Mono and Wine working out of the box, so thats got ya covered there!
  
• Pulseaudio, I believe that will be a case for a team vote on that one. I personally don't know enough to make a decision so if anyone could shed some light would be brilliant.
  
• Having some sort of CD burning would be a good idea also.

Keeping down bloat is going to be one of the hard tasks, but it can be done.

[n_K]

Still waiting for the last part of my server to arrive before I can reconfigure everything to run from the new internet, when that happens I'll get onto a GUI
But yes I like the idea of ballot screens.
Pidgin gets my IM vote though, well, pidgin/finch.

[+Stocker360]

n_K, on 29 July 2012 - 00:54, said:

Still waiting for the last part of my server to arrive before I can reconfigure everything to run from the new internet, when that happens I'll get onto a GUI
But yes I like the idea of ballot screens.
Pidgin gets my IM vote though, well, pidgin/finch.

Thanks for the update, ahh forgot about Pidgin!

[+Majesticmerc]

How is Pidgin's integration with Gnome?

Couple more thoughts:

• NetworkManager would be good to include, a nice network GUI would be good and NetworkManager's applet satisfies IMO.
  
• Laptop tools for CPU scaling and that kind of thing (again, possibly automatically added through detection during install).

Are there any IRC chat logs available? My lack of internet access means I'm missing out on project progress!

[+Stocker360]

There were some at the beginning, but I myself havent been on lately for work reasons

How long have you not got internet access for?

[+Majesticmerc]

Stocker360, on 29 July 2012 - 23:01, said:

There were some at the beginning, but I myself havent been on lately for work reasons

How long have you not got internet access for?

Hopefully Orange are planning to have me up and running by Tuesday, and I'll hopefully be able to help out a lot more. I'm not moaning about a lack of chat logs, just thought I could catch up on any discussions if there were. Was someone not writing a bot to do it?

[+Stocker360]

Majesticmerc, on 29 July 2012 - 23:28, said:

Hopefully Orange are planning to have me up and running by Tuesday, and I'll hopefully be able to help out a lot more. I'm not moaning about a lack of chat logs, just thought I could catch up on any discussions if there were. Was someone not writing a bot to do it?

Ahh thats good news

I dont know what was happening regarding the bot for that. I didnt know if we are even allowed to do that tbh.

[Javik]

Personally i'd vote for chrome but I agree, a ballot would be a good idea. Most seem to just slap Firefox with their Linux distributions and I personally cannot stand Firefox. And preferably current versions of Chromium, not versions that are about 4 versions old like in the Ubuntu repositories.

[+Stocker360]

Javik, on 29 July 2012 - 23:53, said:

Personally i'd vote for chrome but I agree, a ballot would be a good idea. Most seem to just slap Firefox with their Linux distributions and I personally cannot stand Firefox. And preferably current versions of Chromium, not versions that are about 4 versions old like in the Ubuntu repositories.

Well that is one of the good things about arch, its a rolling release, so it shouldn't be outdated very often.

[Matthew_Thepc]

Majesticmerc, on 28 July 2012 - 23:45, said:

Web browser: How about a browser ballot screen? Many people here on Neowin complain that Microsoft gets a bad rap for bundling a browser, why not provide a choice of several?

great idea let's definitely try to do this, but if we can't, Chrome would be the #1 choice for me because it comes bundled with auto-updating Flash. or maybe we could do a custom build of chromium? that would be boss

Quote

Email/IM: Aren't Evolution and Empathy parts of the Gnome set? Perhaps it would be wise to use those. That said, I'm an XFCE user so I could be wrong.

yeah, I think the are (or, at least they cane with my GNOME ). They're pretty nice, but for Evolution I'd like to see a way just to read my email and have it never be deleted off of Hotmails servers, and for Empathy I can't seem to get it to connect to the Neowin IRC network O.O. What about Thunderbird for an email client?

Quote

Office: LibreOffice

or OpenOffice, I don't have much of a preference...but what about running Office Web Apps in chrome/border-less browser windows? that'd be cool, and pretty easy to do in C#.

Quote

Others to consider:

• An option to install WINE during the install. Have an option during install for "Install Windows compatibility software" or something

WINE AND MONO. I think it should be an opt-out thing to install WINE and Mono, it would just make app development for Shift2 so much easier. And what about a custom app store?

Quote

I wouldn't add much else, lest we start to make it a bloated distro.

agreed, I'd like to start it out with just the basics.

IMO, the most important part is WINE and Mono.

[+Stocker360]

Matthew_Thepc, on 30 July 2012 - 00:23, said:

great idea let's definitely try to do this, but if we can't, Chrome would be the #1 choice for me because it comes bundled with auto-updating Flash. or maybe we could do a custom build of chromium? that would be boss

Chromium would probably be my choice as well. I don't believe that a ballot screen would be too hard to do, even if we do have to compromise and have a simple app load on first startup.

Quote

yeah, I think the are (or, at least they cane with my GNOME ). They're pretty nice, but for Evolution I'd like to see a way just to read my email and have it never be deleted off of Hotmails servers, and for Empathy I can't seem to get it to connect to the Neowin IRC network O.O. What about Thunderbird for an email client?

Last time I heard Thunderbird support was getting dropped by Mozilla.

Quote

or OpenOffice, I don't have much of a preference...but what about running Office Web Apps in chrome/border-less browser windows? that'd be cool, and pretty easy to do in C#.

The only issue I would see with that is that it would require either a Live/Google account and is not always reliable offline. I do like the idea though, could always be an option for some people

Quote

WINE AND MONO. I think it should be an opt-out thing to install WINE and Mono, it would just make app development for Shift2 so much easier. And what about a custom app store?

Opt-out? No way! Integrated ftw
But no, it would make things so much easier to have some Windows support.

Quote

agreed, I'd like to start it out with just the basics.
IMO, the most important part is WINE and Mono.

100% agree!

[+ViperAFK]

Stocker360, on 30 July 2012 - 00:29, said:

Chromium would probably be my choice as well. I don't believe that a ballot screen would be too hard to do, even if we do have to compromise and have a simple app load on first startup.



Last time I heard Thunderbird support was getting dropped by Mozilla.



The only issue I would see with that is that it would require either a Live/Google account and is not always reliable offline. I do like the idea though, could always be an option for some people



Opt-out? No way! Integrated ftw
But no, it would make things so much easier to have some Windows support.



100% agree!

Thunderbird is still under development, just no paid developers from mozilla.

[firey]

Stocker360, on 30 July 2012 - 00:29, said:

Chromium would probably be my choice as well. I don't believe that a ballot screen would be too hard to do, even if we do have to compromise and have a simple app load on first startup.

This would be super easy.. A Simple app with some pictures of a browser. At which point the user picks the one they want, then a simple apt-get install (or whatever we use) for that browser.

Also, with the WINE/Mono we can write/port some things if need be. Such as custom app store / downloader (as mentioned above). As well it gives us a lot more freedom for this customizability.