JDPFu.com 2025

You may not have heard that the Ubuntu guys are planning to remove The Gimp from the default desktop installs in the next LTS release of Ubuntu. Good. The Gimp is very capable, but I’ve never found a use for it. Never. It is too complex for my rotate, crop, remove red-eye needs.

There are a few excellent options, but it seems most of them have issues for me. I like a lite desktop – no Gnome, no KDE, so anything that requires those libraries is to be avoided. The only think worse is to include Mono. Mono is an FOSS implementation of Microsoft’s .NET libraries.

I generally deal with photos very little, unless I’m using scripts to attach GPS lat/lon to the EXIF data in the files or rotate them. Recently, I installed digiKam, a KDE app, but only because it made attaching GPS EXIF data easier. I avoid using it.

Well, I came across an article concerning 3 Gimp replacements that got me thinking. That link was really, really slow for me too. Of the choices, only 1, f-spot, is in the default repositories for my LTS distribution. For fun, I did an install, here’s the dependency data.

$ sudo apt-get install f-spot

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information… Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

  cli-common libart2.0-cil libflickrnet2.1.5-cil libgconf2.0-cil

  libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.0-cil

  libgtk2.0-cil libgtkhtml3.14-19 libgtkhtml3.16-cil libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil

  libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo1.0-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil

  libmono-corlib1.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-data-tds1.0-cil

  libmono-data-tds2.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil

  libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-sqlite2.0-cil

  libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-data2.0-cil

  libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-system-web2.0-cil libmono-system1.0-cil

  libmono-system2.0-cil libmono0 libmono1.0-cil libmono2.0-cil

  libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil mono-common mono-gac mono-jit

  mono-runtime sqlite

Suggested packages:

  monodoc-gtk2.0-manual libgtkhtml3.14-dbg libmono-winforms2.0-cil libgdiplus

  libmono-winforms1.0-cil sqlite-doc

Recommended packages:

  dcraw libmono-i18n1.0-cil libmono-i18n2.0-cil

WOW! That’s a bunch of crap to be forced to load for 1 app that I’ll use perhaps once a month. No thanks. Further, the last package, sqlite, is concerning, since I use the sqlite3 package all the time. Forcing an older package – boo.

I hope the Ubuntu guys consider bloat, which is what they are trying to get away from by not including The Gimp after all. Some people like iTunes and others like the original WinAMP. I’m in the later group. Keep it simple, please.