That’s what I suggested for 18.04 but well, guess what happened.
I guess the problem here is, that it isn’t in the Ubuntu repos.
The problem here is that nobody has done a head-to-head comparison recently among the various candidates. The Ubuntu Desktop Team is willing to listen to suggestions for changes, and has changed applications in the past. But the bar is high - such changes in the defaults affect millions of users, and the backfire potential is high (“OMG my 15-year super-duper tag library was deleted by the migration!”).
So the benefit needs to be worth the effort and the risk. Migrations need to be planned and tested for every upgrade path, and lots of corner cases evaluated.
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Right, neither are firefox, chrome, libreoffice, vlc, spotify, skyoe, gimp to list a few of the most used softwares on Ubuntu (and others distros). Having a modern look is a nice feature but isn’t enough by itself and from this list it’s obvious that “being designed to work nicely with gnome-shell” is not the primary criterion for users.
That being said we should have another look at gnome-music and gnome-photos and how they compare to our current solutions today.
The topic was discussed a bit ago on Default Apps: gnome-music and gnome-photos and at the time the tracker dependency was a blocker. We agreed to give tracker a go after the LTS which means there is no technical reason we couldn’t start using those now if the outcome of the discussion is that they are better options.
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Thanks for the answers.
Well, those are not “core”-applications. Whereas a music player and a “gallery”-like app are (one could say that EOG is already that gallery app, but GNOME will make EOG built into photos as far as I understood that correctly). Except firefox, which is not that bad at adapting to modern design standards (client side decorations).
I will make this when I finished some work for the communitheme next week. But let’s not forget that music will definitely lose in a feature comparison to rhythmbox. I would like to attach the question, if the use case and the average target user for offline music applications has changed over the past years, to that comparison.
For me Rhythmbox is very prone to crashes for about a year or so. Up to the point that it is unusable. So anything would be better than Rhythmbox for me. Even moving from the ASrock ION 330 to a more current ASrock BeeBox and a new Ubuntu install didn’t solve my problems with Rhythmbox.
I wonder if the Foobar2000 snap could be a viable answer to my needs, because seemingly all linux players lack basic functionality (cough correct gapless MP3 playback cough). I guess that moving to Foobar2000 will result in problems accessing external and secondary drives (harddisks, disks and CD-ROMS) though due to snap sandboxing.
As for shotwell: I didn’t like its complexity from the beginning and replaced it with gthumb years ago. I didn’t see the necessity to import and export photos to databases and so on.
Gthumb offers all the basic functionality that I need. But I am not the modern mobile generation type with thousands of quick mobile shots each year.
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Did you report those issues, could you share the launchpad bug number?
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Ubuntu is a distro and i think it need to work then to create an standard, not the chaos. As gnome applications are just particulars applications, the way can not be follow that design as a general goal because is not general is a particular design for gnome applications only.
I think is better invest the time to make the gnome applications like any others applications instead. Try to change the world around the few gnome applications is work against the rest and this is absurd for my point of view. User want to have a general and standard workflow, not some applications working in one way and another in another.
As this proposition not resolve the problematic from the sources (the gnome applications) and instead is against a uniform way to present the GUI, it will give then priority to the chaos instead of give a uniform aspect to the desktop.
I just hope that now one of the most popular Linux distros is on Gnome, the attention and donations that will bring to it will add a momentum to Gnome DE as a whole. Better ecosystem, better apps and better UX
Ubuntu team or representation is already there on Gnome board. I hope that will be a good thing to Gnome, Ubuntu and Linux distros as a whole
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I still owe you a head to head comparison.
Yet after using rhythmbox again I found that it is not connected to the gnome media controls
(Pause, back and forth) in the gnome message tray/calendar popover.
That’s actually pretty bad for a gnome application
Edit: okay epic fail: deactivated the DBUS plugin 
That’s odd. Whilst I don’t use Rhythmbox, I’ve just tired - and the controls in the tray/calendar popover are working as expected for me.
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