Parts of LibreOffice will be installed instead

Apr 15, 2015 17:36 GMT  ·  By

Earlier today, April 15, Simon Steinbeiß from the Xubuntu development team has announced that some important open-source software packages will be removed from the next major release of the Xubuntu distribution.

Therefore, it has been decided that the GIMP image editor, AbiWord word processor, and Gnumeric spreadsheet editor applications will be removed from the Xubuntu 15.10 operating system, which will be released at the end of October 2015 along with Ubuntu 15.10 and its flavors.

"In terms of dropping Gimp I would argue it's totally fine to try this in the upcoming cycle based on this result and re-evaluate for the LTS," says Simon Steinbeiß. "So all in all this means that 15.10 will be shipped without Gimp, Abiword and Gnumeric but instead (parts of) the LibreOffice Suite."

While the Xubuntu team has said that both AbiWord and Gnumeric software will be replaced with their counterparts from the LibreOffice office suite, such as LibreOffice Writer and LibreOffice Calc, they don't mention anything about a replacement app for the GIMP image viewer and editor.

However, if the decision to remove GIMP from Xubuntu 15.10 is final, the team says that the image editor might return in the next LTS (Long Term Support) of the distribution in Spring 2016, Xubuntu 16.04. We'll keep you informed on this space if things change in the near future.