Published at LXer:

During a planning session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week, a decision emerged to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision has generated a bit of controversy, it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users. As a participant who attended the session in person, I want to shed some light on how and why the decision was made.

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Seriously how really gives a crap what is installed by default other than a DE and a package manager. Anything else can be installed easily including GIMP. And rather as "it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users" it more along the lines of one less package the devs have to cram on the install cd/dvd. So rather than include a tool that might be too complicated for "normal" users they include F-spot and all the Mono crap it depends on; which does less than half of what GIMP can do.

From both Ubuntu and the Gnome devs point of view the so called "normal" user must have Forrest Gump's intelligence. Let's make things as simple as possible for the "normal" user, we don't want to make things too complicated for them or they will go back to 'gasp' windows.