GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Tool, is a powerful image editing tool and is present in Ubuntu as a default application.

GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Recently though, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, the Ubuntu developer community has decided to discontinue providing GIMP as one of the default applications in the distribution.

GIMP is a powerful tool and has been a part of Ubuntu for a really long time. Although, this decision was taken to reduce the size of the Ubuntu live CD, it may have many other side advantages and logical explanations.

• The general end-user hardly uses GIMP, it is more of a professional software.
• The GIMP UI is complex and has many options, settings and editing capabilities.
• It takes up a huge amount of disk space.
• Windows does not bundle a Photoshop like software with itself, a basic image editing software should suffice.
• F-Spot photo viewer is good enough for basic photo editing.

With all these points in mind, developers at the Ubuntu Development Summit has decided to remove GIMP from the next Ubuntu release onwards. Bye bye GIMP.