Comment 3 for bug 59092

Ubuntu has a philosophy that it's okay to install something that isn't necessarily going to be used, because it maximizes usability and minimizes problems. For anyone using Ubuntu, the small amount of extra disk space isn't going to be a problem, and for anyone else, there are distros that cater to people with limited system resources.

That being said, I don't see a problem with always installing timidity by default. All network driver kernel modules, for instance, are on the disk by default, so this isn't any worse.

Just make sure that the system is smart enough to disable it when real MIDI hardware is detected. But some MIDI hardware sucks, so people might want to use timidity anyhow. I think, therefore, in GNOME and KDE "System Preferences" panels, there should be a facility for managing this (turing it on and off, etc.).

What do you think?

I think the effort is worth it, because this is one of those things that users typically expect to "just work," and there aren't any license issues that stand in the way like there are with certain multimedia formats.