Canonical Pulls Kubuntu Personnel Funding 356
LinuxScribe writes "An announcement on the Kubuntu-devel mailing list tells the sad story: Canonical is pulling funding for in-house developers to work on the KDE-based Kubuntu flavor. Canonical now seems committed to its single vision of a GNOME-based Unity as a desktop and other Ubuntu flavors will now have to rely on community support and some infrastructure from Canonical."
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, for me, the reason I'm not using any other KDE based distro is because I want access to the awesome Ubuntu package repositories, as well as all the PPAs. I love PPAs, and apparently so does a lot of other users and developers.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:2, Informative)
It comes with the whole Canonical infrastructure/support and the Ubuntu userbase. Made it much easier to troubleshoot problems.
Re:Mint 12 KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Kubuntu's never really been a good way to use KDE. I don't have much love of KDE, but many people package it better than Ubuntu.
If what you want is old Gnome just use XFCE; Xubuntu in canonical-speak.
Re:Excellent business move (Score:5, Informative)
That doesn't mean other experiences are not possible. For example I use Ubuntu with GNOME shell and have even stuck Ubuntu with xfce on one netbook because those packages exist in the Ubuntu / Debian repositories so they can be installed and used instead of the default desktop.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
The way Debian breaks stable with updates and leaves it broke? It's why I left Debian for Kubuntu to begin with.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
Does this count? [slashdot.org] I'm also the GGGP on that. Sound chip doesn't work? It worked before they broke it and it's working now, I still have the thing, next to me, running.
Re:Excellent business move (Score:5, Informative)
True, but their chosen focus wouldn't seem quite so silly is Unity didn't suck quite so badly. I gave it a shot ... I really did. It's a huge step backwards in usability.
Re:Alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)
Since everybody seems to concur that Kubuntu's KDE is pretty bad, which one's actually better? I'd welcome suggestions.
try lubuntu [ubuntu.com] - finally something that feels human for a developer (boots and moves fast, easy to install/customize, good repos/updates - from Ubuntu. A desktop manager - LXDE - not maintained by Ubuntu)
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
"(for instance: you need to click the tabs in the launcher menu instead of just mousing over them, which is unpleasant)"
we have a policy of having everything go upstream unless there is very good reason. I just checked and the issue you say is not true (now).
"Is there any reason to use Kubuntu instead of just about any other KDE based distro?"
We believe KDE to be the best technology and therefore way to take over the world. Other distros will fill in gaps in KDE's offering with non-KDE apps but we are much more reluctant to do that. If you are interested in having short term solutions go with other distros which ship non-KDE web browsers etc.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
You could use debian.
You could use Ubuntu.
Kubuntu is not the only way to get KDE on Ubuntu. There are also full, standard and minimal KDE packages available to any Ubuntu variant from the standard repositories. Just like the equivalent Debian packages, you get a standard desktop without all the Kubuntu customisations. The same applies to Xfce and LXDE, which are also available in vanilla forms without the Xubuntu or Lubuntu tweaks or alternative packages.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Informative)
You could use debian.
You could use Ubuntu.
Kubuntu is not the only way to get KDE on Ubuntu. There are also full, standard and minimal KDE packages available to any Ubuntu variant from the standard repositories. Just like the equivalent Debian packages, you get a standard desktop without all the Kubuntu customisations. The same applies to Xfce and LXDE, which are also available in vanilla forms without the Xubuntu or Lubuntu tweaks or alternative packages.
Of course, that brings in a lot of dependencies and extra apps that you would then need to remove manually. It's not as bad when doing this with Xfce or LXDE because they don't provide a lot of extras by themself, but KDE does.
Kubuntu is not Ubuntu with KDE pasted on top.
ArchLinux for Bleeding Edge, Debian for Stability (Score:4, Informative)
I have had a lot of time to deal with this, as I dropped ubunturd 3-4 years ago, as I found that every dist upgrade horribly broke the system, and that I had to jump through a lot of hoops to get my custom modifications and kernels not to cause dependency hells...
I'm personally very partial to ArchLinux [archlinux.org] for my daily driver laptop. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a tweaker and ricer on my laptop, but Arch is perfect for that...
You control every aspect, as you set the system up from the ground up, and it's packages are always more up to date than most distros. It's package management is faster by far than apt, and the PKGBUILD building system gives even the most novice compiler of software what they need to package any application not included in the distro, build any of thousands of premade PKGBUILDs in the AUR repository [archlinux.org], and rebuild and modify anything that is already packaged by the distro via ABS.
My server, however, runs Debian testing - which is rock solid...if you need something that "just works," Debian is definitely the way to go.
In my mind, these are the only two distros that exist, as I've been unimpressed with any others, unless you count the TAILS livecd when using public computers, for paranoia's sake.