"[...] a regularly released community-friendly distro with a strong KDE focus. There is no other major distro out there that matches that description [...]"
This makes me really mad. OpenSuse is a major distro and has supported KDE for years. It's not so popular in the USA, but is pretty big in Europe (I have used it for years and it rocks; so does KDE). I don't see how the quote above is excusable. Before reading that you had my sympathy, but if you're going to trash-talk the rest of the community then good riddance.
[I just noticed some people are actively downvoting this comment. Just how far does mindless Ubuntu fanboyism and intolerance of alternatives go?]
That was written by Jonathan Riddell, who worked on Kubuntu. I am fairly certain he is not trash-talking KDE and I am also fairly certain that Ubuntu is not using him as a mouthpiece to trash SUSE.
So it isn't necessary to get very hot toward Ubuntu on account of it. Maybe Riddell misspoke. I seriously doubt anyone is trying to be mean to SUSE, let alone all of Ubuntu doing so through people who were working on Kubuntu.
I think it's just gratuitous to blame "mindless Ubuntu fanboyism and intolerance of alternatives" for this sort of illusory perceived slight. I like your posts, but I don't see why you would get this angry. Ubuntu is also an alternative, so clearly is SUSE, if you think Jonathan Riddell is picking on SUSE you can just ignore him.
Kubuntu is not Ubuntu. It is a complete distro with KDE as the default desktop. In the future, KDE support will still be in Ubuntu, as much as it is in Opensuse. Opensuse allows you to pick which desktop to use [1]. OpenSuse is not a "KDE distro."
Puh-leese. Kubuntu and Ubuntu are the same distribution. They just replace your boot screens when you install kubuntu-desktop instead of just installing another DE.
I've always been annoyed at Canonical's packaging of different DEs as if they were entirely different distros.
I've always been annoyed at Canonical's packaging of different DEs as if they were entirely different distros.
You mean they aren't? Really, how often do you have to go mess around under /etc ? A different DE is probably the biggest user-facing change you'll get.
Of course they aren't. One of the coolest things about desktop Linux is that you can easily use whatever DE suits your fancy without having to do a bunch of footwork.
Packaging these as different distributions sends your users red flags about compatibility and ease of use. It makes people think they have to change their computer completely if they want to try something new. It makes them think they can't have concurrent DE installs if one user prefers XFCE and another prefers KDE and another prefers Gnome. It makes them look for "Kubuntu packages" instead of "Ubuntu packages" even though the distributions are binary compatible.
There are a lot of implications of pretending like you're a whole different OS when you're just a different default DE.
And I "mess around under /etc" frequently, probably multiple times per week.
I'd hazard a guess that there's a not-insignificant number of Ubuntu users for whom opening the terminal is "a bunch of footwork".
I used to live with a 40-something woman who was fairly technologically impaired, the kind of person you would expect to get a MacBook Air and call it a day. She ran Mint. Now, granted, it was installed by our room mate who was (still is, I suppose) a CS grad student, but she got by just fine with Mint, LibreOffice, and Chrome. Never used anything else, and never had a need to go plunking around on the command line.
I suspect Susan is not alone among Linux users who just wanted a cheap computer that worked and had some nerd install a user-friendly distro for them.
I haven't tried this in a few years, but I recall that Kubuntu and Ubuntu desktops used to have serious issues co-existing on the same box for some reason.
You called a mistake 'trashtalking' and then went on to claim that it was the work of the intolerant Ubuntu fanboys. Your comment was pretty crap in that respect.
Putting that aside, it's true that Ubuntu has completely taken away the spotlight from other Linux distros, which runs counter to the anti-monoculture argument which was commonly thrown around in previous years by Linux... advocates. But even as a user of another distribution, I don't really mind.
Ubuntu and Canonical as figureheads in the Linux community make it a much more tangible alternative than the previous cloud of distributions recommended to everyone, with ever changing dominance. It's seen as a rival on par with the proprietary OSes and the fact that it's projected that image for four years now only strengthens the position of the entire lot.
he said the author was trashtalking, and his comment being downvoted was the work of intolerant fanboi. what part of it did you not understand?
second. it doesn't matter if ubuntu got the spotlight in your circles, other distros are famous in other circles. europe has good number of fedora/redhat and suse users
It is a literal statement and you are not reading it literally. OpenSuse is frequently but not regularly released. It also fills in gaps in KDE's offering with other software such as Yast and Firefox. Otherwise it is a good distro for KDE fans.
Ubuntu releases regularly every 6 months like clockwork, while on the otherhand, suse releases relatively frequently, but there is anywhere between a few months and a year or so between releases, so it can't exactly be described as 'regular'.
Mandriva and its descendant PCLinuxOS also fall into this category. I believe Mandriva is relatively popular in Europe also, being used in government and such.
It seemed surprisingly popular ca. 2007 before people figured out that they were, I shit you not, tampering with the DistroWatch numbers by spoofing hits.
A decent distro though, and it was a little more usable than Mandriva at the time.
Mandriva is less frequently released and like suse fills in gaps with their own technology such as system control centre. They have also been very bad at creating a community which leads to forks like PCLinuxOS and Mangia
I don't quite understand what you mean by "fills in gaps". There are no gaps, YaST on openSUSE is provided in addition to pretty much what anyone would expect on any distro.
Edit: I see what you meant in a comment later/earlier in this thread.
I couldn't agree more, that's a pretty "wtf" statment to make. I think it demonstrates the growing disconnect between Canonical and the Linux community.
In fact I'd go so far as to say that very few people think of Kubuntu when they think about KDE on Linux. openSUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Arch are the go-to's for KDE on Linux.
And actually, increasingly, a distro you wouldn't have expected on that list only a few years ago given Red Hat's usually Gnome-focussed efforts: Fedora. Their KDE team is highly competent and hard-working, and has produced a very strong KDE CD for some time now.
Folks from the KDE team have also popped up on the distro's board of directors and engineering committes, which are voted offices. And Red Hat has several paid employees working on KDE/Qt stuff at least part-time.
Fans of KDE definitely shouldn't dismiss Fedora automatically anymore, especially if they otherwise have a strong appetite for Fedora's usual virtues (closeness to upstream, package freshness). It's a really good KDE binary distro these days.
(Disclaimer: I'm a KDE developer, but KDE of course remains highly committed to distro neutrality, i.e. the above are my personal views as a Fedora user, not as a representative of KDE. And I'm not involved with Fedora development.)
Thanks, that's good to know. I'll make a point of giving it a "spin" so to speak, so I can be confident to recommend it alongside the others I mentioned. I really should anyway since there's many a package on our build service (openSUSE) using fc15/16 as build targets.
While there are a lot of Canonical folks that don't have backgrounds in upstream projects (more so than at other major distros), Jonathan has been involved in KDE since long before he worked for Canonical and is old friends (and still in frequent contact) with many of the top tech folks at SUSE.
Following the Unix philosophy Write programs that do one thing and do it well -- perhaps we can assume that Canonical is willing to maintain one OS, and do it well.
I've been wanting to hear this for a long time. Not that I like one more than the other, I just think that Canonicals effort should be towards developing, fixing and improving one UI, not four.
I'm not sure Canonical supports XFCE in any way, and now they also no longer support KDE (financially, that is). There were hiring one guy to work on Kubuntu, that's not much if you ask me. So we're down to two (Gnome-shell and Unity), and the support of gnome-shell is almost mandatory. Unity itself is based on gnome3, so they need to help maintain and improve it.
There is no harm in letting community driven efforts take place. Having a variety of desktop environments available to pick from has its advantages. For example, Xubuntu is really useful for people who need to cut down memory/CPU requirements.
Xubuntu is also really useful if you want a superior desktop UI. I'm not sure if it's gotten harder or easier to make a default Ubuntu install use Xfce4 on the very newest version, it'd be nice if that was an install-time option instead of the separate distro mess. (It used to be just sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop, but I've been out of the Ubuntu world for long enough I have no idea if they changed that and it wouldn't surprise me.)
I'll be on Gnome2 until it dies, after that I'll have a full switch to Xfce4 since it's the only one that can compete with Gnome2 at the moment. I'll probably seriously experiment with various tiling managers around that time too. I'm more excited about the future developments of Wayland which I'm glad Canonical is supporting but not so much gnome3 and unity.
So far, I'm not a big fan of gnome3 (and Unity), but I'm going to give the gnome developers some credit and trust the direction they took. They spent countless hours thinking about what to do - I didn't.
They refactored most of gtk, simplifying many things, and in the long run, when people are done migrating everything, I believe it will turn out for the best.
If it does then we need people to step up and take the initiative in doing the tasks that are often poorly supported by the community process. ISO testing, for example, is a long, slow, thankless task, and it is hard to get volunteers for it. We can look at ways of reducing effort from what we do such as scrapping the alternate CD or automating KDE SC packaging.
This is the biggest single challenge that free software has to over come if it every hopes to challenge proprietary versions. Testing, and verifying bug fixes, and bugs, and documenting. Its not the 'fun' work of building a distro, its not the 'glorious' work of building a distro, its not something that makes people want to sit at your table during a 'con.
But the reality is the for most software products the number of people who are 'users' and the number of people who are 'developers' are generally very different, with successful products having many more users than developers. Users have no option when they hit a problem or an incompatibility but to stop using, that is their only choice. They aren't going to learn C, they aren't going to try to fetch and build a newer version of a kernel module, all they really can do is try something else.
Everything else pales in comparison to that problem.
I don't understand what is the problem.
I installed Ubuntu multiple times just to uninstall Gnome and install KDE as a first step after install. Never bothered to actually try KUbuntu.
Is this method of installing KDE still supported, or they are dropping support for KDE completely.
Add to that that Jonathan Riddell (the sole Kubuntu developer Canonical was funding, which they now cancelled, which is what this announcement is about) had been off the Kubuntu rotation for about one release cycle in the recent past already, working on Bzr instead. The Kubuntu folks still managed to make their release just fine.
They will probably not drop the KDE packages (that'd be idiotic, tons of people use, say Amarok or Kopete or whatnot) — but it won't be the streamlined experience that Unity is or Gnome was, Ubuntu icons everywhere and whatnot.
It'll just be closer, or even identical to upstream KDE (or rather, Debian's version of upstream KDE) with few modifications on Canonical's side.
Canonical is not a stranger to idiotic business decisions.(See also Unity and their subsequent losing of ground to Mint)
That, combined with their utter inability to take community feedback into account, really makes me wonder whenever they do something like this. It's like traditional logic doesn't apply.
I'm not angry that Canonical has not dedicated a staff member to Lubuntu or Xubuntu, why should I rage over Canonical not having a staff member dedicated to Kubuntu? The community is doing a fine job.
I have no problem with Unity and if I did, I have no problem installing Xfce either.
My impression, with no basis in actual facts, is that they spend more than they take in. How many zillions of users do they have, and how many of those actually need support from Canonical, especially when they can get varying degrees of support from anyone with Linux knowledge.
Ubuntu Server is becoming more and more popular. While the Red Hat "wait five years between releases" model works for some applications, it is actually not very good for people developing new web-based programs. There is a lot of appreciation for a server-style OS that updates more frequently (semi-annually in Ubuntu's case), and Ubuntu offers contracts (supposedly) comparable to what you would get with RHEL so you can still keep the CYA business guys happy (and get support, I guess, if you need it).
That's a shame. I never liked KDE since I first tried it about 15 years ago. Unity and Gnome 3 are so bad that on my latest ubuntu install, I decided to see if KDE was fixed yet. It's now my primary desktop environment. There are a few issues with it, but I felt like it was far better than the alternatives.
I've recently switched Linux Mint as a result of Canonical's new focus on eye candy rather than functionality (I couldn't take the new interface in Ubuntu). Have others gone the same way or is there another distribution I should look at?
I've done so too. It seems that they will not be able to get around the Gnome3 crap in their ubuntu-based edition. They're trying to get out of the mess with their Cinnamon project. I'll see how it goes, but i'm afraid I'll have to ditch gnome altogether and go for XFCE (in Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) for example, they say its a rolling distro too, so it looks even more like a good idea).
It's a philosophy, not a requirement. Mint thinks you should upgrade Ubuntu that way as well.
I just keep separate partitions and do a full install on the ones I need. No sweat.
On the other hand, I did a "ubuntu" style upgrade to 10.04 LTS, and that worked fine, too (I run that on a netbook for their netbook interface). It took longer than a full install on Mint (perhaps being a slower machine had something to do with it), but it worked out ok.
I've ended up looking at Arch Linux (I installed using ArchBang which is probably a little easier/simpler than using the straight Arch installer). In actual daily use I find it about as easy as Ubuntu, but I like the more minimalist philosophy of the distribution. I already feel like I understand more of what's actually on my system and how it's really working.
I switched to Mint a while back, not because of mad h4xx0r skilz (I don't have them), but because it "just works" (for linux). As a happy coincidence, they give me an acceptable desktop option in their custom desktop.
Unfortunately, in Mint 12 my lexmark printer no longer works. I think it's some issue between 3.0 kernel, cups, and Mint, but nobody has quite figured it out yet.
This happens with Windows upgrades too, so please no flame wars here.
I've installed the xubuntu-desktop packages on Ubuntu 11.10, and am pretty happy with it, at home; at work I'm using Ubuntu with the awesome window manager -- but running a gnome-session within that to make some things a bit easier.
Ubuntu is not limited to the default interface if you spend a little bit of time; probably that is far less time than getting to know a new distribution.
I stuck with Ubuntu but switch to gnome + xmonad on fresh installs. If this ceases to be possible in future releases I may take a few days and get set up with arch linux, and then automate that with chef or something similar.
One thing about ubuntu (and the reason i prefer it) is that it works well with new hardware mostly out-of-the-box. If you use it on laptops that is a big plus. If you hate too much eyecandy, xubuntu is an obvious option.
But maybe i have overlooked other distributions that "just work" out of the box.
I liked that mix o Debian base + latest KDE + some Ubuntu graphical extras (printer, package update, etc). KDE needs it's own distro focused on a great KDE user experience. Sorry for Mandriva and others but for me I need something based on Debian. My real opinion is that KDE should make itself a distro to get a good vertical integration.
Canonical should consider dropping Unity and getting the Gnome people to drop Gnome 3 and then get them to come out with Gnome 4 based on Gnome 2 with some very small Ubuntu twists. Oh right, that would be all Ubuntu versions up to 11 which were successful.
It's always sad to see a project failing. There are other alternatives, both to a KDE linux distro (i.e: openSUSE) and gnome/ubuntu (mint being my favorite).
It's a business decision I understand, they want to shift focus completely to ubuntu, especially since they are losing a huge user-base over their last gnome3 releases.
It doesn't mean the project is failing. Kubuntu had only a single developer from Canonical, and numerous other developers. This just means that Canonical doesn't feel like funding a KDE desktop anymore with that one developer. It doesn't mean the project is ending or anything.
You're right, but it means the project will (probably) become less stable. One less full time individual probably means less testing and might require you to use older packages or build them yourself.
kubuntu are the ones who maintain the packages. If they go away, you're either HOPING someone volunteers to package KDE in an independent repo (a pretty daunting task), or you're building it from source.
All those packages come from Debian anyway. As long as Debian keeps KDE in its repos, I don't see any reason for KDE packages to disappear from Ubuntu repos. Worst case, KDE on Ubuntu will become less stable due to less testing, but that could be partially mitigated by using slightly older packages.
The reason i prefer xubuntu is the fact that Kubuntu is going the way of ubuntu by investing heavily on eyecandy, touch-like interfaces and excessive UI bloat. KDE seems to be the best overall platform for development, but the interface is trying too much to be everything. I think they should reconsider falling back to a simple clean default desktop, because they are doing a disservice to the developers of thousands of great KDE apps.
I'm on Ubuntu 11.04 atm. I plan to upgrade to 12.04 in July (after its had a few months to bed in), but I'm weary of what to expect from their next UI update, given their recent history. Unless I hear good things, I'll be moving over to Xubuntu.
Alternatively, you could go with XMonad! I made the jump after experiencing Canonical's Unity and proceeding to search for alternatives. Once you make the switch, you won't want to use anything else. :-)
My current approach is Android ICS on a Transformer Prime, with an Ubuntu chroot for running server-side apps when developing (with vim, git, etc), and VNC connection if I need to run full desktop apps.
If only Firefox Mobile included development tools I could mostly ditch the VNC part.
Some ideas seem kind of interesting, like the HUD thingy, but I very much doubt it will be enough to bring disappointed users back to using Ubuntu. Xubuntu is quite good if you're looking for something close to the gnome 2 experience.
The desktop is just there to launch and switch between applications. I want it to stay simple and to keep out of my way. I've not tried Xubuntu yet, but it sounds/looks like it will be better at satisfying these requirements for me.
"The desktop is just there to launch and switch between applications."
If that's how you look at the desktop, then you should definitely look at Lubuntu. It's just windows and a panel. When you look at an Xfce desktop, it looks like Xfce. When you look at Lubuntu, it's just windows and a panel.
Then WTF is OpenSuse? http://www.opensuse.org/en/
This makes me really mad. OpenSuse is a major distro and has supported KDE for years. It's not so popular in the USA, but is pretty big in Europe (I have used it for years and it rocks; so does KDE). I don't see how the quote above is excusable. Before reading that you had my sympathy, but if you're going to trash-talk the rest of the community then good riddance.
[I just noticed some people are actively downvoting this comment. Just how far does mindless Ubuntu fanboyism and intolerance of alternatives go?]