Canonical pulls funding from Kubuntu

how many other people are working on the kubuntu team?

I think Kubuntu is probably one of the biggest successes for the Ubuntu *project*, just not financially for Canonical. That success is based on the work of the community. I'm not a KDE user, but have often been tempted to switch simply due to the strong community around Kubuntu.

While Jonathan has done great work, for better or worse, he was always the only full-time Canonical employee working on Kubuntu. If you've liked using Kubuntu in the past, there is no reason for you to stop using it now. I know everyone wants to get their shots in at Canonical, but it frankly seems a little insulting to all the community members that put in so much effort creating Kubuntu.

Of course, doing something as goofy as giving the installed system two completely different desktops and sets of software by default would have just spelled the death of Ubuntu, not just Kubuntu.

Too often the Linux crowd forgets the important of "polish," which among other things means not forcing the user to pick between two different ways of doing the same thing.

Whether KDE is better than GNOME is significantly less relevant in the grand scheme of things. Marketing and how the image is projected is significantly more important. "Here's the one thing we did and here's how freaking awesome it is and hot damn do you need to try this out" is significantly more powerful than "meh, do whatever you want, choice and stuff, we're open and that's neat and you should try one of the things we couldn't make up our own minds about."

If I remember right, Kubuntu was an LTS for 6.06, just like Ubuntu. For 8.04 it wasn't due to the KDE transition going on at the time (old unsupported KDE3 or new unstable KDE4), but it resumed its LTS status for 10.04 and 12.04.

Canonical's stand from the very beginning has been to reduce user's confusion at having too many option by providing sane defaults. Yes, even if those sane defaults are chosen by insane people ;-)
I found it somewhat contradictory they funded Kubuntu to begin with, and tought it'd be obvious that in the end they would choose one of the environments, leaving the other to be community maintained (as countless others).
And yes, I was right all along! ☺

Me too post, but I can't resist...

Why do many people vehemently criticize a company who tried to do good thing but eventually not very successful at doing it. At least they tried.

2 words: GNOME OS

Hmm.

With that comment in mind. I think it would behoove us all if we took a closer look at how the KDE based OS is constructed and applications delivered for the newly announced Spark device.

I'm not sure the Spark device's OS is going to be delivered like a tradition "distribution" in the Kubuntu sense. I admit I don't fully understand who is responsible for maintaining the OS image and updates for the device yet. Based on bits produced by the mer project, but I'm not sure yet who is responsible for the image QA. Clearly the app delivery system is going to be established outside of mer.

I would imagine Gnome project devs are going to look very closely at the Spark device and try to figure out a way to deliver a similar direct to consumer product for the GNOME OS concept.

-jef

> Again, this stupid notion that OSX is perfect for the "average Joe", whatever that means. Now I have to even read it on LWN. I think that is utter BS. OSX is good in a few respects and falls short in many others.

Very true.

I've managed Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) machines for my parents, and I also help my wife with an OSX laptop.

Apple gets a lot right but make no mistake, there are loads of serious inconvenient flaws in OSX. I am not talking about "oh, it's so much easier in Debian", but things that inconvenience my wife a lot while using the computer.

I think the reference comparison for OSX users is the WinXP they upgraded from. Also there is the buyer of an expensive gadget, say Apple laptop, (unconsciously) trying to justify the decision. That distorts perspective a lot.

Based on the experience of my parents using Ubuntu, I sincerely believe that Ubuntu beats OSX in usability in many aspects. However, even with a seasoned Linux husband to help, the number of 'deal breaker flaws' in Ubuntu was such that we ruled it out when replacing my wife's WinXP laptop.

There's only one thing worse than anecdotal evidence, that is no evidence (as in your comment). But, I have many friends who barely know anything about computers and are happy OS X users. In the past, I also installed Linux on family's and friends' machines, but they usually reverted back to Windows in days or weeks. This was caused by everything from incompatibility (OO.org/LibreOffice mangles my PowerPoint presentations), hardware incompatibility, instability (program X crashes), incompleteness (what user-friendly program can I use to edit a movie, like Adobe Premier Elements), installation of software that is not in the distro's repositories and confusion (I want to write an e-mail, but see five different programs).

Of course, some of these issues are not directly related to polish, i.e. as hardware support (since Apple only has to support their own) and the availability of widely used applications (Office, Adobe CS, games, etc.). But, OS X also offers users a simple and polished environment, where they never have to use a terminal to do what they want. Needless to say, they even nailed user-friendliness better with iOS.

Unfortunately, many computer-savvy people are blind to the concerns of the average computer user.

The problem is that actually lots of people do not have valid choice.
Where I works, people are offered the choice between Mac laptop and Linux-hostile laptops. People choosing Linux end up disgusted with the poor hardware support. On the other hand, I buy laptops with perfect linux support (e.g. stable suspend to disk since 1998), but most Linux users have no idea how to proceed. Even computers sold with Linux preinstalled often fail to have perfect hardware support.

So if you are looking for perfect hardware support, Mac is the easy option. It even beats Windows.

remember that when Ubuntu started they did not have any KDE support. Kubuntu started off as a community fork to replace GNOME with KDE and it was popular enough for Canonical to put some resources into supporting it.

> I think that is unfair. The KDE project have a solid vision for their technology

Maybe you could elaborate?
In quite a few occasions the KDE project seemed to be about "developers want to have fun": nothing bad with this, this is Free software after all, but is-this the "solid vision" you're talking about?

Gnome3 at least tries to work with its users. That can't be said about KDE.

I think they've drifted way too far into Plasma-land to care about worldly matters anymore.

"BTW, in retrospect, it seems that his 6-month rotation to the bzr team was just a trial run to see if Kubuntu can survive without him. I guess the Kubuntu guys did well :)"

It's unrelated but that it managed without me for 11.10 is a good sign for the future

"P.S. Jonathan, thanks for the Irn-Bru you shared with me :)"

You're welcome, plenty more of that here in Scotland :)

Surely it's more effective to just delete that sort of comment - the poster clearly isn't going to listen to reasoned objections and others shouldn't have to read it.

I think your info is outdated. GNOME Shell does unredirection for full screen games now. I don't think there is a current benchmark that shows a slowdown in performance.

Perhaps but it becomes harder to sell to higher management....