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Shuttleworth's Commitment to Kubuntu and KDE
An anonymous reader writes "The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is in full momentum this week and Kubuntu has been prominent throughout. In his opening remarks at the start of the conference Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was now using Kubuntu on his desktop machine and said he wanted Kubuntu to move to a first class distribution within the Ubuntu community. Free CDs for Kubuntu through shipit should be available for the next release if the planned Live CD Installer removes the need for a separate install CD."
Slack still ships with KDE as main desktop, if you use X anyway.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
There's still Mandriva, Knoppix and surely some more. And don't forget that a lot of distributions are not KDE- or GNOME-centric
I hate all sigs, mine included.
Few days ago SUN abandoned its gnome based Java Desktop failure.
It did nothing of the sort! Sun Microsystems is putting *more* money and effort into GNOME now. The problem was that JDS was rapidly turning into a fork of GNOME. In an incredibly rare burst of cluefulness, Sun realised this, and understood the solution: it needed to get the thousands of patches it created to build JDS (including those to make it run on OpenSolaris) into GNOME CVS and bring it back to being just a branded GNOME... instead of maintaining an increasingly forked version. It was also apparent that Novell was pushing their vision of GNOME directly into the upstream CVS while Sun was busy trying to make the downstream JDS into their vision (and since CVS feeds JDS... well, you see the problem). Hence the major reshuffle, reorganisation and opening up of the JDS process, which you stupidly label as "abandonment".
Far from abandoning JDS, Sun demonstrated that, despite its manifest idiocy in most things, it really understood the problem and the action needed to fix it. A quite remarkable breakthrough for a firm renowned for its open source witlessness. Now, if only they'd shown half as much sense over the CDDL... but that's another subject.
P.S. Stop reading dot.kde.org -- those idiots are full of shit.
Gnome people, this is not the time to freak out. Just because Mark is using KDE as his desktop and he wants to put more resources into KDE doesn't mean that the Gnome side of Ubuntu is going to suffer. There could be many reasons for his new found interest in Kubuntu.
1.From the beginning it seems that Mark felt a little guilty that he had to pick one desktop to really do well. I know a lot of people think "just do one thing and do it well" is an admirable philosophy, but in the GNU world that is the path to weakness. The Linux Desktop is chaos and unless you want to spend enough to harness that chaos you HAVE to make some big decisions like that. When he first started with Ubuntu, he had no idea how successful it was going to be. He had not idea if the whole thing would be a waste of money, or that no one would care. But now that Ubuntu is making a huge splash in the Linux world and is making noise across the globe Mark has decided that he is willing to commit more of his resources to the entire Ubuntu project. He set up the Ubuntu foundation and gave it $10 million to begin with. So a new commitment to KDE and Kubuntu DOES NOT MEAN THAT UBUNTU WILL HAVE LESS, just that probably he will be willing to give more overall to help the KDE side as well.
2.Despite its relative popularity, the Kubuntu side of the project has not had nearly the resources the other side has gotten so far. The Kubuntu maintainer- Jonathan Riddell - did a lot of the work in its free time. At first he was only given a smallish contract at the end of releases to help get them in better shape. I bet that if Mark is serious about Kubuntu it will finally have a full time developer (if that is not already the case).
3.A big goal of the entire Ubuntu project for Mark is his Edubuntu side project. Well in all honesty Kubuntu might be a better fit for that project than Ubuntu for a few reasons: the The KDE Edutainment Project is the single best educational software on the GNU desktop and is far more developed than anything on the Gnome side. Plus KDE uses less RAM (this is my own opinion) so it might be a better fit for the older computers that many schools might have today. Gnome hates to have less than 256mb, and you can't build a user friendly desktop around XFCE (and it would probably take less resources to make Kubuntu better than to fix all of Gnome's RAM problems single handily). So a better KDE is better for the Kubuntu project.
4.The entire Ubuntu community has been trying better to make the KDE side seem like an equal ever since it was announced. On the Official Forums we have separated KDE and Gnome areas for the Breezy release, and beyond that a forum independent forum was made by a third party for Kubuntu. So in some ways Mark is just catching up to the rest of the community.
The last thing any Gnome fan and Ubuntu user needs to think is that "the sky is falling." This is a GOOD thing for you Gnome fans. Why? A better Kubuntu will bring more people to the distro and that could help build the overall community. A better Kubuntu will help establish the entire project as THE Desktop Linux which would help with gaining support of third party application makers that won't release for anything not called Red Hat. A better Kubuntu shows that Mark is becoming even more devoted to the project, and considering the man makes more off of investments than the entire Linux service industry more of his support means that the entire project is is better shape. Finally, a better Kubuntu means that there is more choice in the community and that the entire project is maturing. Its a good time to be a Desktop Linux user.
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