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Canonical Pulls Kubuntu Personnel Funding
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."
As a Linux user, I think this is a great business move on the part of canonical.. It is very important that we have choice software... but for Linux to success, the companies backing need to have a focus.
Every time the subject of Ubuntu comes up on Slashdot I see a slew of comments complaining about how bad Unity is and what they've done to Gnome and how they're jumping ship for Mint I think "OK, so why not just use Kubuntu instead?", but now they've dropping funding for Kubuntu it looks like even more people will be moving over to Mint too.
I only update to the LTS versions of Kubuntu but if Precise is going to be the last one then why bother? Mint 12 came out a few days ago so maybe I'll just move over to that instead.
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I'm not really sure that Unity is a tablet UI. They've replaced a menu with a search box, do tablet UIs normally involve more typing and less pointing?
typing on an onscreen keyboard is easier to find stuff vs multiple menus layers if you've got a low resolution screen with a finger sized pointer.
In that context Unity is a perfectly acceptable UI for touch screen devices. Doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible interface for traditional keyboard/mouse input.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
The New Ubuntu is becoming increasingly less flexible. In Lucid 10.04, you could place the gnome-panels anywhere you wished. You could add icons and and even short cuts to scripts to the panel, and there were a whole bunch of panel applets that you could add.
Now, Ubuntu's new layout with a top panel and left launcher bar is so inflexible that you're stuck with what they give you. You could go with installing classic gnome shell, and/or install ccsm and turn unity off..... but if you do, look out, because when you copy files, don't even dare minimize the File Operations Dialogue, coz it will be gone forever. It;s almost as though Ubuntu punishes you for not using the Unity interface. Oh and forget mentioning this in any of their forums, because if you even imply that you don't like unity, prepare for some snooty feedback.
But the engine below the interface is pretty fantastic. I fell in love with Ubuntu from Lucid, because everything worked, and it was so flexible and customizable, and that suited my indecisive personality... now things are very mac-like... where everything works perfectly, but sort of comes with a sticker saying, don't change it too much, coz it's perfect the way it is!!
I hear that. The version mish-mash in Debian following every KDE upstream release was atrocious - mind you, that was several years ago, as I too, eventually jumped ship to Kubuntu. Things were better there, but the overall lack of polish, probably stemming from KDE's relatively low priority in the the greater scheme of all things Ubuntu made me eventually leave for OpenSUSE. I'm still using it and it remains a very nice distro for KDE fans.
Heh, this is the exact reason I've switched in other direction: from Ubuntu to Debian. After two failed upgrades to 11.10 (both resulted in unbootable system that requires tweaking to bring it back and then left me without true-and-tested classic GNOME desktop, I've happily switched to Debian which now provides some of the best parts Ubuntu developed in recent years. Debian 6 reminds me Ubuntu 8.04 which IMO was the best Ubuntu distribution ever released (in terms of stability).
Why not give Xubuntu a shot? Might be less of a headache. I just migrated to it from Mandriva.
For me, Ubuntu stops existing right now. Oh the whole, I have had less breakage with Debian Sid, supposedly "unstable", and Canonical has just managed to push me over the tipping point: I'm going back to Debian (testing) on my primary machine as I should have done months ago. I am awfully tired of having to put up with Gnome bad idea of the week bogosity while waiting for Ubuntu to fix their broken, untested KDE packaging.
It stopped being amusing a long time ago. There is one reason, and one reason only that there is Ubuntu on this workstation: it came that way. Henceforth, Ubuntu will just be a way to establish which drivers (if any) the OEM configured, then *wipe* *wipe* install, install, there we go, blessed relief, it's not a hobby project any more.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?