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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."
When you've shot yourself in both legs... you're out of legs... Nice going Canonical.
From what I remember from Kubuntu, most of their tweaks to KDE just make it inferior to the vanilla version (for instance: you need to click the tabs in the launcher menu instead of just mousing over them, which is unpleasant). Is there any reason to use Kubuntu instead of just about any other KDE based distro?
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.
Summation 2
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?
It does make business sense to drop financial support for Kubuntu when you think about it. Ubuntu has been around for 7 years and Canonical still has yet to make a profit, so the purse strings undoubtedly have to be tightened so that the focus of attention can be put towards things that are more likely to succeed. It's not like they took Kubuntu seriously anyway - it was generally one of the least polished KDE distros available (though it has been getting better).
Having said that I think Ubuntu is mostly doomed anyway - even with this new tablet/TV angle Shuttleworth wants to get into, the fact he hasn't managed to expand Ubuntu's marketshare via OEMs preinstalling it on machines (with some rare exceptions) kinda tells me he is either really optimistic or really stupid. Red Hat gave up on the desktop and, but then again Red Hat never had Unity and disappearing global menus. Yeah, I'm sure that's what's gonna fix things to make Linux more appealing for mainstream users. :)
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
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!!
Drop support for Ubuntu?
Agreed.
While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere, once they're accustomed to it, they can migrate out to other options if they feel they want to. Funding a parallel-but-different version is just encouraging the confusion. If there's one thing Linux suffers from in the eyes of the newcomer, it's too much choice, leading to confusion, subsequent frustration (with support) and returning to their hated-but-known Windows.
If we want cohesive desktop/apps then this is a reasonable move to make.
(I'm no fan of Ubuntu Unity, but I still use Ubuntu + Fluxbox instead :) )
Why not give Xubuntu a shot? Might be less of a headache. I just migrated to it from Mandriva.
Since everybody seems to concur that Kubuntu's KDE is pretty bad, which one's actually better? I'd welcome suggestions.
try lubuntu - 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)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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?
While Ubuntu might have some issues that people are going to moan loudly about, remember, it's first job is to bring people into the Linux sphere...
I assure you that for most people, being brought into Gnome is just going to send them right back to Windows.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
This has very little to do with KDE or the quality of KDE. I think Canonical simply sees too many people migrate from Unity to KDE so they distance themselves since it's not where they want to go.
I'll follow KDE to another distribution but I already have Ubuntu ppa's installed to automatically upgrade KDE to the latest stable versions so I don't know what the big deal is. When Canonical starts to actively block inclusion of packages like kde-desktop then I'll start to worry. In the worst case scenario I have a few hundred MB of worthless Unity/Gnome crap on my disk. I'll live.
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for KDE.
Not at all, KDE has a huge presence in Europe, especially Germany, which by itself is enough to ensure it continues on happily forever. On the contrary, Ubuntu getting its clumsy claws out of the standard KDE package is no doubt the best thing that ever happened to KDE on Ubuntu.
But I'm still installing Debian stable :-)
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Me too. I think the Kubuntu developers did some great work pushing the envelope on what KDE can do on the desktop and netbook, and a lot of their work has appeared upstream. Kudos to Jonathan Riddell and the other Kubuntu devs! Personally, though, I needed stability more than shiny new features so I switched to Debian (ironically) unstable. Not only does it offer a more stable desktop experience with KDE 4.6 than does Kubuntu, but because its a rolling release distribution the packages are usually fresher than the latest Ubuntu release and I haven't had to reinstall in over a year. Hopefully now we will have more manpower to work on stable, vanilla KDE 4.7 and 4.8 on Debian.
As for Ubuntu, I now have zero reasons to install it.
I don't; I do install Enlightenment though :-) But yeah, I don't get why people, on slashdot of all places, seem so mortified when an OS default setting gets changed - as though they're not only using the defaults, but don't know how to change them other than by switching distro...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Actually, no, they didn't. It says they were closing in on that point - and since then, they've lost the Dell OEM netbook market.
The reason for the headcount is financial. If they were profitable, there'd really be no reason to cut one of the distro and help stem the flow of people abandoning Ubuntu. The fact is that every product they've announced since that article has been a dud - their music store (turns out it's not even theirs), their initial cloud offering (again not theirs - just a rebandged Amazon deal), the android execution environment (abandoned), tablets (abandoned), cell phones (abandoned), and the latest fiasco - UbuntuTV (code ripped from samygo.tv that anyone can use to install any linux distro on samsung tvs) - announced at the same show where Lenovo was showing off 55" Android Ice Cream Sandwich TVs with facial and speech recognition, remote with motion and multi-touch sensors, etc.
Expect more cuts.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Me too. I think the Kubuntu developers did some great work pushing the envelope on what KDE can do on the desktop and netbook, and a lot of their work has appeared upstream. Kudos to Jonathan Riddell and the other Kubuntu devs! Personally, though, I needed stability more than shiny new features so I switched to Debian (ironically) unstable. Not only does it offer a more stable desktop experience with KDE 4.6 than does Kubuntu, but because its a rolling release distribution the packages are usually fresher than the latest Ubuntu release and I haven't had to reinstall in over a year. Hopefully now we will have more manpower to work on stable, vanilla KDE 4.7 and 4.8 on Debian.
As for Ubuntu, I now have zero reasons to install it.
You may have zero reasons to install, but it made a great deal of sense to many people I would point at a distro. Yes, KDE 4 is craploads better than Gnome [23]. Really.
However, as much as I love debian, I am not pointing raw users at a distro that expects the users to be able to deal with massive breakage when certain libs and so on are updated, and yes, that shit happens all the time in unstable. Hence the name. So now I have to point them at ubuntu, maybe suggest they install kubuntu-desktop and hope it isn't broken now, or just leave them with Unity.
Either way, debian unstable does not want a crapload of kubuntu refugees, trust me, no one will enjoy that.
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 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, 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.