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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.
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
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.
Ubuntu: combining the inflexibility of Mac with the hardware support mess of Windows.
Makes you wonder if this thing will ever get popular with mainstream users...
I am not really here right now.
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 could use debian.
You could use Ubuntu.
Kubuntu is not the only way to get KDE on Ubuntu. There are also full, standard and minimal KDE packages available to any Ubuntu variant from the standard repositories. Just like the equivalent Debian packages, you get a standard desktop without all the Kubuntu customisations. The same applies to Xfce and LXDE, which are also available in vanilla forms without the Xubuntu or Lubuntu tweaks or alternative packages.
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.