Kubuntu To Be Sponsored By Blue Systems, Rather Than Canonical

JRiddell writes "Kubuntu, the KDE flavour from Ubuntu, has found a new sponsor in Blue Systems. They will be providing more resources than were available by previous sponsor Canonical. The project will remain much the same: community led, KDE focused, Ubuntu flavour. With the new independence it can branch out into new markets such as a Kubuntu Active flavour for tablets."

Comments

In Ahnold voice

[tripleevenfall]

Consider this a divorce!

"More resources than were available"

[TaoPhoenix]

Is that another way of saying that with Canonical's push to new UI front ends and Stores and stuff, that support for the KDE side languished?

The summary feels like one of those "tip of the iceberg" ones, where there's a massive lurch beneath the scenes here. Anyone know where the problems are expected to arise in this?

Re:"More resources than were available"

[Bill_the_Engineer]

More like Kubuntu now has another source of money and no longer has to adhere to any implied restrictions that Canonical may place on their money.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[idontgno]

Problems? As far as I can tell, Canonical was Kubuntu's primary problem, and finding an independent sponsor is an awesome solution.

I hope this works out. I vastly prefer KDE over that Unity abortion Canonical is trying to foist on us. I'd use Kubuntu over Ubuntu even if Kubuntu stagnated completely, but this makes avoiding Canonical's silly marketing games practical.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[metamatic]

Well, personally I was considering moving to Debian, but there really aren't that many APT-based distros with good KDE flavor.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[Tarlus]

I think it is more a result of the fact that Canonical disowned Kubuntu a couple of months ago, and the Kubuntu team needed a new host.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[cpu6502]

I quit Kubuntu when it started becoming as big a memory user as Ubuntu. I switched to Lubuntu which uses about 1/3rd as much RAM (and less hard drive thrashing).

Re:"More resources than were available"

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with Debian since v4 - finally ended with Debian 6.04. I won't go back. Not only is the installer a pain in the rump, but it's almost impossible to install the binary nVIDIA drivers on a 5 year old card even.

I went with OpenSUSE 12.1/KDE 4.6 works like a charm, AND I installed the nVIDIA drivers without a bit of a problem.

Debian's people got their egos in the way.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[nschubach]

Why not just use Debian with KDE? http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/

Are you looking for something in particular that is only available in some distro?

Re:"More resources than were available"

[hairyfeet]

I think this is wonderful news as KDE has been the saner choice as of late as far as stability, but if they are smart they will base it on Debian and NOT Ubuntu. it is pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that Canonical is floundering, trying to find a business model that will keep them alive and failing, first Netbook edition (coming waaaay past when that boat had sailed) and then trying to rip off of all people that stupid ass MSFT idea of pushing cell phone UIs on the desktop, hoping they can sell either Ubuntu TV (not a chance, Android and embedded Linux variants has that tied up) or Ubuntu smartphones (not a chance the market is too crowded as it is, its obvious it'll be owned by apple and Android) so they can expect quality to go down, bugs to go up, simply because they have ZERO real revenue stream and Shuttleworth has already said he's not sinking more of his money into Canonical.

Debian was here before Canonical and will be here in 3 years when i predict Canonical will either go cloud server OS only or close their doors. they have testing if they want to be cutting edge but IMHO basing it on stable would be the way to go, a rock solid never breaks KDE with a push towards user friendliness might be just the ticket to gain some share when MSFT shits out Win 8, aka "My God I want to be the CEO of Apple so bad it hurts!" Ballmer edition.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[ifiwereasculptor]

The installer sucks (why it stays frozen, doing exactly nothing for about 30 minutes on all my machines after copying files is a mystery), granted, but I have a working Geforce FX 5200 (from 2003) using the legacy 173 drivers from the repository. No pain at all. (Getting a Radeon HD5570 to work, on the other hand, was a bit more challenging because it requires a manually written xorg.conf.)

About the egos, I always smile when I read on distrowatch's list of cons "discussion in the mailing lists can get a bit uncultured at times". I'd call it "excessive passion", cutting the developers a slack because Debian is a colossus of a project that just shouldn't work, when you think about it. It's collaborative and pays nothing to its voluntaries, but managed to be the biggest distro (both in number of packages and, if you count its derivatives, in users), handling five branches concurrently (oldstable, stable, testing, unstable, experimental) while being a cornerstone of stability and democratically led with no major corporate sponsor.

Debian is a lot like Wikipedia. Sure, we can bash its editors for being egotistical and picky, but it's their work that gave us the biggest (and arguably the most accurate) encyclopedia ever. Flamewars are an insignificant overhead, when we look at the sheer magnitude of the result, and even if we have no interest in joining the flamefest, we should respect people devoted enough to fight for what they think is right, for free. It's what makes great projects great. The Torvalds-Tanenbaum feud also springs to mind.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[LordLucless]

I moved to KDE Mint 12 when I upgraded away from the last pre-Unity Ubuntu LTS. It's been running fine for me, but my needs are modest.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[Gavagai80]

Mint requires a re-installation/import whenever there's a new release. Kubuntu, I installed once somewhere around '07 and the upgrades every 6 months are painless. You can make an argument that Mint's approach is safer, but isn't it good to have distros for both strategies so both strategies can develop further and people who prefer each have a choice?

Re:"More resources than were available"

[unixisc]

I avoid any distros that use .rpm files as the packaging manager. Apt get and .deb is a lot more reliable, although I'd love to know what the situation is w/ PC-BSD's PBI. But w/ any distro using yumm, I just dread dependency city!

A better question would have been - why prefer Mint's KDE to that of other Ubuntu based distros, such as Comice?

Re:"More resources than were available"

[unixisc]

I fully agree w/ this. As for the GP's point - RMS still dings Debian for even offering 'non-Free' software in its repositories, so what they are doing is thankless anyway. Instead, during installation, they could, somewhere at the beginning of the installation, ask an user whether s/he wants to restrict the installation to software whose source codes are freely available, or not, and include suggestions on which ones to pick if they are in doubt. Then do the install from there. If the user chooses the 'non-Free' route, install everything that would make life easier. If the user goes the 'Free' route (gawd, I loathe this terminology), just install the ones from the archive, w/ the advisory that certain things not included are not included b'cos they are non-Free.

I can understand the 'free' vs 'non-free' argument if it was simply a question of which software to use, such as Opera vs GNOME Web, or things of that sort. But not including Wi-Fi drivers or video drivers for that reason is retarded - by doing that, the system is deliberately crippled! If network drivers are not included due to the fanaticism, it just makes it impossible to use the computer. Honestly, Debian is just shooting itself in the foot w/ this one.

Re:"More resources than were available"

[unixisc]

Unlike Unity and Metro, the KDE project accepts that different platforms have different requirements, and has a different UI for each so that they can be best tuned to the platform, w/o being constrained by design decisions of another. KDE has one UI for desktops/laptops, one for netbooks and one called Plasma Active for tablets. As a result, their desktop version has a taskbar similar to Windows 7 and prior, while Plasma Active is purely a touchscreen oriented interface.

In fact, I've not seen KDE users complain about the UIs. People who do complain about it are those who left it after the fiasco of the initial KDE 4.x releases, but from what I understand, that's been subsequently fixed in 4.7 and beyond. The other criticism is its resource requirements, which is no more than Windows, but may be too much for those trying to get there from Windows 2k or prior versions. Also, the problems that KDE had was due to the changes involved in going from Qt3 to Qt4 - they released KDE4 way before it was ready. Ideally, when KDE4.7 was what they should have released as KDE4. Hopefully, when they migrate KDE from Qt4 to Qt5, they'll make sure that there is no disruption in user experience before going ahead.

My only other beef w/ them is all those 'K' names - would really like that aspect to disappear.

What We Really Need

[macromorgan]

What we really need is a Gnome flavor of Ubuntu. Still not a fan of Unity, while Gnome 3 is starting to grow on me. Where's my Gnubuntu?

Re:What We Really Need

[mishu2065]

1) Install Ubuntu 12.04 (beta, for now)
2) Open terminal
3) sudo apt-get install gnome-panel
4) Log out and back in, selecting GNOME Classic as Desktop Environment
5) ???
6) Profit!!! Actually, there is no step 5. :)

Re:What We Really Need

[jimmy_dean]

1) Install Ubuntu 12.04 (beta, for now)

2) Open terminal

3) sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

4) Log out and back in, selecting GNOME Classic as Desktop Environment

5) ???

6) Profit!!!

Actually, there is no step 5. :)

Or rather than step 3, you can get GNOME 3 by doing "sudo apt-get install gnome-shell"

Re:What We Really Need

[lennier1]

Yes, but there are projects to repair that damage.

Re:What We Really Need

[nine-times]

Personally, I think it makes sens for distributions to begin going their own way. I don't think it's a bad idea of Ubuntu wants to say, "We're developing a Unity-based desktop OS. If you want to install KDE, be our guests. If you want to create a whole KDE-based fork, we have no objections. However, we're just going to focus on making a consistent and coherent desktop environment using Unity."

Different distributions can make different choices. Fedora might make a Gnome distribution and SUSE might make one with KDE. It might be a mistake to think that every distribution has to be all things to all people.

Good

[bacon.frankfurter]

Because Unity sucks.

Re:Good

[causality]

Because Unity sucks.

About the only things I want from a distribution are a good package manager, a good selection of available packages, and timely attention paid to security.

What comes installed by default is something I'm likely to rearrange anyway. I don't like Unity either, which is why it would be installed for all of a few minutes until I replace it with something else if I decided that Ubuntu/Kubuntu fit my criteria.

So how many Slashdotters really just stick with defaults no matter how much they like something else better? Seems like a total non-issue (and a non-complaint) to me.

Re:Good

[jawtheshark]

I don't know for other slashdotters, but I can tell you why I care about sane defaults. Support. You see, many slasdotters live in a void where there is their desktop and the rest can just suck it up. I, on the other hand, help other people with their computers.

Ubuntu, until the version 10.04 LTS, was a distribution you could take, drop on a machine, install half a dozen packages (Thunderbird, Restricted Extras, ....) and be done with it. Installation time very quick. This compared to a Windows install which can take a up to a day, including hunting for drivers, software, securing it and finally setting the GUI to sane defaults. It's a complete pain.

Now, assume just for the sake of it that I ddi default installs for my friends and family and let them figure it out, and I do my thing in my corner. First support call, I get from them will put me and Linux in a bad light (either, or... ) and I want neither. Thus, I use the default desktop in order to be able to support them! Eating your own dog food, you know.

Deviating significantly from default install, increases the initial install time and increases the risk that you forgot to change a tiny GUI setting you use. (Example from the Windows world: you work with extensions turned on, the default is off. You forgot that on you family/friends computer. Try explaining the how to turn it on and why you need it, as it now suddenly deviates from what they are used.

That's my personal problem with the whole debacle. Furthermore, there has to be said something about software quality feels. If you have sane GUI settings from the beginning, your software is perceived as higher quality. That is also very important for the normal user. That we, nerds, can change everything to our hearts desire is not important to them.

As for Unity, I hated it at first too, but the changes in 12.04 beta, improved its usability. It's not perfect, but by now I can see my mom use it. (She's on 10.04LTS) and that /is/ important to me.

Blue Systems

[Tarlus]

Given KDE's (and especially Kubuntu's) affinity for the color blue, this seems appropriate.

Blue Systems?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, who or what is Blue Systems? The only information on their website is a list of projects sponsored by them.

Re:Blue Systems?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick whois lookup shows affiliation with IT Works Unlimited GmbH & Co. KG [ http://www.itwu.de/index.html ]

Re:What a relief

[unixisc]

Mint also does KDE as one of its options. So if you've moved to Mint on one front, you can just as well switch your Kubuntu to Mint/KDE.

Excellent News!

[Wattos]

This is really awesome!

I was always a Gnome fan and Ubuntu fan. Have been using Ubuntu since Ubuntu 6.4. When Unity came out, I wanted to give it a fair shot and I did. However things like the total lack of customization and general slowness when opening dash turned me off (gnome-do + docky offer a much faster solution). I also tried gnome-shell for a bit. This is also somewhat limited in the ways you can customize it (e.g. what about 2x2 workspaces?) and general problems with graphic drivers ( I was getting hard freezes 1-3 times a day, which made it impractical)

So couple of months ago I tried KDE 4.7. I Instantly liked how it is very similar to the desktop Im used to, but also offers interesting things like plasma widgets and is very customizable. I would not want to go back to gnome again.

So now I have a choice of distributions to pick. There is the Chakra project, which is totally awesome (I tried it for a while), however, it is not yet ready for prime time (things like installing non-KDE is very cumbersome and requires a lot of time). Kubuntu on the other hand comes with the awesome packaging system from ubuntu which makes installing applications a breeze. Moreover, almost any project out there, has an ubuntu repository (if its not already in the default repositories) making it the default choice if you dont want to start compiling applications for yourself.

When I heard about Canonical dropping Kubuntu, I was worried at first that it might go under. But this development makes a very happy camper and am looking forward at the next releases of Kubuntu!

Re:Obligatory Yoda voice

[tripleevenfall]

AC, his scorn wide.