Kubuntu is not for beginners?

[Steve Riley]

On 2013-07-17 22:38:50 Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>
> On Wednesday, July 17, 2013 06:44:23 PM Steve Riley wrote:
> > On 2013-07-17 20:38:33 Clay Weber <clay at claydoh.com> wrote:
> > > On Thursday, July 18, 2013 02:22:33 AM Volkan Gezer wrote:
> > > > Do you know what the reason of not being in Beginner category for
> > > > Kubuntu
> > > > is?
> > > 
> > > Are we *supposed* to be a beginner distro?
> > 
> > I hope not. The world has enough "beginner" distros. Face it: Linux in
> > general will not appear to the typical beginner audience, frequently
> > characterized as one's grandmother or elderly parent. Many of us want a
> > reasonably advanced and sophisticated distro that we can bend to our will
> > without having to completely to Arch or Gentoo. Kubuntu fills this role
> > nicely, IMHO.
> 
> I'm really not sure what this entire discussion is about.  We want Kubuntu to 
> be as widely useful as we can manage and that means making it easy for people 
> that are new.  "For beginners" is mostly, IMO, about default install.  Non-
> beginners are quite capable of installing other stuff they want.  That's where 
> the breadth of the Debian archive that is 75% sync'ed into Ubuntu unmodified 
> really pays off.
> 
> Yes, let's make it easy for people that want easy, but that doesn't mean other 
> interests are precluded.  We aren't going to remove options or dumb things 
> down, but you don't have to do that to make it easy.


Probably this part:

> remove options or dumb things down

is often associated with making this easier for newbies. The industry has seen a lot of this lately, and I'm not convinced that it actually succeeds at the goal of drawing in large numbers of new users.

I wasn't implying that Kubuntu should abandon whole classes of users. Looking back, it's easy to read that into what I wrote.

...Steve