Kubuntu a dist in crisis?

[Mark Greenwood]

On Saturday 24 Oct 2009 09:28:14 O. Sinclair wrote:
> http://www.itnewstoday.com/?p=1032
> 
> Read - do you agree? To some extent I do, at least on bugs not being 
> attended to even if they are serious.
> 
> And no, am not a coder so can not do much to assist there. And yes, 
> still with Kubuntu and doing what I can to spread it.
> 
> Sinclair
> 
> 
Hmm. The guy seems to have an axe to grind, mostly in the areas of 'custom themes'. Crikey, if he's that concerned about how it looks he should paint his computer pink and only use it when sitting in a Ferrari. Being disingenuous, I could point out that Gnome needs custom themes and icon sets to stop it from looking like a toy computer from the 90's. KDE4 needs no such facelift.

I agree that 9.04 has not been great. I've been using every ppa and backport repository I can find just to get a useable desktop. I think it's an interesting discussion as to whether this is Kubuntu's fault. KDE4 was nowhere near ready to be used as an everyday system when 9.04 came out. With KDE 4.3.2 it's just about getting there. So I think Kubuntu (and everybody else, it has to be said) were too hasty in switching to KDE4. But had they not done so, who would have found the bugs and reported them back to KDE? The magic elves? Linux is permanent beta software; if you want stability stick with what you've got.

On the other hand, I was too hasty in upgrading my machine. I was seduced by the eye-candy and the idea of a new toy to play with and chose to ignore the fact that KDE4 was cutting edge (which is engineering for "new, untested, and doesn't work"). Mea culpa, as I think they say in far-off places.

It's not only Kubuntu that has this problem. I also use Mandriva, and their previous release - 2009.0 with KDE4.0 - was as atrocious, if not worse, than early Jaunty releases. This followed hot on the heels of what I regard as the best Linux release ever - Mandriva 2008.1, which had KDE 3.5. The similarity to the change between Intrepid and Jaunty is uncanny. 

I personally think that, away from the KDE issues, Kubuntu is improving. Compared to other distros I've used, everything in Jaunty feels very integrated. It looks and feels like a very polished OS. Once KDE 4 is "finished", Kubuntu will be a fine system. And when that happens I am going to seal up the CD-Rom drive so that I can never upgrade again :)

I put this one down to experience. Having gone through the last 12 months I kind of wish I'd seen the signs and stuck with my nice stable KDE3 based systems until KDE4 reached maturity. The fact that I didn't has caused me some grief, but I'm not going to complain about it, rather I'm going to continue to report bugs and help the community in any way I can to bring the distant nirvana of stability closer.

Mark