Updating from 8.04 LTS -- incrementally or jump or not at all?

[Score Kitterman]

Pastor JW <pastor_jw at the-inner-circle.org> wrote:
...
>Best choice, however what you would need to do is first load gnome then
>boot 
>into that, do the upgrade to the next LTS (10.04) which should work
>flawlessly 
>as they made that Gnome junk work.  They do seem to think of KDE as a
>red 
>headed stepchild but it really is the ONLY Ubuntu that works!!  Once
>done with 
>the upgrade, reboot into KDE and just do the normal updates. 
...

Virtually none of this is accurate.

There is virtually no chance that installing Ubuntu (Gnome) and upgrading from within it is more likely to be successful. The fiddly bits of upgrading are handled by update-manager's back end which is used regardless of the active desktop.

The decision to not make Kubuntu Hardy an LTS was a reasonable one for a variety of reasons.  Just to pick one example, I had to do some extremely awful hacks to get Guidance Display Manager to work at all with the X stack shipped in Hardy.  8.04 was very bad timing from a KDE perspective for an LTS.

Coordination between Ubuntu and Kubuntu has improved considerably over the last several years. Kubuntu is primarily a community driven project. Personally, I prefer it as this gives us a lot more control over the project. Continued inflammatory language about *-headed step children won't make more engineering resources appear and really mis-characterizes the situation.

Scott K