Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

[Mark Greenwood]

On 8 Feb 2012, at 11:51, Sid Boyce wrote:

> On 08/02/12 03:26, kubuntu-users-request at lists.ubuntu.com wrote:
>> ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:19:27 -0500 From: doug <dmcgarrett at optonline.net> To: kubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com Subject: Re: Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu Message-ID: <4F31955F.5070701 at optonline.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 02/07/2012 09:27 AM, Thomas K Gamble wrote:
>>> According to Ubuntu Counter (assuming theire stats are a reasonably accurate
>>> representation)
>>> 
>>> http://ubuntucounter.geekosophical.net/
>>> 
>>> Kubuntu only accounts for 2% of the various Ubuntu flavor installs.
>>> 
>>> Rather surprising, imho.
>>> 
>>> /snip/
>> I looked at Kubuntu about a year ago.  It was the absolute worst
>> rendition of KDE that I have ever seen.
>> It's no wonder nobody wants it!
>> 
>> --doug
>> 
> I use Kubuntu 11.10 on 2 x86_64 boxes, Unity 11.10 on a BeagleBoard ARM platform and Unity on 12.04 on a x86_64 laptop run from a USB stick.
> 
> I also run 3 openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 0 boxes with KDE.
> 
> Unity is not nice, to put it politely and I don't see where it's heading.
> 
> There is absolutely nothing wrong with KDE and I for one prefer it.
> 
> I know there were scathing comments when KDE4 was introduced, that was in spite of the clear warnings given by the developers that the intention was to get it out there to receive bug reports, etc.
> There was no distro that forced it on users but as usual the barbs came in spades and I'm sure they were expected.

That's not true. I was a Mandriva user at the time and KDE 4.1 was the default desktop in their 2010 release. It was buggy as hell and it was at that time I switched to Ubuntu for a year before finally switching to Kubuntu when KDE4 improved to the point where I could run it on a daily basis.

Yes the early releases were released with caveats, but in my view this was a huge mistake. A lot of Linux users like to keep up to date with the latest releases - to get up to date kernels and up to date software packages. Around that time if we wanted to do that we had no choice but to get KDE4 as well, despite it being only partially complete. KDE4 should not even have been made public unit 4.2 and even then that would have been classed as alpha software in my book. If you release a default desktop people expect it to basically work, which KDE4 didn't - this is not an unreasonable expectation. This made people angry and you know what the internet is like - angry people will write angry emails and that's what happened. And now we see the same thing happening all over again with Unity. Lessons clearly were not learned. The past two years in Linux have been the era of beta software, more so than at any time I can remember, and people are getting fed up.

Perhaps, with Kubuntu not being "commercially sponsored" any more, people will actually start to to expect less of it. I know that a lot of my criticism of it recently has been based on the fact that I expect better from a distro that is bankrolled by a billionaire. It's still to my mind the best of the KDE distros (I installed Debian wheezy yesterday and was not impressed). Perhaps we'll now see more of a community spirit around it.

Mark




> 
> There were useful bug reports and observations fed back which led to fixes and improvements, the barbs duly consigned to the waste bin where they belonged though some may have been helpful.
> The developers knew the state of the code and users were forewarned even if they didn't heed the caveats issued.
> Regards
> Sid.
> 
> -- 
> Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot,
> Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support
> Senior Staff Specialist, Cricket Coach
> Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks
> 
> 
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