Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

[Tim Edwards]

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012, at 12:10 PM, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> 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.

+1 to all this. IMHO there was a massive failure in communication around
the early 4 releases which could've been avoided by simply adding the
words 'beta' and 'alpha', i.e. "KDE 4.0 alpha", "KDE 4.1 alpha", "KDE
4.2 beta" up to maybe "KDE 4.4".

Tim