Ubuntu vs Kubuntu

[Corey Burger]

On 1/19/07, Peter Whittaker <pwwnow at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 13:31 -0500, Pay Wahun wrote:
> > emphasis is placed on Ubuntu, so much that I wonder if Canonical has
> > any long-term commitment towards Kubuntu
>
> My understanding is that Shuttleworth based Ubuntu on Gnome because of
> his perception of Gnome's commitment to usability, that some KDE fans
> saw that Ubuntu was good and launched Kubuntu to get their favourite X
> environment running on their favourite distro, and that Shuttleworth has
> since switched to Kubuntu.

The primary reason for GNOME over KDE was its steady release cycle.
Ubuntu's release cycle, was and largely still is, based off the GNOME
one, down to the day.
Of course, tweaks have been made since, due to the differences between
releasing a distro and a DE.

>
> Since the sabdfl use Kubuntu, I expect there will be long-term support.
> Refer also to http://www.kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-commitment.php

This is a grave misconception. Yes, Mark uses Kubuntu on his desktop.
However, his primary work machine is his laptop, which still runs
Ubuntu.

>
> As for me, I'm still using Ubuntu despite finding more and more I
> dislike about Gnome's approach to user configuration and preferences*.
> It's more inertia than anything else for me: I've gotten use to it and I
> can live with it. But KDE beckons, oh, it beckons the cfg file hacker in
> me....
>
> For a newbie, Ubuntu may be better, because there are fewer options, the
> user experience is more choreographed/constrained (YMMV). But someone
> who really wants to explore may prefer KDE because they can configure
> everything!
>
> Either way, I think the long-term legs are there.

GNOME does a get a great deal more support from Canonical, merely
because most devs use GNOME. However, Canonical has one full time KDE
person (Jonathon Riddell) and two GNOME people (Sebastian Bacher and
Daniel Holbach).

Cheers,

Corey