taking Unity to the next level

[Scott Kitterman]

On Monday, March 04, 2013 03:35:42 PM Ted Gould wrote:
> On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 15:35 -0500, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> 
> +AD4 Projecting out a year or two, I'm personally starting to run short of
> reasons +AD4 why a non-Unity desktop flavor of Ubuntu makes sense as a
> value proposition.  I +AD4 can probably build a current KDE +- Debian
> Wheezy derivative with less work +AD4 than it'll take to continue to
> maintain anything similar withing Ubuntu.
> 
> 
> For some derivatives that may be the case, but it would seem for Kubuntu
> specifically Canonical now has vested interest in keeping the Qt stack
> working really well and will start to pick up work that has been done by
> Kubuntu-devs previously free'ing time to working other more KDE specific
> stuff.  I don't know, seems like a golden time for Kubuntu to me.

Canonical has historically patched things very heavily and without community 
pressure not done a great job of getting stuff upstream.  Personally, I don't 
view increased Canonical involvement as a likely net win.  I expect we'll end 
up spending more time debugging subtle incompatibilities than we save.  
Historically, Qt4 was mostly sync'ed from Debian.

Although the right people haven't been online to ask since this latest 
bombshell got dropped, I'm not anticipating a great deal of enthusiasm from 
Kwin upstream for the idea of supporting a distro unique backend.

It seems like we're totally screwed to me, but then it may just be that I'm 
jaded from several major pronouncements that are completely changing the 
character of what Ubuntu is.

Scott K