Interesting read about the future of Ubuntu

[Boggess Rod]

>Kubuntu is a very poor effort at sticking KDE on Ubuntu - Ubuntu's core
>effort is very much in Gnome.
>
>--
>Avi

As I am becoming painfully aware as I attempt to learn this desktop on
my newly formatted hard drive. Grr. There's nothing more frustrating
than knowing exactly where everything is, only to discover that nothing
works the way it's supposed to.

First round of additional installations and the package kit dies a
painful death. Hmmm. Did you know that you can't reinstall or verify
install on the GUI package kit? I don't know whether this is possible on
GNOME, either, but only because IT NEVER CRASHED!

Gotta love this, it wants to install a bunch of debugging libraries to
generate the bug report. How? Using package kit. Doh! Managed to keep
that running long enough to build the bug report, but only then does it
tell me I have to have an account on Kubuntu's bug report system! DOH!

I don't think I'm gonna stay with KDE much longer. I love development
with Qt. Changing to that other conversation about meritocracy vs.
democracy vs. autocracy, I find the Gtk developers (and most other linux
dev groups) have exactly the same attitude as Canonical. Not to say that
they're wrong, but I don't think meritocracy is quite the problem.

I remember a conversation with the Gtk group about how early (compiler)
warnings about mis-cast types is advantageous. This is the 21st century,
after all. The reply was something like this: If you don't like it,
create your own version of Gtk+. If it becomes more popular, then people
will start using your version instead of this version. Eventually, yours
will displace this one and you can do it however you want.

Mind you, I know the reply is accurate. And if this were a reply to a
contentious or haughty I-know-better-than-you discussion, the attitude
would have been warranted. But, notice that there's no discussion of
merit here. Just an All-your-interface-development-are-belong-to-us
attitude. It's not that Shuttleworth's statement is incorrect. It isn't.
(It's not a democracy the way he runs it, it's a meritocracy in the same
sense that the Gtk+ development team is a meritocracy.) It's not that he
should do things differently. It's not like anyone else anywhere in
Linux does things differently. They don't. But he could have been
friendlier in his reply. He could have given meritorious reasons or
practical reasons for his and his team's decisions. (Of course, I too
get frustrated, and I'm not naive enough to believe that everything I
say will be understood the way I intended, so I can forgive both
statements on that basis.) But if you're a Gate's conspiracy theorist,
it does lend merit to the notion that this is just how business is done
in software development, not part of some grand world-domination
conspiracy.

Anyone on here ever just download the Kubuntu-Desktop package to an
Ubuntu install? I'm wondering if I wouldn't be better off reformatting
and going that route.