Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu [LWN.net]

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 4:34 UTC (Tue) by realnc (guest, #60393)
Parent article: Canonical pulls funding from Kubuntu

Bah. Not a success? Are you guys serious? Just rename "Kubuntu" to "Ubuntu" and the current "Ubuntu" to "Gubuntu". Wanna bet it will be a success then?

Of course Kubuntu couldn't be a success. It was a second-class citizen to begin with. The name itself suggests that to whoever looks at it. If Canonical really wanted it to succeed, they wouldn't have put it in the corner, on another domain with another name and thus making it look like some inferior spin-off product rather than the real thing.

You're responsible for killing it (meaning Canonical, not you personally.)

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Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 5:25 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (11 responses)

I agree, if it had been a login option 'login GNOME' 'login KDE' on equal footing, then you could call one a failure if nobody used it.

but to force it to be a second class citizen, not supported in LTS releases (although I think they changed that with the last LTS release, or possibly the one before that), is it any surprise it wasn't that popular?

I wonder what they would have defined 'success' to be?

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 5:39 UTC (Tue) by andrewsomething (guest, #53527) [Link] (4 responses)

I think Kubuntu is probably one of the biggest successes for the Ubuntu *project*, just not financially for Canonical. That success is based on the work of the community. I'm not a KDE user, but have often been tempted to switch simply due to the strong community around Kubuntu.

While Jonathan has done great work, for better or worse, he was always the only full-time Canonical employee working on Kubuntu. If you've liked using Kubuntu in the past, there is no reason for you to stop using it now. I know everyone wants to get their shots in at Canonical, but it frankly seems a little insulting to all the community members that put in so much effort creating Kubuntu.

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 8:32 UTC (Tue) by jonobacon (guest, #54449) [Link] (3 responses)

I agree: I think Kubuntu (as well as Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Lubuntu) are testament to the success of not only those respective communities, but the wider Ubuntu family.

I personally don't see the Kubuntu project going anywhere anytime soon: lets hope that this press will encourage more people to participate in the project.

More information is at http://www.kubuntu.org

Jono

What fuiture for Kubuntu?

Posted Feb 7, 2012 8:47 UTC (Tue) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (2 responses)

Jono, are you a Kubuntu user? Do you see a future in Kubuntu? Or should I start switching to something else (Debian comes to mind)?

What fuiture for Kubuntu?

Posted Feb 7, 2012 16:00 UTC (Tue) by jonobacon (guest, #54449) [Link] (1 responses)

Yikes! What I said came out wrong!

When I say "I personally don't see the Kubuntu project going anywhere anytime soon" I mean that I don't see the project shutting up shop and stopping and not that the project has no direction.

Apologies for the lack of clarity!

Jono

What fuiture for Kubuntu?

Posted Feb 7, 2012 18:44 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Good catch :)

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 6:17 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

Of course, doing something as goofy as giving the installed system two completely different desktops and sets of software by default would have just spelled the death of Ubuntu, not just Kubuntu.

Too often the Linux crowd forgets the important of "polish," which among other things means not forcing the user to pick between two different ways of doing the same thing.

Whether KDE is better than GNOME is significantly less relevant in the grand scheme of things. Marketing and how the image is projected is significantly more important. "Here's the one thing we did and here's how freaking awesome it is and hot damn do you need to try this out" is significantly more powerful than "meh, do whatever you want, choice and stuff, we're open and that's neat and you should try one of the things we couldn't make up our own minds about."

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 12:54 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Would you mind not labelling large groups of people ("the Linux crowd") and tagging them all with some opinion that you've come up with? I don't know if you read the KDE blogs, but it actually is all about "how freaking awesome it is and hot damn do you need to try this out", and we all know what that attitude has done for the project's reputation.

Those of us who actually use stuff like Kubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions are aware of the problem that a lot of active development focuses on making yet more stuff instead of finishing the existing stuff off. Before I became tired of doing so (and before KDE 3 was thrown overboard) I filed a few bugs on various things, and years later I still get e-mails from the paper-trail around those still unfixed bugs, presumably rebased into a KDE 4 existence.

I've already ranted about Kubuntu and its second-class treatment, notably that the "LTS" aspect of the version I run is only partially supported - it's like a car manufacturer not offering the full warranty on the engine - and although the decision to not support KDE 3 after most of the developers abandoned it seems completely rational, such decisions only serve to undermine the justification for the distribution's existence.

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 8, 2012 15:02 UTC (Wed) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link] (1 responses)

If you want "polish" and less choice, may I suggest that there's a company in Redmond whose products you should take a look at?

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 8, 2012 18:28 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I want to buy it, not rent it, sorry. Otherwise it's pretty good choice, actually.

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 14:48 UTC (Tue) by maco (guest, #53641) [Link]

If I remember right, Kubuntu was an LTS for 6.06, just like Ubuntu. For 8.04 it wasn't due to the KDE transition going on at the time (old unsupported KDE3 or new unstable KDE4), but it resumed its LTS status for 10.04 and 12.04.

Of course... Only that from the very beginning

Posted Feb 7, 2012 16:45 UTC (Tue) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link]

Canonical's stand from the very beginning has been to reduce user's confusion at having too many option by providing sane defaults. Yes, even if those sane defaults are chosen by insane people ;-)
I found it somewhat contradictory they funded Kubuntu to begin with, and tought it'd be obvious that in the end they would choose one of the environments, leaving the other to be community maintained (as countless others).
And yes, I was right all along! ☺

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 8:25 UTC (Tue) by jonobacon (guest, #54449) [Link]

Not really.

Canonical and the wider Ubuntu project has always encouraged community flavors. Kubuntu has always been a community flavor, it was just that Canonical also provided some additional investment in sponsoring Jonathan to work on it.

As such, it is not a second-class citizen; it is a community-driven flavor. We have always had a variety of flavors grow up around the Ubuntu project; I call it "diversity" as opposed to "second-class".

Jono

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 8, 2012 13:22 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> You're responsible for killing it (meaning Canonical, not you personally.)

Ubuntu should have never funded a Kubuntu developer and infrastructure in the first place to avoid this type of comments.

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 11, 2012 3:32 UTC (Sat) by vachi (guest, #67512) [Link]

Me too post, but I can't resist...

Why do many people vehemently criticize a company who tried to do good thing but eventually not very successful at doing it. At least they tried.