Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu [LWN.net]

Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu

Posted Feb 7, 2012 6:17 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: Canonical pulls the plug on Kubuntu by dlang
Parent article: Canonical pulls funding from Kubuntu

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."

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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.