Kubuntu 12.04 to be Supported for 5 Years

[Posted March 1, 2012 by jake]

The Kubuntu project has announced that the 12.04 LTS version of the KDE Ubuntu flavor will be supported for five years. "Kubuntu has always been and always will be a community made project. The Kubuntu Council and community of developers would like to reaffirm their [commitment] to provide the same level of support for Kubuntu 12.04 as in previous releases, and to ensure that Canonical's staffing constraints will not affect the level and quality of support that Kubuntu offers to users. Our 11.10 release was also made without a staff member from Canonical and our future ones will be as well. The Kubuntu contributor community is dedicated to the project and will continue to support and release the latest KDE Software along with Kubuntu every six months."

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Posted Mar 2, 2012 9:24 UTC (Fri) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

Wonderful news! I was thinking what to put on my new laptop and you have won Kubuntu. :)

Kubuntu 12.04 to be Supported for 5 Years

Posted Mar 2, 2012 9:44 UTC (Fri) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

Oh no, now I don't have an excuse not to update one of my machines still running Kubuntu 10.04 LTS next month. Just kidding, welcome news of course.

Depends on upstream

Posted Mar 2, 2012 19:34 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

So has upstream KDE also promised to support this KDE version for five years? Or if not that exact version, at least a version compatible with it and without major user interface changes. If the KDE4 to KDE5 transition is anything like the KDE3 to KDE4 transition, then Kubuntu could be in a sticky situation a few years from now trying to offer long-term support for an older KDE version when the upstream project has moved on to something radically different and not fully backwards-compatible. Likewise, does a five year support window exist for Qt?

Depends on upstream

Posted Mar 2, 2012 20:48 UTC (Fri) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

Well, I guess this is just a declaration of intention. How could Kubuntu promise anything binding? I don't think Kubuntu is any kind of legal entity that could offer any contractual bindings. Canonical is, but I understood they are just about to end such offer.

So if the community survives 5 years and they don't want to ruin their reputation they probably try to fulfill their promise in one way or the other. But as a user you can't really be sure that all this will happen.

Sounds unsure? Well, future is unsure. And even in relationships where much more $$$ is involved than in using Kubuntu legally binding contracts did not always help. Think of Enron, Lehman Brothers. Even market leaders can completely disappear within 5 years. I think SUSE promises 10 years of support for their enterprise product. Well, if they still exist in 10 years, they probably do it. But as a customer you can't really be sure they will still be around, even if you have their contract in your safe.

Of course you could argue that promising anything for 5 years involves a high risk of ruining their reputation, because even if they are still around they might have a hard time to fulfill their promises because of the external factors like the upstreams you mention. They just seem to desperately want to attract cooperate users, and 10 years of XP have set a pretty bad standard. (At least from the techie point of view who wants things to move forward)

Depends on upstream

Posted Mar 2, 2012 21:26 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

Of course, I didn't mean legally binding (even Canonical's support period is just a promise and is not binding, unless you have a contract with them). But legalese aside, it's important to know whether the support period has widespread support from the people who matter, which must include the upstream maintainers. (While other components such as the kernel don't support a single version upstream for five years, they do have a strong commitment to backwards compatibility; that is not true for KDE across major releases.)

Talk is cheap and anyone can announce a release with 'support' for any time period they care to name; but to decide whether to rely on that, you have to look at how realistic it is. That becomes more, not less, important when there is no legally binding obligation that the support period means anything.

Depends on upstream

Posted Mar 3, 2012 21:01 UTC (Sat) by Sho (subscriber, #8956) [Link]

> If the KDE4 to KDE5 transition is anything like the KDE3 to KDE4 transition

FWIW, we (at KDE.org) currently have no plans that are anything like the KDE3 to KDE4 transition.

On the library side, KDE Platform v5 is mostly about modularizing, cleaning and upstreaming things to Qt, with an overall intent to remain source-compatible (and the latter is also true for Qt 5). On the desktop side, some modernization of the Plasma libraries and porting to new UI technologies in Qt is planned (though some of that has already started to appear in 4.8), but no major interface changes.

In terms of the development process, we're keen to avoid disrupting the desktop and application development cycles this time. Development of the KDE Platform v5 libraries has already been going on for a while, and the v4 libraries are in maintenance-only mode. In the meantime, though, the desktop and applications continue their six-month timed release schedule uninterrupted, and will only start porting to the v5 libraries when they are ready.

So, we have learned. Though we certainly also had reasons for doing things the way we did them last time (such as having our hands forced by the major ways in which Qt 4 had changed, turning porting efforts into rewriting efforts).