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Complaining.
by gardion on Tuesday 09/May/2006, @08:45
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I see a lot of complaints about KDE/Kubuntu so I will try and show the direction I think Mark is taking based on past actions and news articles rather then just feelings of skepticism.
1. Ubuntu started as a gnome distribution. (Probably for its predictable release cycles of every 6 months)
2. Some people wanted a kde based ubuntu distribution. One of the cheif people being Jonathan Riddell
See this link for an interview with Jonathan Ridell
(http://behindubuntu.org/interviews/JonathanRiddell/)
3. Mark Hired Jonathan to start working on Kubuntu. At that time Kubuntu was not supported with Shippit.
4. At some point Mark Shuttleworth announced that Kubuntu would be a first class distribution along with Kubuntu. Some time after Kubuntu was supported with shippit (xubuntu is not yet as far as I know). This is a significant since shippit doesn't cost us anything but it costs Mark Shuttleworht a lot. Mark I guess was impressed enough with Kubuntu to start shipping it with Shippit.
5. Some people complained on the http://www.kubuntu.de/ that Mark Shuttle worth was not giving access to some of the programmers, wanted more control and wanted ubuntu to hire more kde developers and some other general complaints. They also wanted to know what first class distribution meant. (I can't find the orgiginal article)
6. Mark sent out this announcment about the meeting at linuxtag for kubuntu and kde
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2006-April/000071.html
Basically if there is interest in the KDE community to work with Kubuntu Mark is ready to give a lot more control to KDE /Kubuntu developers even to the point of eventually letting Kubuntu have it's own release cycle (if there's enough support for it). (see the story)
7. We have the this recent announcment where Mark met with KDE and Kubuntu developers about where things can go. It seems there is some interest in the KDE community to work with Kubuntu.
A lot has been accomplished and there is a lot more to go before Kubuntu can be a real "first class" distribution but this depends not only on Mark Shuttleworth but on the KDE community as well.
Basically it seems to me that Mark is doing more and more for KDE starting from nothing when Ubuntu was first realeased. Mark seems to start small and adding support for stuff rather than starting big and taking away like Redhat did and SUSE did with KDE.
Some people in the KDE community want more support for KDE/Kubuntu. Mark seems to be doing that. The question is whether the KDE community will support those efforts or whether Mark Shuttleworth is wasting his time. It seems there are enough people interested in Kubuntu/KDE that it's probably not a wast of time.
PS. I use Ubuntu and now prefer GNOME. Before Ubuntu I actually liked KDE better. Maybe Kubuntu can make people give KDE another try. |
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Re: Complaining.
by cw on Tuesday 09/May/2006, @09:40
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> PS. I use Ubuntu and now prefer GNOME. Before Ubuntu I actually liked KDE
> better. Maybe Kubuntu can make people give KDE another try.
That's a strange and a bot twisted way of looking at things, since according to all apparencies the sole purpose of Kubuntu is making KDE users give Ubuntu a try. And since there are lots of these KDE users out there, it certainly looks like a trap. My question is whether Kubuntu is still a promotional trap (take this word lightly), or certain things have changed. Up to this point nothing has changed, strictly speaking not even Shipit, which will only be available for Kubuntu in the (admittedly near) future.
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Re: Complaining.
by Simon Edwards on Tuesday 09/May/2006, @09:48
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> That's a strange and a bot twisted way of looking at things, since according
> to all apparencies the sole purpose of Kubuntu is making KDE users give
> Ubuntu a try.
What a load of crap. Give it a rest cw. The "kubuntu is a gateway drug for Ubuntu usage" theory doesn't hold any water at all. The Gnome desktop isn't even offered as an option when installing Kubuntu.
--
Simon
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Re: Complaining.
by cw on Tuesday 09/May/2006, @10:50
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I've never said 'gateway drug', I just got carried away with this because I don't understand the Kubuntu project's role within Ubuntu, neither technically nor politically, and it seems that no one is able or willing to explain it. Of course I don't suspect a conspiracy, but I do suspect a serious lack of overall direction, and I was hoping that maybe I'm wrong.
However the most encouraging answers that I've got have been along the lines of 'be patient, the real news is secret for now'. And since I can afford being patient, I will. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Re: Complaining.
by Anonymous on Monday 29/May/2006, @07:16
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> 'be patient, the real news is secret for now'
I'm not sure, if secrecy is any good for _Open_ Source projects.
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Re: Complaining.
by gardion on Tuesday 09/May/2006, @10:14
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Actually one of the main reason I switched to Gnome was that Ubuntu made GNOME very clean on the desktop and cleaned up a lot of the menus. KDE had seemed a lot more cluttered in terms of menu items. My hope is that Kubuntu & KDE clean up a lot of the less useful menu entries and gives a much cleaner desktop to start with.
Secondly if Mark is trying to get KDE users to swtich to GNOME, then he is a fool. He is much better targeting windows users (90-95% of the destkop market) rather than kde users (<1% of the desktop market). If you look at the number 1 bug on gnome you will see that Mark is targeting windows users. He is trying to get them to swtich to Linux and using ubuntu / kubuntu as a platform for other linux distributions.
Finally you can always use Mepis a KDE/kubuntu based distribution, if you are concerned about being pushed into gnome. Mepis is definatly a KDE based distribution and it is number 4 on distro watch in the last month, scoring higher then Kubuntu.
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