Shuttleworth's Commitment to Kubuntu and KDE 276
An anonymous reader writes "The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is in full momentum this week and Kubuntu has been prominent throughout. In his opening remarks at the start of the conference Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was now using Kubuntu on his desktop machine and said he wanted Kubuntu to move to a first class distribution within the Ubuntu community. Free CDs for Kubuntu through shipit should be available for the next release if the planned Live CD Installer removes the need for a separate install CD."
The only major KDE distro? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:KDE is dying (Score:1, Interesting)
It is a problem of GTK+ that it does not integrate proper in a KDe desktop.
KDe is not bound to Toolkits.
Intrestingly Gnome adopts all non-QT solutions as part of its own solutions portfolio. I do not mind using Evolution under KDE etc. And I am certainly not intrested in Toolkit wars. They do not matter under Windows, so why shall they matter on Linux machines.
what Ubuntu could do is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:KDE is dying (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The user should not have to care (Score:5, Interesting)
KDE's Konsole is clearly superior to GNOME's terminal app, which is achingly slow. Fedora, a GNOME-centric distribution, has recognized that fact by making Konsole the terminal app on GNOME (desktop right-click->New Terminal). And GNOME has nothing to compare to Konqueror.
Re:The user should not have to care (Score:3, Interesting)
Carrying things to an extreme, if you want true consistency for users, you shouldn't be changing font and colour settings........
But I think your suggestion about a unified control panel is the best suggestion I've heard re. unifying the "Linux desktop". Personally, I'm glad there are several Linux desktop environments, all competing with each other and rapidly improving together as a result.
A single control panel which could control at least the common elements of the most popular desktops would be a wonderful idea. I hope someone reads your suggestion and makes a serious go at it - really, this would go a huge way towards achieving the "unified Linux desktop" in the eyes of the end user.
(Getting the environments to use the same font sizes (respecting the X11 DPI values) would be another).
A common mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
But! kdelibs are LGPL!
So if you are only using KDE interfaces, you may license as anything you want!
I don't know for sure, but I think this is intentional - if you want to develop cross platform apps, then you buy a Qt license from TrollTech (Although I would argue that neither Qt nor GTK+ is right for the job - instead choose FLTK or Wx). If you want to strengthen the Linux desktop (specifically the KDE part of it), then you can license it however you like w/o paying anyone anything.
Re:ARRRG. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The user should not have to care (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't have to pay for health insurance.
Yes, you do.
Even if it's called something else, you pay.
Must-have KDE apps (Score:5, Interesting)
Mandrake, Kubuntu/Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which many must-have KDE apps have been built. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:
AmaroK music player [kde.org] -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.
K3b [k3b.org] -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.
DigiKam [sourceforge.net] -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.
Wireless Assistant [kde-apps.org] -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc
KDE Education [kde.org] -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.
Konqueror File Manager [konqueror.org] -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)
KDE Control Center [kde.org] -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)
Seamless, transparent network file access [kde.org] on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.
Kaffeine [sourceforge.net] -- The most polished FOSS movie player.
MythTV [mythtv.org] -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).
Baghira [sourceforge.net] -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.
Klik [atekon.de] -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.
KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):
Kdevelop [kdevelop.org] for syntax highlighting, application templates, and project organization.
QT designer [trolltech.com] for GUI development
Quanta [kdewebdev.org] -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced con
Re:The only major KDE distro? (Score:1, Interesting)
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Here's why:
Comparative study of various vendors' business decisions:
Redhat:
1. Adopt Gnome as the only Linux desktop
2. Loose lots of money
3. Become disillusioned in desktop on Linux
4. ???
5. Abondon Linux desktop strategy
Sun:
1. Adopt Gnome as the only Linux desktop
2. Loose lots of money
3. Become disillusioned in desktop on Linux
4. ???
5. Abondon Linux desktop strategy
HP:
1. Adopt Gnome as the only Unix desktop
2. Loose lots of money
3. Become disillusioned in desktop on Unix
4. ???
5. Abondon Unix desktop strategy
Eazel:
1. Adopt Gnome as the only Linux desktop
2. Loose lots of money
3. Become disillusioned in desktop on Linux
4. ???
5. Abondon Linux desktop strategy
UserLinux:
1. Adopt Gnome as the only Linux desktop
2. Loose lots of money
3. Become disillusioned in desktop on Linux
4. ???
5. Abondon Linux desktop strategy
Anyone else seeing a common pattern here?
Probably Mark Shuttleworth does. He's a smart guy. He embraced KDE. I'm sure this man already thinks hard how he can take advantage of the stupidity displayed by Novell management. Chopping KDE will alienate most of their customer base. Internal studies@SUSE show that 85% of openSUSE users are using KDE. 12% use Gnome. 3% use something else. Novell management are betting their careers on Gnome, But their heads will roll.
The Ubuntu suite of offerings is starting to become really sweet -- rock-solid servers based on Debian, Gnome/Ubuntu as well as KDE/Kubuntu offerings for desktops, workstations and thin clients -- and it is going to be ready to enter the enterprise market very soon too. (And in my definintion of "enterprise", it is not only the top 500, but most important the Small and Medium Businesses (SMB), where Linux stands the best chances to be adopted by the owners, as well as supported by small IT professional service providers.)
Re:ARRRG. (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess your probably don't want to hear about Xubuntu [ubuntu.com] then?
On a more serious note, stop. "Back to square one" and "splitting the userbase"? Give me a break. The underlying parts of K/X/Ubuntu remain the same - they all are using the same kernel, can use the same apps, and all of the programs install with the same "sudo apt-get install" syntax (or YOUR CHOICE of graphical installer). How is that splitting? As long as the "guts" of Ubuntu stay consistent and allow me to do what I want, I'm happy with my 5.10 Gnome desktop with k3b and Amarok installed, or switching to KDE and using Synaptic and Firefox.
Or look at it another way - what happens when things don't work "best" in GNOME? For example: this thread [ubuntuforums.org] on the Ubuntu forums. In order to get some programs working, such as FreeNX, a remote desktop program, an alternate window manager (XFCE 4 in this case) had to be used. If GNOME was the only option, it wouldn't have worked as easily. Having choices about desktop environments allowed this particular project to work, and allowed other people to try it out, (hopefully) leading to further development of FreeNX (which kicks ass, btw). How is that a bad thing?
Re:Must-have KDE apps (Score:2, Interesting)
K3B is the best program I've used, I'd like more wizards (for windows-compatible CDs, for example), but definitely the best I've seen on any OS.
[SNIP programs I don't use/don't know]
Konqueror is slow, clunky, the configuration sucks. Is it a file browser or a web browser? where is the config for each part? Looks ugly as hell, windows is leaner. The integration of all kinds of crap isn't good, it's bad! That is the definition of bloat, Even firefox is a better filebrowser.
The KDE Control Centre is nice, but very incomplete (same than Gnome's).
Network functionality is not so seamless, in truth, and pretending a network system and a local system are the same can easily cause more problems than it solves (see SMB on windows, it's horrible).
I'm downloading kaffeine now, I hadn't heard of it, I hope I'll like it. Mplayer plays anything, but the interface is so bad it can't even make it to the interface hall of shame.
MythTv, can't use it.
Baghira, bah, hardly fundamental, besides it's a mistake to think that superficially resembling another OS makes it easier, it's the configurations and below-the-surface stuff that causes trouble.
Klik, hadn't heard of it, I think, but why would non-experts use bleeding edge (and hence unstable) apps? How hard is it to set up klik (which must include a bunch of libraries if it must run precompiled binaries).
Qt designer is very nice, I've heard good stuff about Kdevelop (but I haven't used it in a couple of years or so). But Qt is not C++, and that is a big problem. Everyone I know notices that Qt apps crash a lot more than gtk apps, that's because debugging a Qt app is a pain.
[SNIP things I don't use]
Umh, Cervisia? CVS is for devs, if a dev can't use comand line CVS he shouldn't be coding, period.
I know there were a few points where subjectivity was a major factor, but so was it relevant in your list!