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KDE Software GUI Linux

Shuttleworth's Commitment to Kubuntu and KDE 276

Posted by CmdrTaco from the neck-deep-in-gui-software dept.
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."
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Shuttleworth's Commitment to Kubuntu and KDE More

Shuttleworth's Commitment to Kubuntu and KDE

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  • The only major KDE distro? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 06, 2005 @09:57AM (#13962704)
    So, with the earlier announcement that Novell/SUSE is giving up KDE in favour of Gnome, does this mean that Kubuntu is now the only major KDE-based Linux distribution? How far can they get on Shuttleworth's money, when all the big boys are throwing their money behind Gnome? I would bet that whatever the advantages of Kubuntu on technical and usability fronts are, they must be years away from profitability. Can Shuttleworth alone keep it afloat until they turn the business side around?

    • Re:The only major KDE distro? (Score:5, Informative)

      by datadriven ( 699893 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @10:04AM (#13962726) Homepage
      Slack still ships with KDE as main desktop, if you use X anyway.
      • Slack is hardly what you'd call a major desktop.

      • Patrick is awesome, but he isn't actually doing KDE development. He is simply *packaging* KDE. The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

        • Must-have KDE apps (Score:5, Interesting)

          by billybob2 ( 755512 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @12:21PM (#13963358)
          The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

          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:Must-have KDE apps (Score:4, Funny)

            by thumperward ( 553422 ) <thumperward@hotmail.com> on Sunday November 06, 2005 @01:39PM (#13963760) Homepage
            These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

            Really. What features does Kaffeine have on top of Totem?

            What's that Lassie? The boy is making things up?

              - Chris

          • KDE Education -- 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.

            Indeed. Check out koffice kids part 1 [blogspot.com] and part 2 [blogspot.com]. I don't think GNOME has something even similar!

          • Re:Must-have KDE apps (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Are you kidding me? amarok's only redeeming features is the global shortcuts and that it can reside in the taskbar. Hardly the only program that can do that! The interface is crap, and it crashes constantly (much more than once a day, sorry, but I gave up windows a long time ago).
            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, clunk

          • AmaroK = Threat to iTunes? Whatever! (Score:5, Insightful)

            by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @02:12PM (#13963949)
            AmaroK music player [kde.org] -- Steve Jobs' nightmare, the single greatest threat to Itunes on the Free Software platform.

            Not to troll here, but how exactly is an OSS Linux music player a threat to iTunes?

            Does Amarok run on Windows or MacOSX? (no)
            Does iTunes run on Linux? (no)
            How much does AmaroK cost? (FREE)
            How much does iTunes cost? (FREE)
            Does Amarok allow easy updating/syncing of an iPod? (no)
            How many people will abandon their cache of Fairplay DRMed music for a new application?
            (kind of a trick question, given neither player will run on the other's platform)

            Saying Amarok is a threat to iTunes is like saying an independant movie theater in Russia is a threat to a U.S. movie theater conglomerate. It's also like that often repeated phrase "iPod Killer": a claim often made, never delivered.

        • The real issue is who is going to pay for the next generation of KDE development if SuSE isn't going to pay.

          Not really, since KDE never has been dependant of corporate sponsorship and has always been more a comunity effort. Unlike others.
      • Xandros, Linspire, Mepis, Mandriva, Knoppix, Kanotix, Gentoo, Slackware all use KDE. SuSE (for now) is KDE. I think FC4 has no preference like RHEL does- it all pretty much looks the same in either DE. The tough thing for me was finding a good up-to-date Gnome distro. Sure, Debian uses Gnome, but it is 2.8 while current is 2.12. So I use Ubuntu.

    • Re:The only major KDE distro? (Score:5, Informative)

      by c_fel ( 927677 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @10:06AM (#13962732) Homepage
      There's still Mandriva, Knoppix and surely some more. And don't forget that a lot of distributions are not KDE- or GNOME-centric
      • What exactly is KDE-based about mandriva? Certainly not their tools, written in GTK. Nor their desktop: they mold both KDE and GNOME to their Galaxy theme. I like it, a lot, but I wouldn't call it "KDE centric".

      • Knoppix, Linspire, Xandros, MEPIS (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Burz ( 138833 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @11:45AM (#13963181) Homepage Journal
        I look at them all as variations on Debian which are KDE-focused, though I tend to stick with Xandros.

        Kubuntu Breezy should not be mailed out for free until it is fixed. Any Linux distro that always fails to save the LAN gateway address you type in isn't worth the CD its burned on. Plus the dialogs that cannot be fully viewed on an XGA screen (with plenty of empty space in the dialogs) plus a host of other problems I ran into within the first 90 min of use. (Yes, I filed those bugs. You're welcome.) So in short, they didn't test it.

        Kubuntu is *very* nice looking though. That aspect is top-notch.

        OTOH even as a KDE fan I'm glad Novel chose one desktop, Gnome. Every distro should chose one desktop. Its unnerving when you try out a distro as prestigious as SuSE 10 and you can't delete any files from Konqueror because "Protocol 'Trash' does not exist".

        As a Corel-> Xandros Linux user going back to 1999, I can say that watching the lack of focus and sloppy execution on these other 'portentious' distros (you know who they are) has been absolutely comic.

        I have to wonder if Ubuntu will suffer by elevating KDE to the level of Gnome.
    • Donno if you consider them major, but they are KDE 'based'.
    • Troll. The "big boys" are Redhat, Sun and Novell. Since GNOME is essentially a Redhat project, there's no mystery there. Redhat has been anti-KDE since before GNOME got recast as a destkop. Sun isn't a Linux distribution, so let's stop talking like they are. Finally we have Novell. Er, I mean Ximian. Since Novell doesn't care about the desktop, it's really Ximian deciding this stuff.

      When it comes to corporate politics, yes KDE is losing some ground. But if corporate circle jerks are your measure of success,
  • I'm using Ubuntu Breezy with the GNOME desktop and I've installed all the kubuntu-desktop stuff as well.

    The major problem I can see is that the user should not even have to care whether a given app is GNOME, KDE or whatever. You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit. WTF?

    No serious open-source desktop these days can be all-GNOME or all-KDE; you need to make the mixture not affect the end user at all. They desperately need a unified look-and-feel control panel that will set this stuff consistently without the user having to care.

    • Can you provide us with some screenshots showing the problems that you speak of? Perhaps you managed to botch your installation somehow.

      If you're using Kubuntu 5.10, check the K -> System Settings -> Appearance configuration panel. Notice the "GTK styles and fonts" portion. It allows you to easily set your GTK style and fonts to those used by KDE. And it works fine for every GNOME/GTK+ app that I use.

      • Try running Inkscape in KDE. You'll notice the menu and file-dialogs look very dated.

        Try running Banshee, it won't even run under KDE for Breezy.

        Not to say I'm unhappy with using Ubuntu and KDE with a mixture of Gnome-apps and KDE-apps, but the poster has a valid point. It doesn't always work so good.

        I tend to like Gnome for administering and KDE as a default for everything else. KDE-apps are too busy for administering, and the admin-apps are not so intuitive (although Control Center rocks, unless your opti
    • "You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit."

      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 resu
      • 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.

        A control panel might possibly be good, but it also might be needlessly complicated. Wouldn't it be easier to standardize between KDE and Gnome where they store some font/color settings or something? Of cou

        • Perhaps this is one of the things that the good fellas at freedesktop.org could do, being a nonpartisan standards development group. If as much as possible could be made desktop-independent, that would surely be good; features could be used by applications from either side of the fence, and maybe some kind of consistency would be possible.

          For instance, if one uses Tango [tango-project.org] icon themes (implementing a fd.o spec [freedesktop.org], the same icons can be found both by KDE and GNOME desktops and applications.

          'Course, that's just ico
    • ``No serious open-source desktop these days can be all-GNOME or all-KDE''

      I don't agree with you there. GNOME (and also KDE, I guess) both have a full set of applications built for them. Ubuntu itself convinced me that you can build a complete desktop using only GNOME software. As long as GNOME and KDE don't get their themes compatible, I see distros that support one desktop or the other exclusively as the best solution for end users who want a nicely integrated desktop that just works. Ubuntu is a prime exa
    • You know, I find that the gtk-qt theme [freedesktop.org] goes a long way to solving this. GTK applications start to look a lot more like KDE applications. It's not complete but it helps.
  • make CD #1 mostly a base system with xorg and the basic x apps, similar to Slackware's #1 CD, and make a #2 CD with Gnome & KDE letting the user decide to install either Gnome and/or KDE, or users can just download the #1 CD install and get a basic OS booting, and download & install either gnome or kde via ftp after installing CD #1

    • make CD #1 mostly a base system with xorg and the basic x apps, similar to Slackware's #1 CD, and make a #2 CD with Gnome & KDE letting the user decide to install either Gnome and/or KDE, or users can just download the #1 CD install and get a basic OS booting, and download & install either gnome or kde via ftp after installing CD #1

      You do realise we're talking about Ubuntu here, which aims to provide a very user-friendly environment ?

  • I've installed both. The computer to my right is running Ubuntu 5.10. It's really a great distro. Very clean, simple, easy to maintain, and "snappy". I installed Kubuntu a few months ago, and I feel it wasn't as polished as Ubuntu is. I think both projects are really good for the community and I'd love to see Kubuntu surpass the commercial distros like Suse and Mandriva.
  • What are they using at UBZ to generate/maintain those schedule pages? I don't see any SW like that in my Ubuntu menu.

  • ARRRG. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Visceral Monkey ( 583103 )
    Just as it seems we are making progress toward at least having ONE standard DE for most of the desktops used out there, Shuttleworth pulls this out of his ass. Seriously, Ubunutu is one of the reasons GNOME has made so much progress recently with users and now we are back to square one with splitting the userbase. Stupid move. I could care LESS which one they choose, just choose ONE.
    • Except that a *single* desktop will *never* happen.

      People have preferences. Some of us really dislike gnome. While others dislike kde. The same goes for anything else that comes along.

      Should we have 100 to support? No of course not, but expecting a single unified desktop to be shoved down our throats isnt realistic either.
      • I agree that a diversity of desktops is good. I would love to see a desktop by the KDE developers that had a chance to succeed commercially. But as long as KDE is based on Qt (GPL and for-pay license), I think it's going to hurt rather than help Linux.

      • Yes, and I like xfce, but that doesn't mean that I think that xfce is going to be the desktop that my grandmother uses when Linux takes over the desktop.

    • Re:ARRRG. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by arkhan_jg ( 618674 )
      The two desktops have different goals, different development platforms, and different markets. Both have their adherants. Some people prefer apple, some people prefer windows. Choice is good.
    • One mans angst is another mans joy. Timing is everything, and Shuttleworth is cleverly showing some skill. I'm a long time Suse user and kubunto is now going on the next machine I have a chance to do a fresh install.

      All Shuttleworth needs to do now is convince troll tech to move Qt to LGPL and I'll help build a shrine for him.

      My new sig - They'll take KDE away from me about the same time when they take away my guns - they tried that recently here in Brasil and failed too.

      iksrazal

    • Re:ARRRG. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by rsheridan6 ( 600425 )
      Open Source is about freedom of choice. If you want ONE DE, try Windows XP. Some of us didn't switch to Linux to have GNOME shoved down our throats.

    • Re:ARRRG. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Stimpack ( 915453 )
      Ive tried Gnome, a few times, I really tried to like it, It just lacks so much its painfull. If you dont have political reasons Gnome is not in a usable position right now. Not many people will be happy if they standardize on one DE, the Gnome evangelicals, well we know how loud and mouthy they can be, the KDE peeps will lose alot of features and useability. Main priority and only thing I care about, sort some way to stop GTK apps looing shitty in KDE and vice versa.

    • Re:ARRRG. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mad_Rain ( 674268 )
      Seriously, Ubunutu is one of the reasons GNOME has made so much progress recently with users and now we are back to square one with splitting the userbase. Stupid move. I could care LESS which one they choose, just choose ONE.

      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 th
    • Just as it seems we are making progress toward at least having ONE standard DE for most of the desktops used out there,

      Didn't look like that to me. The distros were moving to a standard DE, it's just not the one that users choose when they have the opportunity. Shttleworth is showing to me that he cares about what his users want. Forcing users to do one thing even when they would prefer to do something else so that everyone is the same is emphatically not the linux philosophy (though it is worryingly seemi

    • You do realize, don't you, that you are under no obligation to use Kubuntu. DON'T USE IT IF YOU WANT WANT TO! Is that so flipping hard you can't manage it? Are you so stupid you need someone else to tell you what to do?

      This is called Free Software. That means the rest of us are free and not beholden to your whims and wishes. You've got a GNOME distro, but that isn't good enough for you because you just can't stand the fact that someone else is using KDE. Screw you! Get your ass out of this community and tak
    • And whichever of Mozilla and Konqueror is worse should just crawl up and die, so that there is only one. Or OpenOffice and KOffice or [insert Gnome program] and [insert KDE program]. If I wanted one kernel, one DE, one Office I'd go to One Microsoft Way.

      I want standards. Interoperability. Not "design by comitee", but Gnome and KDE coming together and saying "Hey, our users set the same options in different places. Can we agree on a format for doing that and both use it?" Or are the developers afraid of maki
  • This is PERFECT! Now, if only the CUPS people could get their thing to work without the step in the instructions that tells me to pull all my hair out....

  • Almost too bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @11:43AM (#13963169) Homepage Journal
    It's almost too bad that Shuttleworth is throwing his weight behind another project, instead of doing one thing and doing it well. Too bad, because the same effort could be used to make Ubuntu and the software that constitutes it even better. Almost, because it seems nobody else can make a distribution like Ubuntu*, so this move may give the KDE-lovers the same gift a lot earlier than if it had been left up to the rest of the world.

    * Certainly, nobody had managed to make a distribution that is as polished, hassle free, and freely available, before Ubuntu came. And it's not because of technical difficulties, Debian has had apt-get for ages, and other distros have had good installers for ages, and most of the software on Ubuntu has been around for quite some time, too.
  • Great news, thanks Mark Shuttleworth, we need more people like you.

  • Thank god (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 ) <[sherwin] [at] [amiran.us]> on Sunday November 06, 2005 @12:02PM (#13963260) Homepage Journal
    Without KDE, I'm sure myself, my friends, and my company would be using Windows.

    Gnome doesn't do enough for the end user. Too many settings required mucking around in either the registry-like editor, or just plain command line things.

    I remember trying to use Gnome is SuSE 9.0, and not being able to figure out how to specify which app to use for which mime type. Someone politely informed me that this [fedoraforum.org] was the procedure to set default apps for various mime-types.

    Yeah, that's noob friendly. Apparently, wasn't 'fixed' in 2.10, either. Is it fixed now?

    Either way, lack of simple things like that, plus KDE's KIOslaves (which are beautiful, come on, who doesn't love fish:// or klik://), plus a far superior file browser (I've seen the gnome when I'm forced to load up a GTK app, which is rare).

    How do I open from a network location in gnome? Can it be done? (In the file browser?)

    Why don't I 'contribute' to the gnome project to make these things better? Simple: KDE already does them correctly for me.

    Do I mind that other people are happy with gnome, or prefer gnome? No. But all you gnome-heads should stop stomping on other people's Desktop Environments. Seriously; Gnome doesn't work for some of us.

    If the next OpenSuSE (which is my current distribution) has inferior KDE support, I'll be thrilled to move to a thriving Kubuntu.

    There's nothing wrong with Gnome, for those who use it. But for some of us, gnome just doesn't cut it. Gnome may be different, Gnome may be more 'unix'. But some of us who actually use Linux as our sole operating system rely on KDE, and couldn't imagine switching to gnome.

  • KDE has grown (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zecg ( 521666 )
    I've been using KDE since 3.3.0 and it's grown incredibly in the last few releases. It's not just about a window manager and widgets, there are apps of consistently high quality for practically every purpose there, a well-thought out control panel, an unprecedented level of integration between applications, a great file browser, u.s.w.

    KDE is, thus far, closest to achieving the ideal of a feature-rich, user-friendly and stable Linux desktop. It is, in my most humble opinion, miles ahead of Gnome.
  • I'm not undertstanding the whole Kubuntu vs Ubuntu concerns about Gnome and KDE, Ubuntu just uses gnome as its basic install, but you can select KDE installed and use it over Gnome and it works perfectly. Kubuntu is just making the integration smoother between config files, theme and toolkits. I havnt had any issue with KDE on ubuntu.

    As far as polish goes, I'd say KDE looks smoother, SuSE shows KDE's strengths. Though I'd like more GTK1/2 theme tweak's native other than a checkmark box under KDE"s prefer

  • Its Ok Gnome Fans (Score:5, Informative)

    by poofyhairguy82 ( 635386 ) on Sunday November 06, 2005 @02:03PM (#13963895) Journal
    Disclaimer: I am a moderator on the Official English Ubuntu Forums

    Gnome people, this is not the time to freak out. Just because Mark is using KDE as his desktop and he wants to put more resources into KDE doesn't mean that the Gnome side of Ubuntu is going to suffer. There could be many reasons for his new found interest in Kubuntu.

    1.From the beginning it seems that Mark felt a little guilty that he had to pick one desktop to really do well. I know a lot of people think "just do one thing and do it well" is an admirable philosophy, but in the GNU world that is the path to weakness. The Linux Desktop is chaos and unless you want to spend enough to harness that chaos you HAVE to make some big decisions like that. When he first started with Ubuntu, he had no idea how successful it was going to be. He had not idea if the whole thing would be a waste of money, or that no one would care. But now that Ubuntu is making a huge splash in the Linux world and is making noise across the globe Mark has decided that he is willing to commit more of his resources to the entire Ubuntu project. He set up the Ubuntu foundation and gave it $10 million to begin with. So a new commitment to KDE and Kubuntu DOES NOT MEAN THAT UBUNTU WILL HAVE LESS, just that probably he will be willing to give more overall to help the KDE side as well.

    2.Despite its relative popularity, the Kubuntu side of the project has not had nearly the resources the other side has gotten so far. The Kubuntu maintainer- Jonathan Riddell - did a lot of the work in its free time. At first he was only given a smallish contract at the end of releases to help get them in better shape. I bet that if Mark is serious about Kubuntu it will finally have a full time developer (if that is not already the case).

    3.A big goal of the entire Ubuntu project for Mark is his Edubuntu [edubuntu.org] side project. Well in all honesty Kubuntu might be a better fit for that project than Ubuntu for a few reasons: the The KDE Edutainment Project [kde.org] is the single best educational software on the GNU desktop and is far more developed than anything on the Gnome side. Plus KDE uses less RAM (this is my own opinion) so it might be a better fit for the older computers that many schools might have today. Gnome hates to have less than 256mb, and you can't build a user friendly desktop around XFCE (and it would probably take less resources to make Kubuntu better than to fix all of Gnome's RAM problems single handily). So a better KDE is better for the Kubuntu project.

    4.The entire Ubuntu community has been trying better to make the KDE side seem like an equal ever since it was announced. On the Official Forums we have separated KDE and Gnome areas for the Breezy release, and beyond that a forum independent forum was made by a third party for Kubuntu. [kubuntuforums.net] So in some ways Mark is just catching up to the rest of the community.

    The last thing any Gnome fan and Ubuntu user needs to think is that "the sky is falling." This is a GOOD thing for you Gnome fans. Why? A better Kubuntu will bring more people to the distro and that could help build the overall community. A better Kubuntu will help establish the entire project as THE Desktop Linux which would help with gaining support of third party application makers that won't release for anything not called Red Hat. A better Kubuntu shows that Mark is becoming even more devoted to the project, and considering the man makes more off of investments than the entire Linux service industry more of his support means that the entire project is is better shape. Finally, a better Kubuntu means that there is more choice in the community and that the entire project is maturing. Its a good time to be a Desktop Linux user.

  • Well golly, good for him, but why should I care? Last year he was all for Gnome and perhaps next year he'll be all for Xfce. Fine. Great. But are Ubuntu's users going to make some nice, rational choices of their own or is that the sound of stampeding hooves I hear as the herd swerves off after new horizons?

    There's an opportunistic streak to Ubuntu and, imho, they've yet to show they've got what it takes for the long haul. To some extent they've taken advantage of disarray within Debian and now it looks a

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