Ten Years of Kubuntu

by Tsiolkovsky • 11 years ago

130 57 11 years ago

flavor8• 11 years ago

KDE is a great platform, but most of the prominent distros ship with near-default style settings, which are ugly (just look at the 15.04 screenshots, linked from the article). It would be nice if an opinionated design team (similar to the elementary guys) shipped a KDE based distro which was meticulously styled out of the box.

reitanqild• 11 years ago

Mandrake, later Mandriva used to be close to perfect IMO.

Today I guess OpenSUSE is the closest thing to what you describe.

TallGuyShort• 11 years ago

Mageia - forked from Mandriva - is still actively developed, I believe - but I haven't tried out KDE on it. I think my Fedora 20 install looked pretty slick out of the box, but I don't think very highly of my own taste :)

baldfat• 11 years ago

I feel that OpenSUSE has had the best KDE default settings and Kubuntu had the worst defaults.

bananaoomarang• 11 years ago

Plasma 5 is still a little janky, but this has been improved a lot, and should hopefully continue to improve (it has a much more consciously opinionated design team than 4 ever did).

The Linux desktop space is a real mess at the moment, but KDE is the best of the bunch for general, modern computing.

weland8• 11 years ago

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community.

The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach.

I'm a post-3.5 refugee in WindowMaker (and sometimes ratpoison) land, but I honestly think KDE is a big, big deal. It still values customization and still tries to place the user in control of his device, unlike the ahem other guys who seem to be following in Apple's very questionable footsteps.

retroafroman• 11 years ago

You mean like happened with Gnome 3 and completely pissed off a large portion of the user base? I'm an advocate for sane defaults, but 'opinionated design' doesn't always nail the mark.

pbhjpbhj2• 11 years ago

I think you actually want the default to be pretty vanilla. Opinionated design tends to polarise opinions which means put a lot of people off. KDE - especially now with the "get hot new stuff" interface - is very easy to mod and there are loads of style packs available.

The sort who'll be attracted to a specific look are also more likely not to go with the default IMO. Personally I like my UI like my DE - out of the way.

worklogin• 11 years ago

Well if the vanilla is itself ugly and polarizing, perhaps it's best that a distro take the initiative to make it better. As long as KDE retains its flexibility to make the desktop how you like it, why not try to make it better by default?

Disclosure: I've tried KDE several times, and have never stayed with it more than a few days, due to its wacky ratios of window and icon sizing, and bubbly appearance.

eitally• 11 years ago

I haven't tried in about two years, but I tried every six months for a few years before that (basically every time Ubuntu pushed a new release I'd try Kubuntu first). I really wanted the advanced configurability of KDE compared to Gnome and then Unity ... but something always either didn't work or just frustrated me to no end and I reverted to Ubuntu. A lot of my friends have switched to Arch now, which similarly seems to "just work" and does a much better job of keeping packages updated than Ubuntu does.

collyw• 11 years ago

I agree, I run Manajaro, which is an Arch spin off. It seems stripped down in the same way that Ubuntu was when it first started getting popular.

dguaraglia• 11 years ago

That's my experience too. For some reason the desktop after startup looks amazing... but as soon as I start playing around with the applications I get a lot of crashes, things in the desktop that don't make sense and general slowness.

I think I've made this comment before, but it almost feels like new KDE releases are optimized for screenshots: it looks great, until you click on something.

giancarlostoro3• 11 years ago

I enjoy Kubuntu and use it's cousin / child, Netrunner. Ships with all (most anyway) the things I wish Kubuntu shipped with, but a little extra I don't want, but that's ok, it's easier to remove things (Firefox addons) than waiting for the updates and what not. It even lets me use the "Windows Key" to open the KDE Menu, or at least their version of it, which is something I'm all too accustomed to from Windows. Been running Netrunner (Kubuntu derrived) for months now, on my main Desktop and my school Laptop.

I used to love KDE when I first used Linux because of Slackware, back before KDE4. It was adaptable to whether I wanted a Windows feel, Linux feel, or Mac feel. It still delivers in that aspect, and now it's much more mature looking.

joshuapants2• 11 years ago

I never quite warmed up to KDE. I think the problem was that it was a "Windows-like" interface but it never felt quite the same as Windows. I found it easier to adapt to GNOME, precisely because it was different than what I was used to.

I did try the beta of Kubuntu with Plasma 5, however, and it seemed nice. I'll have to try it again sometime.

giancarlostoro3• 11 years ago

I started with KDE but then I fell in love with Gnome after KDE4 was too buggy to run for me, it was almost like the Vista fiasco, you needed a graphics card just to run a desktop environment, so I moved to Gnome and fell in love with how customizable it was. Then Gnome 3 came out, and my love for Gnome died, all that I loved had been taken out, I understand plug-ins and all, but Gnome was amazing out of the box, then I ran back to KDE my first love, ah this should be a movie or something, but now if anything goes wrong I may consider LXQt, seems promising enough. I don't know why people get religiously stuck to desktop environments, sometimes you just need to move on.

Consultant32452• 11 years ago

I've heard comments like yours before but this time it made me consider the other side of it. I wonder if your reaction is due to being a power user. If you've been a Windows power user for a while you're probably accustomed to doing things like setting PATH or other environment variables, installing/uninstalling things, starting and stopping services. If you have something that's a little "too much" like Windows but things are in a different place, that may be worse than starting from a mental framework of "completely different now." Particularly, I wonder if it is easier for nearly computer illiterate people to transition from Windows to something very close to Windows, or something else entirely.

aruggirello2• 11 years ago

I think you can probably customise Kubuntu as well; e.g. I always do remove the Ctrl+F4 key mapping from KDE so I get the "usual" Windows MDI behaviour.

zanny• 11 years ago

Kubuntu is in a great place today. Five years ago KDE developers were pretty fragmented between Mandrivia, Suse, Fedora, and Kubuntu. Today, thanks to Blue Systems adopting Kubuntu and the general decline of most other KDE spins (Suse lost its commercial support, Mandrivia died and got forked a bunch, Fedora continues to be Gnome-first in a good way) my impressions from the ML and general developer mindshare is that Kubuntu is becoming the KDE distro for the betterment of the platform, because then you don't end up with all this wasted effort making an 80% great experience on every different package manager, fs layout, login manager, and init stack. Kubuntu CI is pretty much the only place one should go to develop KDE software and that means Kubuntu and Netrunner are always going to be the core KDE distros.

And that is not bad. Desktop environments in my view do a lot better when they have a blessed implementation. Cinnamon, Unity, and even Enlightenment have seen resounding success because they are developed for single distros and that focus lets them dodge the semantics of their environment and get to the good stuff.

Kubuntu 15.04 is looking to be the first release of the distro I can be proud of as something to show the uninitiated and get them excited about using it. The bugs are falling down by the dozen each day and all the best of Linux is ready for the release, its going to be a blast in my book.

michaelmrose• 11 years ago

When I tried it Netrunner was an abortion. Its first stable release crashed more, both individual components and the whole damn thing, than Windows ME.

Even the name is stupid and sounds like a 10 year old thought of it.

colinmahns• 11 years ago

OpenSUSE is still shipping KDE by default, and it's pretty usable in recent versions.

That said, Kubuntu is still very nice. I'm glad you are using it to show off free software to new people!

notfoss2• 11 years ago

I think you are forgetting Linux Mint KDE. It is updated regularly and is fantastic to work on.

claydoh• 11 years ago

You forget that Mint KDE is Kubuntu, if you look at the package sources ;)

filmgirlcw• 11 years ago

I first installed Ubuntu either a few days before or a few days after the Hoary Hedgehog release. I recall using the Gnome version first and then adding in the Kubuntu packages a few days later.

At that point, I was fairly used to Debian and I'd used some of the other "shiny" distros at the time (like Linspire, shudder) but Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) was one of the first distros to work with my Atheros Wi-Fi dongle without significant amounts of pain. I mean, it was still a pain but I was able to get it done.

Ubuntu -- and Kubuntu especially -- was my obsession for a few months in the spring of 2005. I still remember torrenting episodes of a brand new TV show called "Grey's Anatomy" (that had taken the time slot of my beloved "Boston Legal") that had just debuted and watching it in variations of Mplayer in Kubuntu. Funny. Grey's Anatomy is still around a decade later too.

These days, I only use Linux on the server and very, very rarely on a test VM, but I have an enormous amount of respect to the KDE team and the Kubuntu team for keeping on keeping on.

bakoel• 11 years ago

Kubuntu is very hard because use KDE.

ElectricFeel• 11 years ago

Great essay on Kubuntu, Tslolkovsky! It is an impressive overview of your accomplishments, in context, and that's perfect. I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds. My personal favorite is the one I use the most. Standard Ubuntu just does it for me. KDE is ok but Gentoo is just too lo-fi for me - I'm not interested in a product that is like living in a halfway house instead of a real house with a roof & doors & a working bathroom, if you get the point I'm trying to make here. I am aware that there are people out there who cannot lose their massive social anxiety problems & try to work on their computers. Red Hat Linux is apparently the one that's most like Windows & I've heard good reviews of it.

stolio2• 11 years ago

I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds.

Is there some Intro To Linux we can point just people to in order to avoid things like this? The "GNU slash Linux" conversation is wearing pretty thin but it should be common knowledge at this point that the GNU project did 10 ten years of work so Linus could add the kernel and have it be the first completed system.

Should we point to Revolution OS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)?

Should we point to GNU's page about the issue (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html)?

Without getting into any finger-pointing, it's just history and we should all know it.

amyjess• 11 years ago

And GNU zealots persistently deny that Linux became successful because of XFree86 and Apache, neither of which GNU had anything to do with.

aruggirello2• 11 years ago

IMHO your comment was informative and did not deserve downvotes.

ElectricFeel's comment may well signal a shift in Linux desktop adoption, in that the less-technical public enters the game. IMHO this is an Ubuntu success story. He's an Ubuntu user that probably does not even know what Debian is, and though this isn't good in itself, it might be good for GNU/Linux adoption. We all called for the "year of the Linux desktop" but due to various reasons, there aren't enough users, so it didn't materialise yet. But there is hope. And KDE is going the right way. I love it. IMHO Kubuntu 15.04 will rock!

UhUhUhUh• 11 years ago

There is not a single day that passes that I don't thank, silently and sometimes not, Linux and the distros it spawned (regardless of my own preferences). It must be clear by now that Linux OSs have recaptured and prolonged the spirit of the "personal computer" idea, which is basically to put the user in control of the machine, or the individual in control of something really. I can't be thankful enough for the hundreds or thousands of talented individuals who made that happen and still do. I think they deserve more praise than they get.

Ten Years of Kubuntu

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