That seems to be the conclusion of another "I Quit" whiner following in the footsteps of "Fewt" over a simple matter of where buttons on a Windows border should be put. A location which can be changed as easily as changing wallpaper or flipping between classic and GUI menus.
Abandoning Ubuntu over such a trivial matter seems totally out of proportion considering that the June 29, 2009 statement that future Ubuntu Desktop Remixes would be DEPENDENT on Microsoft API (a.k.a. MONO) didn't raise an eyebrow on this "democracy loving" individuals. Like the whiner before him, this one points to "problems" he had in which his complaints about Ubuntu game pads not working was ignored. I guess he never read where the goal for Ubuntu was to become a commercial, not a gammer's distro. Equally apparent is his lack of knowledge about the evolution of and reasons for why Ubuntu and other commercial distro makers chose GNOME over KDE, a path which the Nokia has probably reversed by adding Qt4 to the LGPL license.
To add injury to insult he says this about Kubuntu:
So, Kubuntu has "fallen", apparently died, and placed in it's coffin, which has been nailed shut. I'm surprised he didn't announce the time and place of the funeral, and the location of the crypt. 
Fortunately, "reports of Kubuntu's death are premature", to borrow a phrase from Samuel Clements. As far as the Kubuntu dev crew not "redesigning visual elements" complaint I can understand why LaCroix, who is NOT a programmer with extensive experience, would not appreciate how much work it would take to modify or rewrite the KDE4 desktop or many/any the applications written for it, just for a unique "look", especially if it required using QtDesigner to edit each of 100's of *.ui files. Not many people are good enough with xml to manually edit *.ui files and not mess up. Personally, I prefer they stay true to the basic KDE4 look, feel and source, and merely push bug fixes and translation changes upstream so they don't start down the path of having to always do extensive rewrites every time the KDE4 dev crew releases an new version increment.
Because Kubuntu was using KDE4 it suffered in the popularity contests at DistroWatch and other places? Hardly. I moved from Mandriva to Kubuntu SPECIFICALLY because Kubuntu moved to KDE 4.2 and Mandriva was staying at 4.1. Kubuntu has always been around a ranking of 15-17 for the last couple years, with little statistically significant variation. Not only that, several distros also adopted KDE4 and suffered no long term ill effects from doing so. Those distros that stayed with KDE 3.5 are now moving to KDE4, obviously wanting to enjoy the cake without having to do the work of helping mix the batter, baking it, and putting on the frosting. Their transition may not be as smooth as they think it will.
I notice that both of these "quitters" seem to have one thing in common: attempting to learn, use and communicate about Linux from/with a Windows mindset which, apparently, they refuse to discard. I've also noticed that a lot of .NET users who have "moved" to Ubuntu with the hopes of using .NET (a.k.a. MONO) to extend the market for their $hareware have a tendency to whine a lot about Ubuntu. Maybe that was their real purpose?
Abandoning Ubuntu over such a trivial matter seems totally out of proportion considering that the June 29, 2009 statement that future Ubuntu Desktop Remixes would be DEPENDENT on Microsoft API (a.k.a. MONO) didn't raise an eyebrow on this "democracy loving" individuals. Like the whiner before him, this one points to "problems" he had in which his complaints about Ubuntu game pads not working was ignored. I guess he never read where the goal for Ubuntu was to become a commercial, not a gammer's distro. Equally apparent is his lack of knowledge about the evolution of and reasons for why Ubuntu and other commercial distro makers chose GNOME over KDE, a path which the Nokia has probably reversed by adding Qt4 to the LGPL license.
To add injury to insult he says this about Kubuntu:
.....
The Fall of Kubuntu
Perhaps one of the biggest casualties from Canonical’s ignorance was Kubuntu (an official derivative based on KDE), which I once believed was the KDE distribution to get. When Kubuntu debuted, it had just the right amount of polish, and really brought KDE into the mainstream in a way that other distributions couldn’t. Unfortunately, after the new wore off, so too did the focus on making it great. Now, it’s quite possibly the most bland distribution in existence.
It all started with KDE4. Although Kubuntu 8.04 was supposed to be an LTS release, it didn’t turn out that way, because KDE4 was just premiered and the developers needed time to prepare for the big change. That made sense, actually. It’s a really big step and KDE4 had quite a bit of maturing left to do. Unfortunately, the KDE4 version we got was virtually unmodified from source, so it left me to wonder what it was exactly they were trying to focus on. In that sense, the LTS status of the release was purged (a decision by Canonical) in vain.
From there, I expected things to improve, but unfortunately Kubuntu never recovered. With every release, it fell further and further behind Ubuntu in terms of new features. No longer was there even a custom wallpaper in each release, and Kubuntu became a distribution that is simply Ubuntu-minimal with KDE apps thrown on top. Every release of Ubuntu featured some amazing new features, most of which to this day were never ported to Kubuntu. (Ubuntu One file sharing, for example).
Perhaps the final nail in Kubuntu’s coffin was the Ubuntu re-branding announcement itself. While I thought that the new theme and branding was pretty sweet, there was virtually no mention of Kubuntu anywhere on the document, and there were no redesigned visual elements for any portion of Kubuntu that I could find. In fact, from reading the brand document it appears that Kubuntu no longer exists. Yet it does exist, designed by a small handful of really awesome people that work real hard on it, that go unnoticed over and over again. To be fair, Ubuntu is Canonical’s flagship OS so of course it’s going to get the most attention, though Kubuntu is in fact an official derivative, yet it gets virtually no attention at all.
The Fall of Kubuntu
Perhaps one of the biggest casualties from Canonical’s ignorance was Kubuntu (an official derivative based on KDE), which I once believed was the KDE distribution to get. When Kubuntu debuted, it had just the right amount of polish, and really brought KDE into the mainstream in a way that other distributions couldn’t. Unfortunately, after the new wore off, so too did the focus on making it great. Now, it’s quite possibly the most bland distribution in existence.
It all started with KDE4. Although Kubuntu 8.04 was supposed to be an LTS release, it didn’t turn out that way, because KDE4 was just premiered and the developers needed time to prepare for the big change. That made sense, actually. It’s a really big step and KDE4 had quite a bit of maturing left to do. Unfortunately, the KDE4 version we got was virtually unmodified from source, so it left me to wonder what it was exactly they were trying to focus on. In that sense, the LTS status of the release was purged (a decision by Canonical) in vain.
From there, I expected things to improve, but unfortunately Kubuntu never recovered. With every release, it fell further and further behind Ubuntu in terms of new features. No longer was there even a custom wallpaper in each release, and Kubuntu became a distribution that is simply Ubuntu-minimal with KDE apps thrown on top. Every release of Ubuntu featured some amazing new features, most of which to this day were never ported to Kubuntu. (Ubuntu One file sharing, for example).
Perhaps the final nail in Kubuntu’s coffin was the Ubuntu re-branding announcement itself. While I thought that the new theme and branding was pretty sweet, there was virtually no mention of Kubuntu anywhere on the document, and there were no redesigned visual elements for any portion of Kubuntu that I could find. In fact, from reading the brand document it appears that Kubuntu no longer exists. Yet it does exist, designed by a small handful of really awesome people that work real hard on it, that go unnoticed over and over again. To be fair, Ubuntu is Canonical’s flagship OS so of course it’s going to get the most attention, though Kubuntu is in fact an official derivative, yet it gets virtually no attention at all.
Fortunately, "reports of Kubuntu's death are premature", to borrow a phrase from Samuel Clements. As far as the Kubuntu dev crew not "redesigning visual elements" complaint I can understand why LaCroix, who is NOT a programmer with extensive experience, would not appreciate how much work it would take to modify or rewrite the KDE4 desktop or many/any the applications written for it, just for a unique "look", especially if it required using QtDesigner to edit each of 100's of *.ui files. Not many people are good enough with xml to manually edit *.ui files and not mess up. Personally, I prefer they stay true to the basic KDE4 look, feel and source, and merely push bug fixes and translation changes upstream so they don't start down the path of having to always do extensive rewrites every time the KDE4 dev crew releases an new version increment.
Because Kubuntu was using KDE4 it suffered in the popularity contests at DistroWatch and other places? Hardly. I moved from Mandriva to Kubuntu SPECIFICALLY because Kubuntu moved to KDE 4.2 and Mandriva was staying at 4.1. Kubuntu has always been around a ranking of 15-17 for the last couple years, with little statistically significant variation. Not only that, several distros also adopted KDE4 and suffered no long term ill effects from doing so. Those distros that stayed with KDE 3.5 are now moving to KDE4, obviously wanting to enjoy the cake without having to do the work of helping mix the batter, baking it, and putting on the frosting. Their transition may not be as smooth as they think it will.
I notice that both of these "quitters" seem to have one thing in common: attempting to learn, use and communicate about Linux from/with a Windows mindset which, apparently, they refuse to discard. I've also noticed that a lot of .NET users who have "moved" to Ubuntu with the hopes of using .NET (a.k.a. MONO) to extend the market for their $hareware have a tendency to whine a lot about Ubuntu. Maybe that was their real purpose?
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