A must read very important news

[mparillo]

Based on what I read, Kubuntu will die in the next couple years or sooner and Jonathan will be doing something else. Hopefully, a non-Ubuntu based KDE distro.

I hope claydoh and yofel can keep the momentum. I have been trying many Plasma 5 distros recently (Fedora, Debian, Manjaro, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed), and none seem to run as well as Kubuntu in a 1GB VM or on a 1GB netbook.

Kubuntu: the lightweight KDE distro ;-)

[GreyGeek]

Based on what I read, Kubuntu will die in the next couple years or sooner and Jonathan will be doing something else. Hopefully, a non-Ubuntu based KDE distro.

We'll be able to tell by the quality of the releases and updates. When TexStar had to take a year long sabattical to rebuild his life after a hurricane passed over Huston PCLinux took a nose dive. That's when I moved on. It didn't come back till he returned.

The question is: is 15.10 any worse of a release than its predecessors? It installed fine and ran fine as a guest OS for me. The first update did well. It died only after I started playing with proprietary drivers. But that is my anecdotal experience. We'll know more when the community as a whole weighs in.

However, overall, as Shuttlesworth's development plans diverge from Kubuntu's I suspect that BlueSystems will find it more and more difficult to remodel Kubuntu away from Unity and is foundational libraries. Then, a rebasing will be one of only three choices.

[julek]

Another choice would be to merge with Debian. I've moved away from Kubuntu since the end of June because of what happened and well, I'm extremely satisfied with Debian.

- Much faster than Ubuntu (and yes, systemd is extremely fast to startup - even though I think it's becoming like X in its early days where it was an operating system withing the operating system)
- With backports, you get many recent software and contrary to Ubuntu backports are here supported, including latest kernels, latest LibreOffice and latest Firefox (sorry, Iceweasel which is basically the same stuff :-p )
- And Debian stable is incredibly stable. I could run my desktop for one full month without rebooting, just suspend/resume cycles. Never managed to do this with *buntu.
- Last but not least : Debian is the basis for SteamOS, which is something good, as I expect Mir will cause breakages in video games. (And yes it would be difficult to run KDE on Ubuntu because of Mir, we'd need 3 different graphic stacks : X for booting, then Mir or Wayland to take over...)

Now it's true that it's a bit harder for beginners because there's a bit more work to do to set up a fully working Debian box, especially with recent hardware including NVidia Maxwell GPUs, but after all the result is almost the same as Kubuntu LTS (except the Firefox icon ;-) ).

Anyway what happens to Kubuntu deeply saddens me. With Debian I'll get KDE 5 one year later but at that time it will be damn solid.

[vinnywright]

Another choice would be to merge with Debian. I've moved away from Kubuntu since the end of June because of what happened and well, I'm extremely satisfied with Debian.

- Much faster than Ubuntu (and yes, systemd is extremely fast to startup - even though I think it's becoming like X in its early days where it was an operating system withing the operating system)
- With backports, you get many recent software and contrary to Ubuntu backports are here supported, including latest kernels, latest LibreOffice and latest Firefox (sorry, Iceweasel which is basically the same stuff :-p )
- And Debian stable is incredibly stable. I could run my desktop for one full month without rebooting, just suspend/resume cycles. Never managed to do this with *buntu.
- Last but not least : Debian is the basis for SteamOS, which is something good, as I expect Mir will cause breakages in video games. (And yes it would be difficult to run KDE on Ubuntu because of Mir, we'd need 3 different graphic stacks : X for booting, then Mir or Wayland to take over...)

Now it's true that it's a bit harder for beginners because there's a bit more work to do to set up a fully working Debian box, especially with recent hardware including NVidia Maxwell GPUs, but after all the result is almost the same as Kubuntu LTS (except the Firefox icon ;-) ).

Anyway what happens to Kubuntu deeply saddens me. With Debian I'll get KDE 5 one year later but at that time it will be damn solid.

I , like you , have Debian-8-KDE installed on one of my partitions , and find it extremely stable .

VINNY

[GreyGeek]

I , like you , have Debian-8-KDE installed on one of my partitions , and find it extremely stable .

VINNY

Ditto, as a guest OS. Debian 8 KDE is very vanilla. Very stable and drop-dead easy to install. However, one MAJOR criteria I have adopted for any future distro I might select is that it include a full featured Btrfs.

Another distro I've been testing is Arch KDE Plasma 5. Absolutely awesome! But it's not for newbies. Even as a guest OS under VB it is as fast as my host 14.04. Drawbacks: only 7,800 apps in the repo and just a handful of widgets. Also, most commercial software developers don't make Arch versions, just Debs (Ububtu & Debian) and RPMs (SUSE, Fedora,etc). But, the apps it offers are well done, at least the ones I've tried.

I have deliberately avoided testing any distros that are based on Ubuntu, for obvious reasons.

[julek]

I do think Debian contains a full btrfs. However it's not fully stable and Michael Larabel from Phoronix has had corrupt data because of it.

[mparillo]

Ditto, as a guest OS. Debian 8 KDE is very vanilla. Very stable and drop-dead easy to install. However, one MAJOR criteria I have adopted for any future distro I might select is that it include a full featured Btrfs.

Another distro I've been testing is Arch KDE Plasma 5. Absolutely awesome! But it's not for newbies. Even as a guest OS under VB it is as fast as my host 14.04. Drawbacks: only 7,800 apps in the repo and just a handful of widgets. Also, most commercial software developers don't make Arch versions, just Debs (Ububtu & Debian) and RPMs (SUSE, Fedora,etc). But, the apps it offers are well done, at least the ones I've tried.

I have deliberately avoided testing any distros that are based on Ubuntu, for obvious reasons.

I have been testing Manjaro, an Arch derivative. True, the main packages are a bit sparse, but the AUR is awesome. One package that is not officially packaged for Arch (Passwordsafe) actually is more current on AUR than the working official Ubuntu version. Even proprietary packages like Dropbox and google-chrome are in the AUR. But for some reason, unlike your experiance, Manjaro is noticably more prone to disk thrashing if you only have a 1GB netbook or VM.

Debian, in addition to older packages, seems to require a lot of post-install tuning to feel as smooth as Kubuntu.

[julek]

Actually it depends for Debian. Debian stable needs actually to be compared against Ubuntu LTS, and if you compare it you'll see that current stable Debian contains actually more recent software than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Now to be honest in term of software selection a Debian stable is roughly equivalent to an Ubuntu x.10, where x corresponds to the year of a Ubuntu LTS. However with backports you get some newer software quite often, for example LibreOffice 5.x. And it's true yes that you'll need much more post-install tuning that with Kubuntu to get the same user experience. However on the other side it is faster and more stable.

[oshunluvr]

As GG knows, I'm with him on the issue of btrfs. It's super convenient to use and has features that, once you're used to them, really don't allow a regression to the dying EXT formats. granted, btrfs isn't a one-stop solution. I still use swap partitions and ext2 on thumb drives. As far a Michael's reporting - they had one machine that had issues (from the error messages I saw, it looked like a familiar kernel problem that was fixed almost immediately) out of 16 - and myself and another forum member have been using btrfs daily since 0.19 without any data loss due to corruptions. Of course, even if there was a loss, it's super easy to make backups and rollbacks if you know what you're doing.

Debian stable is just too old for my tastes. I'm going to check out Siduction again, but it's been somewhat slower (update-wise) than the *buntus are. I guess we can't have it all...

[GreyGeek]

I do think Debian contains a full btrfs. However it's not fully stable and Michael Larabel from Phoronix has had corrupt data because of it.

No, it's somewhat limited in its capabilities. AND, more importantly, its configuration is not as desirable as Kubuntu's (@root, @home)

[GreyGeek]

Actually it depends for Debian. Debian stable needs actually to be compared against Ubuntu LTS, and if you compare it you'll see that current stable Debian contains actually more recent software than Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Now to be honest in term of software selection a Debian stable is roughly equivalent to an Ubuntu x.10, where x corresponds to the year of a Ubuntu LTS. However with backports you get some newer software quite often, for example LibreOffice 5.x. And it's true yes that you'll need much more post-install tuning that with Kubuntu to get the same user experience. However on the other side it is faster and more stable.

I installed Debian Jessie 8 KDE and found it to be drop dead easy to install and tune up. Other than configuring Dolphin the way usually do, setting of the system tray and adding quick launch and my most used apps, which I always do with Kubuntu, there was nothing else to do.

A fully updated Debian 8 Jessie KDE is running KDE 4.14.2 while my fully updated Kubuntu 14.04 LTS is running KDE 4.13.3.

[MoonRise]

.....but it's been somewhat slower (update-wise) than the *buntus are. I guess we can't have it all...

As with anything in life, no we can't have it all. It would be nice but you do have to decide. My decision is I will wait and see and if for real Kubunut is to die, I wait until that is so.


It is very sad that a select few zealots that care nothing about anything but their ego push out such talented individuals and cause such a great piece of work go to ruin.

[Qqmike]

MoonRise: As with anything in life, no we can't have it all. It would be nice but you do have to decide. My decision is I will wait and see and if for real Kubunut is to die, I wait until that is so.

Yep, me, too, I'm with you on this. There's a h&ll of a lot of people and enterprises depending on Kubuntu; I can't imagine it will just blow away.

[claydoh]

I installed Debian Jessie 8 KDE and found it to be drop dead easy to install and tune up. Other than configuring Dolphin the way usually do, setting of the system tray and adding quick launch and my most used apps, which I always do with Kubuntu, there was nothing else to do.

A fully updated Debian 8 Jessie KDE is running KDE 4.14.2 while my fully updated Kubuntu 14.04 LTS is running KDE 4.13.3.

kubuntu-backports puts you to 4.14.2.......just sayin'

[rybnik]

I have an ignorant question.

What is Kubuntu aside from Ubuntu that uses Plasma instead of Unity?

What does it mean for Kubuntu to die in the future, if we'll still be able to slap KDE on top of Ubuntu?