poll at ubuntuforums.org on whether Canonical should show more love to Kubuntu

[ghostautumn]

Hi, I've written a detailed thread at ubuntuforums.org (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1462668) explaining that I feel Canonical should give more support to Kubuntu in terms of developers' time and resources, and included a poll asking for others' opinions. I'd encourage anyone who has an opinion on the issue to please vote and participate in the discussion. Especially if you love/like Kubuntu but feel it needs more attention and love, please go speak your mind, because otherwise the thread is just going to be trashed by people who hate KDE and/or only use Gnome and don't care about KDE users' needs - it's only been up for half an hour and it's already getting rude flames, and a disproportionate amount of Gnome-only voters.

Please help!

[dewclaw82]

Re: poll at ubuntuforums.org on whether Canonical should show more love to Kubuntu

Okay, I voted in the poll and attached a reply detailing the lack of love kubuntu users have been receiving.
Then I came back here to find out if 9.10 had been released yet. I was so frustrated by that search that I went back to ubuntuforums and was going great guns on a negation of my first answer:

I've changed my mind. Even though I love Kubuntu, it might be just as well to let it die. The amount of time that isn't paid to the Kubuntu sites sure makes it look like nobody really cares about having anyone but perhaps an experienced Linux user visit. This is particularly evident at the kubuntuforums.org site.

The "Home" page's last announcement is dated April 12, 2009 and the lead on the News page is just a copy of the same year-old announcement. When one goes to the actual forums, the Important Administrative Announcements stop at December 2009 and the first page of the Important Kubuntu Announcements has only one mention of the newest LTS candidate, which I believe is going to be released today or tomorrow.

Then I realized that "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." What can I do to help this forum?

PS I have no idea how to shorten these lines.

[askrieger]

Re: poll at ubuntuforums.org on whether Canonical should show more love to Kubuntu

The April 12, 2009 date refers to the welcome statement. It is not the most recent post listed on the home page. Nor is it intended to be.

This site is NOT an official part of the Ubuntu organization (as UFO is). It is entirely independent. It was established (and financed) by OpenSource. Ubuntu developers are welcome to participate here, and some do, but so do a lot of other people.

You can help, by participating here. If you can answer a question and help someone, do so, PLEASE. If you've got a problem, ask about it (after searching to see if it has already been solved). The next person with the same problem will be glad to learn from the answer you get.

[dequire]

Re: poll at ubuntuforums.org on whether Canonical should show more love to Kubuntu

Hi, I've written a detailed thread at ubuntuforums.org (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1462668) explaining that I feel Canonical should give more support to Kubuntu in terms of developers' time and resources, and included a poll asking for others' opinions.

I voted. +1. Kubuntu needs more Canonical love, pure and simple.

[claydoh]

Re: poll at ubuntuforums.org on whether Canonical should show more love to Kubuntu

I personally choose Kubuntu specifically because it is a smaller, community based distro, and not the uber-megalith that our big sister is. More $$ would be nice, but that always comes with strings. The strings we already have are not bad ones imo.

Unfortunately for us, Ubuntu has a mission, and more KDE would only distract from and dilute resources needed to achieve those goals. That is of course not easily to accept.

What we really lack is more community effort from developers, artists, and such, and I don't think the Kubuntu teams is too good at attracting those to our distro, probably in part to the size and success and controversies Ubuntu have had. What would attract coders, packagers, etc from Arch, Fedora, Opensuse, et al? I think the community aspect is one way to achieve this.

but there are too many questions/concerns/wants than there are answers at the moment.

[kubicle]

Re: poll at ubuntuforums.org on whether Canonical should show more love to Kubuntu

For me this is again one of those double-edged swords.

While I wouldn't mind Canonical paying for more devs to make KDE experience smoother on *buntus (and I do think that would benefit ubuntu as well, since many people run KDE software on standard ubuntu, and Canonical also offers support for kubuntu), I don't really want Canonical/Shuttleworth to be more involved in the development/design of kubuntu. From my perspective, for every good call Canonical/Shuttleworth make, they make two bad ones and three questionable ones (of course, this is just my personal opinion).

I like kubuntu for what it currently is, a community driven distribution that aims to provide pretty vanilla KDE experience. What would make me happy is more communication between ubuntu and kubuntu devs to ensure that changes in the ubuntu/gnome side of things don't break things in kubuntu/kde (which seems to be a semi-regular occurrence), I'm under the impression that most of the ubuntu devs have limited experience with KDE (I wouldn't want to think that they don't care).