"[...] a regularly released community-friendly distro with a strong KDE focus. There is no other major distro out there that matches that description [...]"<p>Then WTF is OpenSuse? <a href="http://www.opensuse.org/en/" rel="nofollow">http://www.opensuse.org/en/</a><p>This makes me really mad. OpenSuse is a major distro and has supported KDE for years. It's not so popular in the USA, but is pretty big in Europe (I have used it for years and it rocks; so does KDE). I don't see how the quote above is excusable. Before reading that you had my sympathy, but if you're going to trash-talk the rest of the community then good riddance.<p>[I just noticed some people are actively downvoting this comment. Just how far does mindless Ubuntu fanboyism and intolerance of alternatives go?]
Following the Unix philosophy <i>Write programs that do one thing and do it well</i> -- perhaps we can assume that Canonical is willing to maintain one OS, and do it well.
This comment stood out for me in that article:<p><i>If it does then we need people to step up and take the initiative in doing the tasks that are often poorly supported by the community process. ISO testing, for example, is a long, slow, thankless task, and it is hard to get volunteers for it. We can look at ways of reducing effort from what we do such as scrapping the alternate CD or automating KDE SC packaging.</i><p>This is the biggest single challenge that free software has to over come if it every hopes to challenge proprietary versions. Testing, and verifying bug fixes, and bugs, and documenting. Its not the 'fun' work of building a distro, its not the 'glorious' work of building a distro, its not something that makes people want to sit at your table during a 'con.<p>But the reality is the for most software products the number of people who are 'users' and the number of people who are 'developers' are generally very different, with successful products having many more users than developers. Users have no option when they hit a problem or an incompatibility but to stop using, that is their only choice. They aren't going to learn C, they aren't going to try to fetch and build a newer version of a kernel module, all they really can do is try something else.<p>Everything else pales in comparison to that problem.
I don't understand what is the problem.
I installed Ubuntu multiple times just to uninstall Gnome and install KDE as a first step after install. Never bothered to actually try KUbuntu.<p>Is this method of installing KDE still supported, or they are dropping support for KDE completely.
That's a shame. I never liked KDE since I first tried it about 15 years ago. Unity and Gnome 3 are so bad that on my latest ubuntu install, I decided to see if KDE was fixed yet. It's now my primary desktop environment. There are a few issues with it, but I felt like it was far better than the alternatives.
I've recently switched Linux Mint as a result of Canonical's new focus on eye candy rather than functionality (I couldn't take the new interface in Ubuntu). Have others gone the same way or is there another distribution I should look at?
I liked that mix o Debian base + latest KDE + some Ubuntu graphical extras (printer, package update, etc). KDE needs it's own distro focused on a great KDE user experience. Sorry for Mandriva and others but for me I need something based on Debian. My real opinion is that KDE should make itself a distro to get a good vertical integration.
Canonical should consider dropping Unity and getting the Gnome people to drop Gnome 3 and then get them to come out with Gnome 4 based on Gnome 2 with some very small Ubuntu twists. Oh right, that would be all Ubuntu versions up to 11 which were successful.
It's always sad to see a project failing. There are other alternatives, both to a KDE linux distro (i.e: openSUSE) and gnome/ubuntu (mint being my favorite).<p>It's a business decision I understand, they want to shift focus completely to ubuntu, especially since they are losing a huge user-base over their last gnome3 releases.
The reason i prefer xubuntu is the fact that Kubuntu is going the way of ubuntu by investing heavily on eyecandy, touch-like interfaces and excessive UI bloat. KDE seems to be the best overall platform for development, but the interface is trying too much to be everything. I think they should reconsider falling back to a simple clean default desktop, because they are doing a disservice to the developers of thousands of great KDE apps.