Canonical to Cease Support for Kubuntu

[Rob Williams]

In a bit of surprising news, Canonical via its mailing list has announced that it will cease support for its Kubuntu distribution after 12.04 ships in April. Jonathan Riddel, Kubuntu's previous maintainer, stated in his e-mail that Canonical is preferring to treat Kubuntu much like other leading Ubuntu-forked offerings and provide the infrastructure, rather than produce it in-house and support it also.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Greg King]

Thats unfortunate. Im still a relatively new day to day user of Linux (openSUSE) but Ive quickly learned to love KDE and no one is bigger in the Linux home user world as Canonical.

 

[Ben]

Kubuntu is a joke. It's clear Canonical does not and have cared not for a long time. I tried to get Kubuntu 11.10 running awhile back and ran into this bug. Basically, if you install and then try to update the system using Muon, the KDE equivalent of Synaptic, the update will fail and render your system completely broken.

Way to go Canonical, release a distro that completely breaks on first update and then don't even bother to fix the bug. It's clear to me that with bugs like this, they don't really care.

 

[MacMan]

Personally, I really liked Kubuntu and it's not like it's exactly going away anywhere. It will still be developed and Canonical will still be lending a hand, just not financial support. Considering that I'm looking forward to running the next update of Ubuntu, version 12, its not the biggest disappointment but it is sad. Hopefully, a lot of the bugs with Unity will be addressed, and I can get some decent support.... drivers.... for my printer!.

 

[Glider]

<sarcasm>Yet another great decision brought to you by Canonical, creaters of the best distro around </sarcasm>

 

[marfig]

It's a rare day the day I hear some piece of news that makes me regret the decision I took a few years back to go with a minimalist distro.

This was not that day.

Never really fancied Ubuntu from day one. But do respect what they did; It's the one distribution responsible for the widest adoption and spread of the Linux operating system. Apparently they seem to think KDE had nothing to do with it.

This is what Mark Shuttleworth, said shortly after he started Canonical:

I believe that the KDE community does phenomenal work, and having a community-driven distribution to showcase that work will help attract users and developers to the project. Our overall goal in the Ubuntu project is to further the adoption of free software on the desktop and the server, and we recognise that KDE is an essential part of the mix of desktop environments that allows people to find the best environment for their needs.