Ubuntu vs Kubuntu

[Peter Whittaker]

On Fri, 2007-01-19 at 13:31 -0500, Pay Wahun wrote:
> emphasis is placed on Ubuntu, so much that I wonder if Canonical has
> any long-term commitment towards Kubuntu

My understanding is that Shuttleworth based Ubuntu on Gnome because of
his perception of Gnome's commitment to usability, that some KDE fans
saw that Ubuntu was good and launched Kubuntu to get their favourite X
environment running on their favourite distro, and that Shuttleworth has
since switched to Kubuntu.

Since the sabdfl use Kubuntu, I expect there will be long-term support.
Refer also to http://www.kubuntu.org/announcements/kde-commitment.php

As for me, I'm still using Ubuntu despite finding more and more I
dislike about Gnome's approach to user configuration and preferences*.
It's more inertia than anything else for me: I've gotten use to it and I
can live with it. But KDE beckons, oh, it beckons the cfg file hacker in
me....

For a newbie, Ubuntu may be better, because there are fewer options, the
user experience is more choreographed/constrained (YMMV). But someone
who really wants to explore may prefer KDE because they can configure
everything!

Either way, I think the long-term legs are there.

pww

* The approach of some Gnome devs strikes me as paternalism in the guise
of usability - it's like being on a Mac - or NeXTStep - back in the day
and having little irritations - and serious usability issues - caused by
design philosophy. Like the lack of screen saver options in Gnome screen
saver because the maintainer doesn't believe in user configuration (so
I've been told). Like the lack of PageUp/PageDown on NeXTStations
because NeXT design philosophy was that it was a screen not a page. Why
they couldn't supply the function and call it ScreenUp/ScreenDown
instead I'll never know... ...but that's just me, and I've always been a
grumpy old fart.


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