Long time user first time poster

[Endafy]

I have become recently aware that Kubuntu development is now being handled exclusively by Blue Systems, and I believe a name change should be in order as it isn't really Ubuntu at all anymore short of the repositories and generic kernel (which all debian distros use the generic kernel) so herein lies my thoughts:

1) It is feature complete enough outside of Ubuntu to actually be a new distribution.
2)Canonical no longer develops this, nor provides support for it.
3)Canonical has their own agenda with Unity and doesn't want KDE associated with Ubuntu. (More on this in a minute)
4)They are closing their doors while developing their OS.
5)KDE Plasma Desktop itself is almost an entire OS, short of package management, xorg, and the Linux Kernel
6)You have to be very explicit with Xorg and other under the hood services when compiling KDE that changes core values of the OS
7)Lastly but certainly not least the name "Kubuntu" was an ongoing joke and I believe this to be a very serious choice for people

More to the Canonical agenda:
They want Unity development and with them closing their development doors to the public eye for 13.04 proves this. They have absolutely no interest in KDE whatsoever, and this is completely fine, the awesome folks at KDE are prime at developing such a strong desktop that little needs to be done to have a fully complete desktop. Canonical is obviously selling your information to Amazon and other partners and records all of your activity in Unity, and afaik, KDE and Kubuntu does no such thing.

Now for my cornered view:
Ubuntu is a trademark of Canonical, Kubuntu makes it sound like a "me too" distribution, which this is far from it. Linux Mint uses the Ubuntu repositories and their name stands on it's own. Now before you go on saying how I don't understand what goes on under the hood, you are entirely right. What I do understand, however, is marketing. This needs to be it's own brand rather than a spinoff me too product. Comparing KDE to the likes of Unity/Gnome Shell is like comparing apples to oranges really, and Linux Mint changed less about their flagship OS and has it's own brand. And I may not fully understand what Blue Systems specifically does, but from the looks of it, they spread themselves thin, they need to focus on one single KDE desktop entity like Canonical focuses on Ununtu with Unity.

Call it something new, something fresh, something that captures the essance of the purity of how it feels, how it flows when using it. Like a gentle breeze. The theme name is Oxygen, call it something like Haire OS, where the H is silent or something nifty and new, and soft sounding, not a hard A sound but like it sort of flows into the name when reading it. Something that captures the pure love that is KDE with the ease of use that Ubuntu brings to the table.

You could have differing opinions, but this is what I do for a living and I am quite successful at what I do.

[woodsmoke]

Hi
Thanks very much for the very thoughtful post.
I'm sure that people will think about it!
Woodintobrandingalsosmoke

[Snowhog]

7)Lastly but certainly not least the name "Kubuntu" was an ongoing joke and I believe this to be a very serious choice for people

Not sure where you get that idea from. It was a 'logical' name choice, given that it was a melding of KDE and Ubuntu. It might interest you to know, if you don't already, that the Gnome Desktop Environment wasn't developed by Canonical -- "is mainly developed by Red Hat employees.". KDE actually preceded Gnome. See GNOME.

[Endafy]

Not sure where you get that idea from. It was a 'logical' name choice, given that it was a melding of KDE and Ubuntu. It might interest you to know, if you don't already, that the Gnome Desktop Environment wasn't developed by Canonical -- "is mainly developed by Red Hat employees.". KDE actually preceded Gnome. See GNOME.

During the initial development of Kubuntu they were struggling to come up with a name, and someone jokingly chimed in "Kubuntu" and it stuck. It had nothing to do with logic at all as since the very beginning Canonical didn't want spin-offs with their name, but they do nothing to stop derivatives.

Shuttleworth himself hates the name Kubuntu, loathes all things KDE, and wishes to distance himself from the project entirely, but doesn't wish to try to hinder other people's choices, if some people like KDE so be it. The ending support is proof enough, however the issue remains. It would be a sad day if Kubuntu died because Blue Systems were told they couldn't have the word Ubuntu with a K in front of it and got sued for it. They bought the project but the name Ubuntu is specific property of Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth.

[Snowhog]

Yes, but Canonical retains the copyright to the name, even if they don't like it. For Blue Systems to re-brand Kubuntu, they would have to get Canonical's approval, which isn't likely - yet. Kubuntu is still Canonical's intellectual property. They may have stopped supporting it financially, but they haven't relinquished control over it. I may be wrong on this entirely, but...

[claydoh]

Welcome to KFN, Endafy!!

I have become recently aware that Kubuntu development is now being handled exclusively by Blue Systems, and I believe a name change should be in order as it isn't really Ubuntu at all anymore short of the repositories and generic kernel (which all debian distros use the generic kernel) so herein lies my thoughts:

That is incorrect, as Blue Systems is sponsoring individual developers, not Kubuntu itself. They are also sponsoring other KDE developers that are not part of Kubuntu. We are still firmly ubuntu based, sharing everything underneath the deskop environment, as well as the development tools, servers, repos, iso testing, bug reporting, disk image hosting, etc.

1) It is feature complete enough outside of Ubuntu to actually be a new distribution.
2)Canonical no longer develops this, nor provides support for it.
3)Canonical has their own agenda with Unity and doesn't want KDE associated with Ubuntu. (More on this in a minute)
4)They are closing their doors while developing their OS.
5)KDE Plasma Desktop itself is almost an entire OS, short of package management, xorg, and the Linux Kernel
6)You have to be very explicit with Xorg and other under the hood services when compiling KDE that changes core values of the OS
7)Lastly but certainly not least the name "Kubuntu" was an ongoing joke and I believe this to be a very serious choice for people

1) Kubuntu is in the same status as Xubuntu, Edubuntu, and a few others. When there is an xorg or driver problem, it is the Ubuntu devs, most of them volunteers, who are the ones that usually fix them. Kubuntu does not do much of that at all, manpower and skill wise.

2) Ah, but they do, by providing the infrastructure that they always have, the only thing that has changed is that the Canonical no longer pays Mr. Riddell's salary, and they no longer sell Kubuntu support contracts (assuming here that they were not big sellers)

3)LOL , or Xfce, or Lxde, LTSP, Mythtv. Of course they have their own agenda, they always have. And we are quite aware of it. Doesn't change a thing. They still pay for all these Ubuntu flavors to attend UDS, I have been to one, and Steve Reilly is going to the next one in about a week.

4)Bull-loney. As I have pointed out elsewere, reading the actual statement of what is going on says something a bit less nefarious. Some bits, for surprise and wow factor, and licensed under the gpl, will be worked on privately, but with no nda or anything.

5) Again, Kubuntu does not develop the inner workings for the most part.

6)?? I don't think I understand that one

7) Wrong, by about 90% as the word actually does have meaning in the Bemba language. After 7 years of use, I think the name is fine. The joke nowadays would be coming up with a new name that isn't already taken and doesn't sound even more silly.

More to the Canonical agenda:
They want Unity development and with them closing their development doors to the public eye for 13.04 proves this. They have absolutely no interest in KDE whatsoever, and this is completely fine, the awesome folks at KDE are prime at developing such a strong desktop that little needs to be done to have a fully complete desktop. Canonical is obviously selling your information to Amazon and other partners and records all of your activity in Unity, and afaik, KDE and Kubuntu does no such thing.

Now for my cornered view:
Ubuntu is a trademark of Canonical, Kubuntu makes it sound like a "me too" distribution, which this is far from it. Linux Mint uses the Ubuntu repositories and their name stands on it's own. Now before you go on saying how I don't understand what goes on under the hood, you are entirely right. What I do understand, however, is marketing. This needs to be it's own brand rather than a spinoff me too product. Comparing KDE to the likes of Unity/Gnome Shell is like comparing apples to oranges really, and Linux Mint changed less about their flagship OS and has it's own brand. And I may not fully understand what Blue Systems specifically does, but from the looks of it, they spread themselves thin, they need to focus on one single KDE desktop entity like Canonical focuses on Ununtu with Unity.

Call it something new, something fresh, something that captures the essance of the purity of how it feels, how it flows when using it. Like a gentle breeze. The theme name is Oxygen, call it something like Haire OS, where the H is silent or something nifty and new, and soft sounding, not a hard A sound but like it sort of flows into the name when reading it. Something that captures the pure love that is KDE with the ease of use that Ubuntu brings to the table.

You could have differing opinions, but this is what I do for a living and I am quite successful at what I do.

Mint does use Ubuntu repos, but they also write software and develop their own desktop shell, cinnamon.

What if we don't want to be separated from the Ubuntu family? Is our purpose to grow larger and larger? What if we do not want to be a separate 'brand'? This possibility has already been discussed, as well has a name change back when we were not sure where Kubuntu was headed after Jonathan lost his salary and Blue Systems came into the picture.







I do not want to seem too harsh here, but I am really getting physically tired of haters hating (too strong a word, really) everywhere I go on the net these days. Politics, religion, linux, everywhere I go it is negative negative negative and people not really looking at easily found things. tl;dr

Sorry, ranting again, Sundays are like that Too much social networking and forum browsing.......

[Snowhog]

Sit claydoh. Sit. Good claydoh.

[claydoh]

Hey, where's my treat? Where's my treat where's my treat where's my treat where's my treeeeeaaattt

[vinnywright]

I do not want to seem too harsh here, but I am really getting physically tired of haters hating (too strong a word, really) everywhere I go on the net these days. Politics, religion, linux, everywhere I go it is negative negative negative and people not really looking at easily found things. tl;dr

.....

to true ,,,,to true and a sad thing it is

VINNY

[Endafy]

I really meant no negativity nor hatred at all, and in fact meant it as a positive posting things that I gathered. Some of which I may be a little or a lot wrong on, but it is what I have read around the Internet so I was assuming they were correct and the rest I deduced on my own. This isn't about the polotical end of things, but more the state of how to best go about handeling the future of this great distribution. Mint develops Cinnamon from which I gather is just another shell for Gnome, it has a Windows like UI, but is very limited when compared to KDE. I don't hate anyone or anything.

They stopped paying Riddell because they don't want KDE, they want Unity and control. I had no idea this has been discussed before, but it would be a great business move on Riddell's part. Be that as it may that they arent signing a DNR and I am sorry for being wrong (you can damn yellow journalism). This point is then invalid.

The rest of this, however, is my point in case. Mint follows Ubuntu so stringintly close that they are in fact just Ubuntu with Unity replaced, and Cinnamon slapped on with a different GTK UI application for handeling software debs. There are other smaller off-shoots that make granular improvements and such, however, calling it "Kubuntu" hits the mouth hard, people don't use it because it isn't the main distribution, it is seen as a metoo distribution with KDE crudely glued on.

When I used to use Gentoo I had to be specific with the kernel and xorg that I was using KDE, but things may have changed a lot since 3.4, I just assume that though its all new and fresh that they still need to be explicit in compiling directly KDE centric.

I am just saying, that in order to grow, sometimes the apple has to shake from the tree in order to be a tree of it's own. You can only grow so much in the shadow of someone else with no sunlight.

From what I gathered, Ubuntu lost 40% of it's users because of Unity (though this may be more or less) to other distributions or Windows. The name *buntu has left a bad taste in their mouths. The ones who stay put up with Unity with the hopes that it will get better and it probably does just like those (like me) who stuck with KDE 4 through the bad times until it did in fact get better. Will Ubuntu ever be on top again? Only time can really tell, however, businesses who were once on top who got greedy and fell, never get back to the top. Obscurity and choice once again remain king. This happens in every other industry other than computing. I am highly surprised Linux hasn't overtaken Windows yet with the Vista fiasco. But I would put money 10:1 that Ubuntu will never again be the hit poster child it once was. This may sound negative, but it is actually a good thing, because it makes the industry stronger and keeps everyone honest and competitive.

I am a business oriented person, and make my living as such, I majored in big business and small business in college. While the facts may not be 100% correct, I am. I speak from years of experience when I say, you don't want to go down with the ship. If Ubuntu tanks and Shuttleworth one day just gives up and moves on with his life to another endevor, what becomes of all the flavors of *buntu? 9 times out of 10, they will all die off. It happens all the time in business, when you have mergers. People view the brand as forever tainted and anything sporting that brand is not positive but negative. They will refuse it at all costs forcing the off-shoot brands into obscurity.

"But Chris this is Open Source and things just get forked and blah blah" I know this, but its not a proper answer. Canonical is big business, Ubuntu is their branded product like Kellog's Rice Crispy. Canonical does not own Kubuntu, they own the brand Kubuntu. They stopped paying that brand and cut life support for it. As far as they are concerned, no matter what face they put on and lies they may tell you, they could care less about the product. They care for their brand and want a unified experience hence the name Unity. If Kellog stopped paying for Rice Crispy to be produced, but the factory found funding elsewhere, the name would get changed unless the name got purchased from Kellog. Using the name Kubuntu while being funded by another cohort breaks copyright law. It would be up to Canonical to decide to sue for the name or not. They may forever grant immunity not caring what goes on with Kubuntu because it keeps Kubuntu in their shadow never outgrowing it or out pacing it, ensuring it never takes the spotlight.

Canonical does not own the rights to the FOSS software used in Kubuntu, nor do or can they own the package management. That is all GPL. Riddell wanting his own brand and heck, call it Riddell OS should he choose is entirely his own decision, but a name change would be the smarter move. This distribution standing on it's own utilizing what is already available being birthed from the ashes like a pheonix. Or continue being Kubuntu the little brother who always follows Ubuntu to folly or fame but never being it's own personality. It is empty and vapid, but hey what do you care right?

[SteveRiley]

what I have read around the Internet so I was assuming they were correct and the rest I deduced on my own

Official sources for information would be the Kubuntu website, Kubuntu PPAs, and Blue Systems. Unofficial but highly likely to be accurate is this here forum, as several Kubuntu members are also forum regulars (and two are admins). Any other source should be verified before assuming it's true.

---

They stopped paying Riddell because they don't want KDE, they want Unity and control.

Unless you have an authoritative source for this statement, I'm going to have to discount this. Matter of fact, I can find statements that are the opposite of your position.

Mark Shuttleworth: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...il/000071.html

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.

What's changed? Canonical made a business decision to align Kubuntu with the other recognized flavors. Since none of the other flavors had a full-time person on Canonical's payroll, part of that realignment included no longer having a Kubuntu person on Canonical's payroll. Note that Canonical didn't fire Jonathan; they simply wanted to reassign him.

Jonathan Riddell: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ku...ry/005782.html

Today I bring the disappointing news that Canonical will no longer be funding my work on Kubuntu after 12.04. Canonical wants to treat Kubuntu in the same way as the other community flavors such as Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu, and support the projects with infrastructure. This is a big challenge to Kubuntu of course and KDE as well. The practical changes are I won't be able to work on KDE bits in my work time after 12.04 and there won't be paid support for versions after 12.04. This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it.

Eventually, Blue Systems decided to make a different business decision: to invest in people to continue developing Kubuntu. Blue Systems then offered to hire Jonathan and others involved in the project.

---

I had no idea this has been discussed before, but it would be a great business move on Riddell's part.

Many posts here on KFN have much discussion about the transition.

calling it "Kubuntu" hits the mouth hard, people don't use it because it isn't the main distribution, it is seen as a metoo distribution with KDE crudely glued on.

By whom? Phoronix trolls don't count. Please show me some serious, thoughtful discussion about the failure of Kubuntu's name.

When I used to use Gentoo I had to be specific with the kernel and xorg that I was using KDE

So you're assuming that the difficulty you experienced getting KDE to operate correctly on Gentoo applies to Ubuntu, as well? That's probably not very wise. What's the alternative? An underlying Linux distribution that's designed to more easily accomodate alternate desktops, such as Ubuntu, of course. Kubuntu is much more than "just the repositories and kernel."

I am just saying, that in order to grow, sometimes the apple has to shake from the tree in order to be a tree of it's own. You can only grow so much in the shadow of someone else with no sunlight.

Ubuntu is one of the most successful Linux desktop projects in existence. Ubuntu is more than just the ISO with Unity that one can download from ubuntu.com. It seems you don't realize this.

From what I gathered, Ubuntu lost 40% of it's users because of Unity (though this may be more or less) to other distributions or Windows.

Again, a source, please. I know that at least some subset of Ubuntu desktop users continue to come to Kubuntu, as our numbers here on KFN have grown and several folks begin their posts with something to the effect of "I'm a recent convert from Unity and..."

I am highly surprised Linux hasn't overtaken Windows yet with the Vista fiasco.

Microsoft fixed that on their own with Windows 7: the most successful product in Microsoft's history. Linux on the desktop wasn't mature enough to take over the enterprise desktop in 2009. I submit that you need to learn more about enterprise desktop computing practices and the notion of "stickiness." Displacing an incumbent is enormously expensive, and very rarely worth the investment.

While the facts may not be 100% correct, I am.

How can you insist on being correct even when you admit your facts may not be?

It happens all the time in business, when you have mergers. People view the brand as forever tainted and anything sporting that brand is not positive but negative. They will refuse it at all costs forcing the off-shoot brands into obscurity.

What in the world are you talking about? My employer, an eight-year-old Silicon Valley networking firm, has succesfully integrated four acquisitions into its product portfolio. These four products are flourishing much more than they did before the acquisitions, and have also helped to broaden the base of our other products.

They stopped paying that brand and cut life support for it. As far as they are concerned, no matter what face they put on and lies they may tell you, they could care less about the product.

At this point, I'm convinced that you're operating mostly in the land of your own opinions. I prefer to operate in the land of evidence and facts.

Using the name Kubuntu while being funded by another cohort breaks copyright law. It would be up to Canonical to decide to sue for the name or not.

You speak of that which you do not know. This issue was settled months ago.

Or continue being Kubuntu the little brother who always follows Ubuntu to folly or fame but never being it's own personality. It is empty and vapid, but hey what do you care right?

I care a lot, and I do not give that care to things or ideas that are empty and vapid. Empty and vapid are, though, apt descriptions for your understanding of Canonical, of Kubuntu, of what motiviates the communities, and how distributions are put together. I certainly wouldn't rely on your intuition to run a business.

[kubicle]

Using the name Kubuntu while being funded by another cohort breaks copyright law. It would be up to Canonical to decide to sue for the name or not.

You're mixing copyright with trademarks: names, titles, short phrases or slogans are not protected by copyright (but can be trademarked), and receiving or giving money for working on kubuntu is not the sort of (commercial) activity that would constitute a trademark infringement (selling kubuntu merchandise would be, for example).

[woodsmoke]

I dunno, but there are multiple other threads about the relationship between Kubuntu and Ubuntu, some of them started by the person under discussion.

So, possibly, perusal of those threads, from the person under discussion, from people that have multiple hats in Ubu, KDE and Kubu, might shed some light on the topic presently at hand.

woodsmoke

[HalationEffect]

Shuttleworth himself hates the name Kubuntu, loathes all things KDE

If that's true, why did he become the first Patron of KDE a few years back?

http://dot.kde.org/2006/10/15/mark-s...rst-patron-kde