Kubuntu 15.10 Could Be The End Of The Road

[JantarMantar]

Alternatives to Kubuntu!?

I use KaOS. It doesn't have a ton of packages, but it's a rolling, cutting edge and very well maintained distro (these adjectives may sound like cliche but combination of these 3 qualities is hard to find). Even though it uses pacman as package manager, you can't directly install packages from Arch. But pacman being so simple, most of the packages from Arch can be built only with trivial modifications. I still have Kubuntu installed alongside KaOS for hard to build packages, but I am using KaOS more and more nowadays.

[TeoLinuX]

I'm a big fan of Netrunner Linux, rolling release based on Manjaro (arch derivative).
It hasn't Plasma yet, but it's developed by blue systems

[sarfarazahmad]

i think kde5 is the best thing that has happened to linux desktop in a long while now. even though mate is still usable we deserved a newer more rich mature platform. gnome 3 still sucks on old hardware ( i amusing sandybridge laptop) and in third world countries ppl dont upgrade that often. kde 5 runs butter smooth on intels poor graphics i believe courtesy opengles . also i think Kubuntu users should look at manjaro. manjaro with kde is awesome. i have found that using BFQ has really helped with Sata 2 devices. my laptop has never been this stable or felt this fluid before. Thanks to manjaro and plasma 5

[zanny]

I could easily see Blue Systems dropping Kubuntu and making Netrunner a Mint-class derivative. Maybe even joining Mint.

Or maybe this schism will make them pivot to the Arch base. Would be nice to see a business invest in Arch, maybe we'd get good working MAC out of the box finally!

Regardless, Blue Systems isn't going away, and they are basically paying for KDE, and they will still have a distro that is the go-to. I hope they do not end up moving to Suse, though, honestly - we need less divergence across desktops, and I like to think that Suse is losing steam to Fedora / Ubuntu.

Not that I don't think Suse was great, hell it still is - before 15.04 I was advocating 13.1 to anyone in need of a stable KDE desktop. It is just that as a community project it can never reach its full potential of getting KDE to the masses. And as it transitions into a more rolling release first model... you start to wonder why you need to have OpenSuse and Archlinux and Antergos and Manjaro. Red Hat is high on the Gnome koolaid and Fedora is only finally getting its third party packaging mess in order after years, so its not a real valid option. And Canonical just ruined Kubuntu with this drama mess.

The future of KDE is bright, all the tech is in place for the most part - we could still use better online accounts integration (kpeople) that kwallet replacement (ksecretservice) and some universal URI handler for sharing functionality on top of kio (and a gui and clean way to manage it, so you can do per-url handling or have a share button that isn't the kipi-plugins list dump). We just need solid foundations to build upon, and if Kubuntu is at risk... thats not good.

[steveriley]

Michael wrote...

Kubuntu's future is now being put under the microscope. In particular, the Kubuntu 15.10 Alpha 1 release notes mention at the top, "The Kubuntu team are committed to releasing 15.10 in October. Updates, bug fixes and future releases are currently uncertain." Basically the official statement is that the future past October's release of Kubuntu 15.10 is uncertain for this KDE flavor of Ubuntu.

It's been changing throughout the day. I've collected a history.

[GreatEmerald]

I tried OpenSUSE last year and found the package system a nightmare. I juts wanted updated KDE and what I got was a package system that took forever and included multiple copies of every package, sometimes with the same version number! There was no nice app store version of the package manager, and nothing as nice as Muon / Synaptic - YaST is awful because it just doesn't feel like it belongs. I praise YaST for being really cool, but it lacks visual and UX polish.

I started with Slackware and ran Gentoo for a few years, so don't think me a noob. Emerge was elegant in a way that apt is and zypper/yast/rpm has never been for me.

You must have been doing something wrong, then. The openSUSE Wiki is pretty clear on how to get it done:

https://en.opensuse.org/KDE_repositories

Basically, choose the repository you want, add it into YaST, then go to the repository listing and click "replace system packages". That's it. One-click solution.

As for YaST looks, you'll be happy to know that the problem is solved now. It looks just like any other Qt application now, since it was recently ported to Qt5.

And as for "app store", while I highly dislike the concept, Apper has been on by default for a while now, and Muon will soon become a part of Plasma 5.

So, basically, those who have tried it in the past should try it again now. There have been a lot of improvements. openSUSE is by far one of the best KDE distributions right now. (And OBS is better than ppas, too.)

[andre30correia]

I could easily see Blue Systems dropping Kubuntu and making Netrunner a Mint-class derivative. Maybe even joining Mint.

Or maybe this schism will make them pivot to the Arch base. Would be nice to see a business invest in Arch, maybe we'd get good working MAC out of the box finally!

Regardless, Blue Systems isn't going away, and they are basically paying for KDE, and they will still have a distro that is the go-to. I hope they do not end up moving to Suse, though, honestly - we need less divergence across desktops, and I like to think that Suse is losing steam to Fedora / Ubuntu.

Not that I don't think Suse was great, hell it still is - before 15.04 I was advocating 13.1 to anyone in need of a stable KDE desktop. It is just that as a community project it can never reach its full potential of getting KDE to the masses. And as it transitions into a more rolling release first model... you start to wonder why you need to have OpenSuse and Archlinux and Antergos and Manjaro. Red Hat is high on the Gnome koolaid and Fedora is only finally getting its third party packaging mess in order after years, so its not a real valid option. And Canonical just ruined Kubuntu with this drama mess.

The future of KDE is bright, all the tech is in place for the most part - we could still use better online accounts integration (kpeople) that kwallet replacement (ksecretservice) and some universal URI handler for sharing functionality on top of kio (and a gui and clean way to manage it, so you can do per-url handling or have a share button that isn't the kipi-plugins list dump). We just need solid foundations to build upon, and if Kubuntu is at risk... thats not good.

how you put a arch machine working out the box? the point of arch is building your own machine from nothing

[oleid]

gnome 3 still sucks on old hardware ( i amusing sandybridge laptop)

Huh? I'm using Arch Linux's GNOME 3 on a Core2 Duo ULV laptop from Asus. It works very well.

[oleid]

how you put a arch machine working out the box? the point of arch is building your own machine from nothing

Install Arch via the Antergos live DVD. Antergos uses the same repo than Arch. (plus one Antergos specific with extra icons and similar stuff). It's the fastest way to set up an Arch desktop.

[Nth_man]

Kubuntu has a lot of advantages, even if it changes its name, it's going to be there. You can buy computers (e.g. from ZaReason) with Kubuntu preinstalled, there are a lot of users and experience brought by civil services (*)(**)(***), it has technical support (****) when a company/government needs to pay an expert, it has paying sponsors (Blue Systems), etc.

(*)Kubuntu rollouts include the world's largest Linux desktop deployment, that includes more than 500,000 desktops in Brazil (in 42,000 schools of 4,000 cities)

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130402015944/http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon/griffin

http://lwn.net/Articles/455972/

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-to-be-sponsored-by-blue-systems

https://blogs.kde.org/2011/09/16/42000-schools-running-kubuntu-derivative

"Kubuntu gets used throughout the world, including in the world's largest desktop deployment in Brazil."

https://lwn.net/Articles/635613/

(**) What is the Limux client? Put simply, it?s a customised version of Kubuntu.
-- http://www.linuxvoice.com/the-big-switch/
-- http://www.linuxvoice.com/issues/002/02munich.pdf
"We're meeting in Munich at the offices of LiMux who have just completed their transition to convert the whole of public administration in Munich to Kubuntu, over 15,000 computers."
- https://blogs.kde.org/blog/57

(***) http://www.fsdaily.com/Government/Ne...000_school_PCs

(****) http://kubuntu.emerge-open.com/