Should Ubuntu Have Gone With KDE Instead Of GNOME?

[lowflyer]

Well, no. Ubuntu should not have gone with KDE. Following the rather public conflict between Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth, this would have been a really bad idea. The "arranged marriage" between the two can only be entertaining if you bring enough popcorn to enjoy the fireworks. There's a reason why these two went separate ways, and it is ok like this.

I'm saying this as a longterm KDE user and my preferred desktop is KDE. But saying this, I'm also lamenting the fact that there is not a single serious distro out there that takes KDE seriously. Not counting KDE neon as it is no "big" distribution yet. And no, Canonical was never ever serious about Kubuntu. KDE in OpenSuse is a joke in itself.

[finalzone]

Offtopic, one of my frustrations (and could just be my ignorance) is that Gnome uses a application bar at the top.. and I used to be able to spawn a new terminal window from there (wheh an terminal windows was active), and now, even though there is still an application tool bar, you have to wonder why it's even there because you have to go to the terminal window to spawn another terminal now. Just seems weird.

For that purpose, Gnome Classic is available and currently used in Enterprise distributions notably RHEL, CentOS, OpenSuse and Oracle.

[eigenlambda]

wowow, first the politics article and now a type of flamebait i don't think I've even seen on slashdot. way to grow the comments

[M@yeulC]

What is even the purpose of this question. We can't dictate what Cannonical decides to do, nor what they should do. "Would you have preferred to see Cannonical go with KDE instead of GNOME" sounds better worded, but probably not catchy/baity enough for a headline. It sounds like Cannonical themselves are asking.

Now, on a personal level, I use KDE, I like it, and would surely enjoy seeing more resources getting thrown at it, but I surely won't dictate what Cannonical *should* do.

[eigenlambda]

This is a strange argument. I have a 9 year old Core2 machine that can run all of the Linux desktops just fine. Even Windows 10 runs on that thing. Are there people out there trying to run KDE on some ancient pentium II with 32MB of RAM or something?

I promise If it can run XFCE, it can run KDE. The "lightweight" desktop is fictitious idea.

Laptops are routinely sold with 2GB of memory, 16GB of disk, and weak processors with two cores and few GHz. This is important because KDE is written in cxx, a language notorious for large binary images and incompatibilities. Also, if both major desktop OSes are cxx, it will create the perception that cxx is a good language for writing desktop environments, crippling desktop innovation in the future.

[jacob]

I can understand staying with GTK+, but why pick Gnome over Xfce? Xubuntu is more popular than Ubuntu Gnome or Kubuntu and I'm guessing Xfce is the most popular desktop in general. Most people aren't power users and don't want a bunch of senseless desktop features or eye candy that they'll never use.

I have nothing against XFCE (I even have it on one machine) but I very much doubt that it's the most popular desktop. Most newcomers from Windows probably don't even know it exists, while they would have at least seen GNOME. Also, is XFCE still developed?

There is merit in the argument that the default desktop should be something conservative and familiar, but if they went that route, the right choice IMHO would be Cinnamon.

[davidvt]

Canonical Ltd. should make a open POLL some were and let the users poll it !

[MiUNX]

Let me explain why not. If you read between the lines of what he said, they're going to make server their main focus. Those guys simply prefer gnome.

Ubuntu has stopped being a user focussed distro for quite a while now. The only purely user focussed distro(s) that I know are Elementary OS and Deepin OS.

I've been using Elementary OS for several now, they have a whole philosophy on what makes good UX.

[OneBitUser]

I'm saying this as a longterm KDE user and my preferred desktop is KDE. But saying this, I'm also lamenting the fact that there is not a single serious distro out there that takes KDE seriously. Not counting KDE neon as it is no "big" distribution yet. And no, Canonical was never ever serious about Kubuntu. KDE in OpenSuse is a joke in itself.

I have been using openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE for a few months now and I completely disagree on it being a joke.
I previously found KDE to be intimidating and unneccessarily "blingy", but I came to appreciate it and its many usability enhancements on this distro.
It is also quite stable, and works as intended, as opposed to other KDE-using distros i tried previously (Mint 18 & 18.1 KDE, Fedora KDE Spin, Kubuntu 12.04, 14.04, 16.04). On those other systems I found several misbehaving or simply non-working functions (applying themes and language settings, changing pointer theme, etc.), while these never occurred on Tumbleweed. The only persistent issue I currently have was also present on Mint 18.1 Cinnamon, so it's not a KDE issue: Firefox hangs/freezes, but it might not be FF's fault, more likely some extension causes problems.

[Mez']

I've been using Elementary OS for several now, they have a whole philosophy on what makes good UX.

And yet somehow they ended up with a OS X clone.