Kubuntu 15.10 Could Be The End Of The Road

While tensions appeared eased yesterday between the Ubuntu and Kubuntu camps with Jonathan Riddell stepping down from his leadership roles, that may not be the end of the story.

Kubuntu 6.04 Flight 1 with KDE 3.4.3.

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.

Kubuntu 15.04 with KDE Plasma 5

Given the strained ties with upstream Ubuntu / Canonical, it begs the question whether they're forming plans to fork Kubuntu in a different direction or jump ship entirely and work on something else. For what it's worth, Jonathan Riddell is employed by KDE-happy Blue Systems and they also sponsor the Netrunner Linux distribution. Blue Systems also has other KDE developers on its payroll like Martin Grässlin. The KDE-using Netrunner Rolling is based on the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution while Netrunner Standard is based on Kubuntu.

I guess we'll see how this situation plays out in a few months time.