Aaron Seigo criticizes Canonical, Kubuntu developers hit back: the Aftermath

My busy schedule seemed to coincide timely with an interesting but recurring debate that has been put in the limelight once again so it seems I can cover the arguments of both sides. Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. and KDE’s lead developer said in an interview with Computerworld,

What I find unfortunate is that some companies dig into technologies. Canonical did not communicate well about long-term support and therefore neglected 35 percent of their user base. A user base they routinely neglect, but at KDE we ignore a lot of this.

Now this was met with disappointment from Jono Bacon, Canonical’s Ubuntu Community Manager who countered Aaron’s comments. Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell wrote an excellent post, leading from the front and listing out the reasons why he felt that Kubuntu was actually helping the cause of KDE. This was followed by a post on the Planet by Celeste Paul which acts as an extension to Riddell’s arguments.

Having given you the situation as it is, I would like to emphasize on certain points from these posts and put forward my opinion on them. I’ll begin in sequence with then, with what Aaron said. I do believe that there is no need to make an actual long-term support version but I do believe that it would help certain small sections of the Kubuntu community, to extend the support of the KDE 3 version of Kubuntu for this particular release from the presently assigned six months to a year. This would give KDE 4 enough time to become a desktop environment which could be reliable enough to provide long-term support for even a year on.

I mean, if Kubuntu 8.04 has a year’s support, then users who opt for long-term stability can work for a year on what will probably be a stable KDE 3.5.9 release and then make the move to KDE 4 which will have been more than a year into its release. If you have seen the rate at which bugs are being fixed in KDE 4, there is no doubt that with this speed coupled with the quality of existing framework, you will have a stable version of KDE 4 following your final usage of KDE 3. All it takes for Canonical is thinking a little outside the box but it would mean making a bold decision.

Their current decision according to me could send one of these signals: a). they simply want to move forward and put their entire focus on KDE 4, b). they are conceding that Ubuntu’s LTS (not Kubuntu’s) is ideal for servers and users looking for a stable option for this particular release, hence ignoring the 35% base they have. I personally think it is a). and I do not think Canonical are cynical enough to concede that they are not giving Kubuntu (coupled with KDE) the developers, attention and focus it needs. Having said all this, I would like to add that judging by Jono Bacon’s post, the decision to not have a Kubuntu LTS this time around was, I am certain, well thought out by them and I respect their decision and I think we should just get on with it.

Now I’d like to touch on the second point of Riddell’s post in which he said that Kubuntu is a pure KDE distro. In my opinion, this is probably the strongest point in his post. He is spot on about Kubuntu actually helping the cause of KDE by being purely KDE-based and not including any GNOME applications in its default setup. PCLinuxOS and Mepis for example, use Synaptic as their package manager, which is GTK+ based. Kubuntu have gone out of their way to create Adept which in my opinion, might lack a small feature or two (like total estimated time remaining) but it is still a fine package manager. Another little known fact he points out is that it was he who worked with Amarok to get the first automatic codec installer working and the fact that Ubuntu got to it first is not true.

He also reminds us of Kubuntu Tutorials Day, when he held sessions of IRC to introduce users to PyKDE and Qt. I remember him mentioning on his blog a little after the event that openSUSE people too turned up and paid notice. I guess that highlights the reason why I visit the Ubuntu Forums every now and then - the wonderful community. I don’t spend time on the #ubuntu channel enough to say that there aren’t a few kinks there and though there has been trolling like with the famous sudo rm command incident, I do think that they are a helpful lot.

The last time the matter of Canonical neglecting Kubuntu came up when there was an open letter to Mark Shuttleworth written by a blogger who wished to emphasize the need to get rid of the current naming system of ‘buntus and stick to something along the lines of Ubuntu KDE Edition. Now while I did comment that I supported this idea, I realize now that this will not change the fact that Canonical had decided to base Ubuntu on GNOME and that Kubuntu came later. What Kubuntu really needs is a few more quality developers to help Riddell, who I think is doing a fine job on his own, but they could probably do with all the support they can get.

~ by SoftVision on February 4, 2008.