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There's also Fedora's KDE spin, and I imagine the base KDE packages will still be available either via the main repos or PPAs, just not as highly customized.

" I imagine the base KDE packages will still be available either via the main repos or PPAs, just not as highly customized."

we do not highly customise the KDE packages, we have a policy of getting any changes upstream except with very good reason

For those that like KDE, may i make a suggest you may not have heard of? Vector Linux, which has not only a KDE 4 LiveCD but a classic KDE 3 as well. Its actually pretty sharp and they have several images built based on what you need, light, full, etc.

Can't imagine much of anything will change for users. The other Ubuntu variants haven't gone poof due to not being officially backed, a $DEITY knows there's a metric truckload of them

I vote for Chakra.
It is somewhat new, but as a half-rolling variant of Arch Linux, with a heavy focus on KDE (non-Qt apps are only available via a "bundles" system), it really is a great KDE showcase.

It seems like Canonical doesn't want Ubuntu to remain a GNOME distribution, either. They seem to want the whole GNOME/KDE thing to just go away. They want GTK+ and Qt applications running together seamlessly, they want to support freedesktop.org standards, and they want their own branded user experience with the Unity shell.

I'm not a huge fan of Unity, but I do think that the increasingly desktop-agnostic direction that Canonical is taking with Ubuntu is good for Ubuntu derivatives and the Linux client ecosystem in general.

There will be better shells in the future, and they will be less complicated to develop and distribute because Canonical cleaned up the interface between the shell and the underlying application platform(s).

SUSE devs have given up trying to port unity to their application.

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-February/162109...

Yeah, I wouldn't imagine that Unity is easy to port to non-Ubuntu distros (including Debian). My point is that future shells will likely be more portable because of Unity (including its negatives).

The "shell war" will be messy in the short term because it splits a relatively thick monolithic layer into two layers along a fault line that until now had never really erupted as a de facto interface surface in the FOSS desktop stack.

But in the long run, I think we're better off with a discrete shell layer, and mailing list threads like the one above suggest that there is plenty of motivation to make this shell layer work for the FOSS community.

I just hope Ubuntu burries Unity for good. Ubuntu 2D doesn't look as good as it used to a year back, 3D stopped working properly...Very disappointed about Ubuntu lately! If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Or you could use OpenSuse.

Outside of Yast, OpenSuse is a good distro and probably the best KDE distro.

I used older versions of SUSE as "college web portals", however I think I ended up switching them to a Redhat based distro (CENTOS/Scientific Linux).

SUSE 9.2 was a nice distro if as I remember.

Not bad at all, but since KDE 4 I have liked Mandriva and PCLinuxOS implementations of KDE best (perhaps because they are the ones which feel most like KDE 3.5)
Pity that the future of Mandriva is vey uncertain and that Texstar is taking a leave of absence.

OpenSUSE is a good KDE distro and a good supporter of KDE. The differences are that is is not regularly released in time with the KDE releases and it is more likely to replace gaps in KDE's offering with other software like Yast and Firefox. Many people will see this as advantages.

Haven't used latest Kubuntu's (since 9.04) for different reasons, but I think you missed something.

Muon is only a Package Manager
Yast is a whole administrative front end like MCC (Mandriva Control Center)

In other words... No comparison.

"Oh well, I guess it means I will be yet another user shifting from Canonical distributions over to Linux Mint. "

Linux Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu. So using it in place of Ubuntu desktop can make sense if you prefer Gnome over Unity. But the existance of Linux Mint KDE depends on the existance of Ubuntu having good KDE packages (also called Kubuntu).

"Netrunner 4.1 actually looks pretty sweet to me. "

Netrunner is a derivative of Kubuntu so they depend on a healthy Kubuntu the same as Linux Mint KDE does.

Good job explaining to the guy who worked on Kubuntu what KDE is....

Is that your elegant way to say you blew it?

and Kubuntu uses the debian KDE packages...

Simple. These users that are ditching Ubuntu in droves pay $0. Ubuntu may get some ad revenue from users browsing in firefox/chrome and some money from the Ubuntu store, but I really doubt it ads up to anything substantial.

I really doubt Mint makes much money. And the fact is that many distributions are so focused on building desktop/laptop features that really don't matter to the mainstream consumer market anymore. What average person gives a shit about an even-lighter-weight music player which doesn't connect to any music stores, doesn't play video, etc. Companies that focus solely on the desktop features are going to go out of business. Redhat is excluded because they're an enterprise business service provider.

Canonical is at least trying to spread to the largest sector of the consumer market, although I don't think they have much of a business plan.

What Mint made in Januari 2012:

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1925

Steve Balmer earns more during the time he throws a chair, but I wouldn't sneeze at give or take $ 14,000 in a month.

http://ev.kde.org/supporting-members.php does not list him as patron.

Exactly. They terminated the position of the one guy on the Canonical team proper that was responsible for helping with KUbuntu. Yes it sucks for him, but it means very little to the distro itself.

Wow! I'm waiting for lemur2's reaction to your post. In my experience, KDE is exactly the opposite of what you're saying. But lemur2 will provide the links

In his fantasy world KDE is perfect and can even cure cancer, but in the real world is very different.

When I dare him to show a video of KDE running in a netbook, he declined. He is just a fraud.

KDE isn't unstable, and neither Kubuntu.

If people wanted to try it by themselves, there was a VirtualBox disk image of Kubuntu 11.04 i386 Desktop, stable version in
http://torrentbox.com/torrent_details?id=1476261

This was definitely true when KDE launched the 4 series, but nowadays this is no longer the case. KDE 4.7 on Kubuntu 11.10 i stable and fast

As someone who also tries KDE, I beg to differ.

Edited 2012-02-07 17:25 UTC

If people wanted to try it by themselves, there was a VirtualBox disk image of Kubuntu 11.04 i386 Desktop, stable version in
http://torrentbox.com/torrent_details?id=1476261

You misunderstand the implications.

1. Kubuntu does not equal KDE as a whole.
2. Kubuntu is a community distro and a lack of funding does not equal death. Many distros exist with $0 funding.
3. You have been sniffing glue if you think that KDE is less configurable than then Gnome3.

Please think before you speak.

Depends on how one defines configurable really. KDE4 certainly has more configuration dialogs, but considering Gnome-Shell is basically javascript these days one could make the argument for it being more bendable to the user's will. For a sufficiently technical class of user of course.

That said the entire first post in this subthread reeks of bad troll.

If KDE4 is so configurable, thene where is the option to remove the cashew?

There are, or were, several plugins that'll do it for you if you desire. You'd have to ask someone who actually uses KDE4 actively for more detail on what they may be and where to locate them though

So, it doesn't comes with the option, you have to rely on a third party developer for that, that's not my concept of configurable.

It does come with the option. Right-click on the desktop, choose the settings and change the used layout plugin to one that does not have the cashew.

The ones w/0 the cashew sucks, sorry. Is not good enougth.

So, everything done in Javascript is in general more bendable then any other programming-language? Sounds like the view of a Javascript-fanboy.

KDE's desktop is a collection of plugins and each single component can be replaced/changed on the fly. All those Plasmoids out there prove that. Do not like those Folderview's? Use another plugin! Do not like the Cashew? Use another plugin!

KDE goes even so far to make removing, adding, changing or arranging plugins and visual components possible via the UI. So, you can just drag and drop a folder-view from your desktop to your panel if you like. Or you can just add a new panel to the right-side of your desktop with just some clicks.

That goes far beyond what is possible with Gnome-Shell. Sure someone could achieve the same result but for that you need to dive deep into the Javascript and code everything yourself.

So, how exactly is Gnome-Shell more bendable to the user's will?

According to our boy up there plugins don't count as customization. ;-)

I'll admit it's been a looooong time since I've touched KDE4 and it'll be an even longer time before I bother to do so again, but the plugin frameworks do offer a lot of customization as you say. By the same token Gnome has it's extensions ready for one click installing and the capability of more or less being rewritten on the fly if the user wants to exert the effort. Perhaps at the end of the day they're equal in potential, for a sufficiently technical sort of user.

The KDE equivalent of GConf is KConfig. You can edit the config-files manually if you like (not possible with gconf) but you don't need to.

Well, I have something to say about they choice to use text based files as configuration, is not that is bad, it is that their choice was to use some type of malformed kind of .ini files.

Edited 2012-02-09 14:35 UTC

Malformed? How so?

$ head -n 3 .kde/share/config/kmixrc
[Global]
AllowDocking=true
AutoUseMultimediaKeys=true

Looks pretty normal to me.

Haven't you see the .inis plasma makes? it is something like this:

[12][23][1][2][34][21][97][21][55][1]
value=1
value2=3

Looks like these guys were to classy to use XML or JSON, so they used .ini files witch goal is for structural value for pair data to a full serialization container, I feel sorry for the poor bastard who has to made the parser for this, if you wonder why plasmoids losings its configuratios, thank to this deformed entity.

Although I'm primarily an Xfce guy (who's slowly coming back to Gnome since Cinnamon became available in the AUR on Arch) I have to say a full install of KDE has always been slow and buggy and felt bloated for me no matter what machine I was running it on so in that sense I agree with you (although I haven't tried 4.8), but a minimal install of KDE has always worked wonderfully and has never given me any problems. I just don't stick with KDE because usually I prefer GTK apps with a couple exceptions ie. K3b...

That criticism certainly had some validity when KDE4 first came out, however it simply isn't true anymore. If you think KDE is still like that, you haven't tried it in a while.

I have used Gnome for years. However, with the changes that Gnome has made, I now find KDE preferable. The recently released Mint KDE version is far more stable and usable than the Mint Gnome version.

The decision by Ubuntu to drop Kubuntu is probably just one more step down the road to its own irrelevance.

Suggestion:

- Rename Kubuntu to something else

The name was created by the original Ubuntu team before I or anyone from outside the company was involved. Coming up with a name which emphasises KDE and Ubuntu but is original and not stupid sounding is very hard.

- Ship a DVD full of applications, including out of the box integration with GTK 2 and 3.

Shipping a 700MB image is a nice limit to prevent it being too much of a burden for many to download.

- Ship all media codecs and stuff out of the box.

This will end up with Canonical staff in jail and they won't want that.

- Select the highest rated set of applications instead of K* traditional ones (eg. VLC, LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox).

That defeats the purpose I had for Kubuntu.

- after that, prepare for going after Linux Mint.

Linux Mint is a derivative of Kubuntu so that won't help you

Probably except for the LMDE

I'm using Debian testing with KDE, and didn't notice any poor treating so far Do you mean some specific problems?

I didn't specifically use LMDE, but I think it uses repositories compatible with Debian testing. Why shouldn't it have KDE available?

Edited 2012-02-08 19:09 UTC

I'm sorry... you're basically saying my points are not valid. Well, time to celebrate the financial cut then. I do think Ubuntu is a weird name, let alone its derivatives.

I did... one month ago, after several years on gnome. Gnome used to be good back in the 2.x days...

Just a remark: it's 5 years of support with that release.

Five years is for the server version. The desktop version of Ubuntu and Kubuntu get 3 years of support.

Personally, I think anyone who thought Linux could be the "next Microsoft" of personal desktop computers was living in a dream world. Linux is a niche market on the desktop. It fits that role very nicely and honestly I wouldn't trade my Linux PC for anything. I love it, and as soon as Linux DE & OS developers get the idea of desktop domination out of their heads (I'm looking at you Gnome and Ubuntu) I think the better off the Linux desktop will be.

Edited 2012-02-09 18:15 UTC