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Comment by andrewcooke | Hacker News Reader

"[...] a regularly released community-friendly distro with a strong KDE focus. There is no other major distro out there that matches that description [...]"

Then WTF is OpenSuse? http://www.opensuse.org/en/

This makes me really mad. OpenSuse is a major distro and has supported KDE for years. It's not so popular in the USA, but is pretty big in Europe (I have used it for years and it rocks; so does KDE). I don't see how the quote above is excusable. Before reading that you had my sympathy, but if you're going to trash-talk the rest of the community then good riddance.

[I just noticed some people are actively downvoting this comment. Just how far does mindless Ubuntu fanboyism and intolerance of alternatives go?]

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That was written by Jonathan Riddell, who worked on Kubuntu. I am fairly certain he is not trash-talking KDE and I am also fairly certain that Ubuntu is not using him as a mouthpiece to trash SUSE.

So it isn't necessary to get very hot toward Ubuntu on account of it. Maybe Riddell misspoke. I seriously doubt anyone is trying to be mean to SUSE, let alone all of Ubuntu doing so through people who were working on Kubuntu.

I think it's just gratuitous to blame "mindless Ubuntu fanboyism and intolerance of alternatives" for this sort of illusory perceived slight. I like your posts, but I don't see why you would get this angry. Ubuntu is also an alternative, so clearly is SUSE, if you think Jonathan Riddell is picking on SUSE you can just ignore him.

Kubuntu is not Ubuntu. It is a complete distro with KDE as the default desktop. In the future, KDE support will still be in Ubuntu, as much as it is in Opensuse. Opensuse allows you to pick which desktop to use [1]. OpenSuse is not a "KDE distro."

[1]http://en.opensuse.org/Product_highlights

Just to be clear, the DVD setup does allow you to pick the desktop you want, but KDE is selected by default.

Puh-leese. Kubuntu and Ubuntu are the same distribution. They just replace your boot screens when you install kubuntu-desktop instead of just installing another DE.

I've always been annoyed at Canonical's packaging of different DEs as if they were entirely different distros.

I've always been annoyed at Canonical's packaging of different DEs as if they were entirely different distros.

You mean they aren't? Really, how often do you have to go mess around under /etc ? A different DE is probably the biggest user-facing change you'll get.

Of course they aren't. One of the coolest things about desktop Linux is that you can easily use whatever DE suits your fancy without having to do a bunch of footwork.

Packaging these as different distributions sends your users red flags about compatibility and ease of use. It makes people think they have to change their computer completely if they want to try something new. It makes them think they can't have concurrent DE installs if one user prefers XFCE and another prefers KDE and another prefers Gnome. It makes them look for "Kubuntu packages" instead of "Ubuntu packages" even though the distributions are binary compatible.

There are a lot of implications of pretending like you're a whole different OS when you're just a different default DE.

And I "mess around under /etc" frequently, probably multiple times per week.

Ubuntu's target market has a very different interpretation of "a bunch of footwork" than yours.

sudo aptitude install kde-full shouldn't be "a bunch of footwork" by any standard by someone who passed high school.

I'd hazard a guess that there's a not-insignificant number of Ubuntu users for whom opening the terminal is "a bunch of footwork".

I used to live with a 40-something woman who was fairly technologically impaired, the kind of person you would expect to get a MacBook Air and call it a day. She ran Mint. Now, granted, it was installed by our room mate who was (still is, I suppose) a CS grad student, but she got by just fine with Mint, LibreOffice, and Chrome. Never used anything else, and never had a need to go plunking around on the command line.

I suspect Susan is not alone among Linux users who just wanted a cheap computer that worked and had some nerd install a user-friendly distro for them.

I haven't tried this in a few years, but I recall that Kubuntu and Ubuntu desktops used to have serious issues co-existing on the same box for some reason.

Don't really care, now, as I'm on Lubuntu.

You called a mistake 'trashtalking' and then went on to claim that it was the work of the intolerant Ubuntu fanboys. Your comment was pretty crap in that respect.

Putting that aside, it's true that Ubuntu has completely taken away the spotlight from other Linux distros, which runs counter to the anti-monoculture argument which was commonly thrown around in previous years by Linux... advocates. But even as a user of another distribution, I don't really mind.

Ubuntu and Canonical as figureheads in the Linux community make it a much more tangible alternative than the previous cloud of distributions recommended to everyone, with ever changing dominance. It's seen as a rival on par with the proprietary OSes and the fact that it's projected that image for four years now only strengthens the position of the entire lot.

he said the author was trashtalking, and his comment being downvoted was the work of intolerant fanboi. what part of it did you not understand?

second. it doesn't matter if ubuntu got the spotlight in your circles, other distros are famous in other circles. europe has good number of fedora/redhat and suse users

It is a literal statement and you are not reading it literally. OpenSuse is frequently but not regularly released. It also fills in gaps in KDE's offering with other software such as Yast and Firefox. Otherwise it is a good distro for KDE fans.

What is the difference between 'frequently' and 'regularly'?

Ubuntu releases regularly every 6 months like clockwork, while on the otherhand, suse releases relatively frequently, but there is anywhere between a few months and a year or so between releases, so it can't exactly be described as 'regular'.

Mandriva and its descendant PCLinuxOS also fall into this category. I believe Mandriva is relatively popular in Europe also, being used in government and such.

Off topic, but PCLinuxOS is really just a terrible name. It's so horribly generic. It sounds like "Windows Antivirus 2012".

It seemed surprisingly popular ca. 2007 before people figured out that they were, I shit you not, tampering with the DistroWatch numbers by spoofing hits.

A decent distro though, and it was a little more usable than Mandriva at the time.

Mandriva is less frequently released and like suse fills in gaps with their own technology such as system control centre. They have also been very bad at creating a community which leads to forks like PCLinuxOS and Mangia

I don't quite understand what you mean by "fills in gaps". There are no gaps, YaST on openSUSE is provided in addition to pretty much what anyone would expect on any distro.

Edit: I see what you meant in a comment later/earlier in this thread.

PC-BSD is KDE based. Then again I guess FreeBSD isn't just a distribution of Linux and doesn't count.

It's certainly a "Linux-like operating system" ;-)

(burn, karma, burn)

I couldn't agree more, that's a pretty "wtf" statment to make. I think it demonstrates the growing disconnect between Canonical and the Linux community.

In fact I'd go so far as to say that very few people think of Kubuntu when they think about KDE on Linux. openSUSE, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Arch are the go-to's for KDE on Linux.

And actually, increasingly, a distro you wouldn't have expected on that list only a few years ago given Red Hat's usually Gnome-focussed efforts: Fedora. Their KDE team is highly competent and hard-working, and has produced a very strong KDE CD for some time now.

Folks from the KDE team have also popped up on the distro's board of directors and engineering committes, which are voted offices. And Red Hat has several paid employees working on KDE/Qt stuff at least part-time.

Fans of KDE definitely shouldn't dismiss Fedora automatically anymore, especially if they otherwise have a strong appetite for Fedora's usual virtues (closeness to upstream, package freshness). It's a really good KDE binary distro these days.

(Disclaimer: I'm a KDE developer, but KDE of course remains highly committed to distro neutrality, i.e. the above are my personal views as a Fedora user, not as a representative of KDE. And I'm not involved with Fedora development.)

Thanks, that's good to know. I'll make a point of giving it a "spin" so to speak, so I can be confident to recommend it alongside the others I mentioned. I really should anyway since there's many a package on our build service (openSUSE) using fc15/16 as build targets.

Agreed. I've been running KDE 4.8 on FC16 at home for the last 2 weeks or so. Very happy with it.

Wrong.

While there are a lot of Canonical folks that don't have backgrounds in upstream projects (more so than at other major distros), Jonathan has been involved in KDE since long before he worked for Canonical and is old friends (and still in frequent contact) with many of the top tech folks at SUSE.

You're reading way too much into that.

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