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Comment by andmarios | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit tired of how much Ubuntu gets promoted compared to other Linux based solutions.

Here is a video of KDE's Plasma Active running on a Nexus 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bb7isMAmwW0

It is a real use video, there aren't any fancy photos, there isn't any CG in the video in contrast with Canonical's page.

Plasma Active is being actively developed for about 2 years now and KDE 4 was developed from the ground up to be able to adapt to various form factors.

Since most Linux applications run on many different architectures, with such an approach you can keep your low power ARM based tablet and run all your desktop software -albeit a bit or more slower.

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"I am a bit tired of how much Ubuntu gets promoted compared to other Linux based solutions."

I find Ubuntu, (at least the LTS releases), to be the best supported distro for major third party applications and the easist for novices to use. I'm using it as development platform and as a VMware host for my Windows OS images. It has supports my Dell hardware better than Dell's Windows drivers. In time, I'll probably migrate to a different distro, but I don't have the cycles to spend on tweaking Linux, I just want a distro that works with what I need now.

My focus was on tablets and netbooks. We have a real and proven Linux based solution, a solution you can install now on your Nexus 7. Granted; it isn't perfect, the installation procedure isn't for the faint of heart, but it exists and nobody talks about it.

Then Canonical announces that it will do the same (Qt based, unified PC/Netbook/Tablet experience), it shows no code, no real use video and everyone talks about it.

I guess it is kind of disheartening for the many - many free software developers involved.

"no real use video"

Here's a hands-on video of the phone version: http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/2/3828266/ubuntu-phone-os-han...

KDE is a DE. Ubuntu is a platform. They are not the same thing.

No. KDE is a platform upon succesfull software is built. You got the DE obviously, but you get also applications like kdenlive, calligra (and krita), amarok, digikam. The developers of these applications would have a more difficult time if KDE didn't provide them with its robust libraries. Even webkit comes from a KDE library.

Further more the Plasma Active team designed their own tablet and will soon announce it officially.

Ubuntu on the other hand is a Linux based distribution with their own DE.

> Here is a video of KDE's

KDE commited suicide with 4.0. After that, whatever they produced was basically irrelevant, because nobody could take them seriously any more. Nobody is going to bet anything on KDE because of the fear that they could pull another "lets throw away a perfectly working 3.5 and rewrite everything from scratch" again. The same applies to Gnome also. Gnome could have avoided the fate by learning from KDE's mistakes, but they screwed up even worse, unimaginably worse.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and so on. They are the picture-perfect example of the saying in effect. For all practical intents and purposes, KDE and Gnome are dead now.

It is obvious that you haven't used KDE for many years. What is funny though, is that Ubuntu did the same thing (throw GNOME, bring Unity), yet you are perfectly ok with this.

It doesn't seem anywhere near as slick as Ubuntu's offerings, though - and I think for a portable device like a tablet, that is very important.

When it comes to notifications, easy sharing and usability features in general, it has them all and they are touch optimized.

I guess you mean that it doesn't look like Android or iOS. This can be changed easily through a theme. Conveniently you can download new themes from the theme settings screen, you don't need extra software nor you have to search in random places.

On the other hand, certain programs, like its text editor which can highlight code in almost every known computer language, does regular expression searches, support vi input mode etc, can't get much eye-pleasing. But you do get something you can actually work on.

I love the touch drived interface of tablets, but I don't think there is a reason to hide that a tablet device is a computer in different form and when you need it, it can perform as thus.

>I don't think there is a reason to hide that a tablet device is a computer in different form and when you need it, it can perform as thus

Sort of like the Surface tablets...

Exactly! But the Surface family has imo 2 problems.

1. Windows applications doesn't run on ARM, so you can't run your desktop software.

2. Microsoft has to differentiate its products, to assign them to different target price groups and to make them distinctive from competitive products. Same goes for Apple and Android tablet makers of course. They accomplish this by limiting what you can do with your tablet. One may not let you open 2 apps aside, another may not let you have multitasking, all in the name of branding and price-features ratio. In the end you get something you have to adjust to, instead of something that adjusts to you.

To be fair, that video is showing Plasma on a working device, where as the Ubuntu videos are professionally done advertisements. We don't know how smooth Ubuntu on tablets or phones is actually going to be.

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