Ten Years of Kubuntu | Hacker News Reader

Ten Years of Kubuntu

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130 pointsTsiolkovsky57 comments

Kubuntu is in a great place today. Five years ago KDE developers were pretty fragmented between Mandrivia, Suse, Fedora, and Kubuntu. Today, thanks to Blue Systems adopting Kubuntu and the general decline of most other KDE spins (Suse lost its commercial support, Mandrivia died and got forked a bunch, Fedora continues to be Gnome-first in a good way) my impressions from the ML and general developer mindshare is that Kubuntu is becoming the KDE distro for the betterment of the platform, because then you don't end up with all this wasted effort making an 80% great experience on every different package manager, fs layout, login manager, and init stack. Kubuntu CI is pretty much the only place one should go to develop KDE software and that means Kubuntu and Netrunner are always going to be the core KDE distros.

And that is not bad. Desktop environments in my view do a lot better when they have a blessed implementation. Cinnamon, Unity, and even Enlightenment have seen resounding success because they are developed for single distros and that focus lets them dodge the semantics of their environment and get to the good stuff.

Kubuntu 15.04 is looking to be the first release of the distro I can be proud of as something to show the uninitiated and get them excited about using it. The bugs are falling down by the dozen each day and all the best of Linux is ready for the release, its going to be a blast in my book.

When I tried it Netrunner was an abortion. Its first stable release crashed more, both individual components and the whole damn thing, than Windows ME.

Even the name is stupid and sounds like a 10 year old thought of it.

OpenSUSE is still shipping KDE by default, and it's pretty usable in recent versions.

That said, Kubuntu is still very nice. I'm glad you are using it to show off free software to new people!

I think you are forgetting Linux Mint KDE. It is updated regularly and is fantastic to work on.

You forget that Mint KDE is Kubuntu, if you look at the package sources ;)

Hmm.. but the Mint team does a fairly good job of customizing KDE.

KDE is a great platform, but most of the prominent distros ship with near-default style settings, which are ugly (just look at the 15.04 screenshots, linked from the article). It would be nice if an opinionated design team (similar to the elementary guys) shipped a KDE based distro which was meticulously styled out of the box.

Mandrake, later Mandriva used to be close to perfect IMO.

Today I guess OpenSUSE is the closest thing to what you describe.

Mageia - forked from Mandriva - is still actively developed, I believe - but I haven't tried out KDE on it. I think my Fedora 20 install looked pretty slick out of the box, but I don't think very highly of my own taste :)

I feel that OpenSUSE has had the best KDE default settings and Kubuntu had the worst defaults.

Plasma 5 is still a little janky, but this has been improved a lot, and should hopefully continue to improve (it has a much more consciously opinionated design team than 4 ever did).

The Linux desktop space is a real mess at the moment, but KDE is the best of the bunch for general, modern computing.

KDE is a breath of fresh air in the current Linux desktop space. It gives you all the nice integrated tools that Gnome gives you while not trying to make you part of a Borg collective and actually (gasp!) listening to its user community.

The artists in that community have some questionable taste (and I thought Keramik was ok, so yeah...) but, overall, the project has a very sane development approach.

I'm a post-3.5 refugee in WindowMaker (and sometimes ratpoison) land, but I honestly think KDE is a big, big deal. It still values customization and still tries to place the user in control of his device, unlike the ahem other guys who seem to be following in Apple's very questionable footsteps.

Apple's reputation when it comes to customisation is not entirely deserved. What's true for iOS, isn't really for OSX. I'd say the gradient goes something like KDE > Windows > OSX > Gnome > Unity. When you go through OSX's system preferences there's quite a lot of options, plus there's tons of hidden ones accessible through the terminal and the very effective defaults system inherited from NeXT.

Unity at least has an excuse - it's stated goal is to have the same interface on mobile and desktop, and function well with both touch and mouse.

Windows seems to have the same goal since Sinofsky had its helm and so far I'm not convinced that this goal makes much sense for an OS.

I'm thinking strictly about the customization of the UI, not of "everything else" in System Preferences (e.g. hardware, network and so on). You can set individual icons but you don't have icon themes per se, can't change the UI theme (and I distinctly remember there was an application that did that very well back on 10.4, and 10.5 broke it along with most other efforts), can't change titlebar buttons and so on. E.g. I very much prefer the NeXT arrangement (close button on the right, minimize button on the left), because I really have no use for Maximize on a 27" screen. Good luck with that.

To their credit, though, Apple does at least think twice before pushing changes most of the time. Gnome's latest effort, with the client-side decorations, is maddening. Now every Gnome application has a thick titlebar that's also a toolbar, and every other application doesn't. They supposedly did that in order to save screen space - which could have just as well been done by reducing the thickness of that mammoth title bar Adwaita uses - but the effect seems to me to have been exactly opposite. Surely someone must have seen that the result is inconsistent on any system that runs a single application not included with Gnome -- say, for instance, Firefox! Or Chrome! Or Emacs! Or Thunderbird! Whatever.

I certainly understand that Gnome developers have a vision for their UI, but the uncommunicative way in which they impose it is pretty unpopular among users (like myself) who moved away from Windows or Mac OS a long, long time ago because they wanted more control over their operating system (well, that and no BSODs, which was a common occurrence at the time when I left Windows behind. Did you know Mac users didn't even have preemptive multitasking then? God I feel like a dinosaur now. Get off my lawn.)

How can you take a OSX as an example of how it's done and lambast Gnome after the new Safari redesign throws OSX conventions through the window (much like iTunes and other OSX programs have done already, independently "reimagining" how the OSX title/control bar should work in a way that is not consistent at all).

The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

Pretty sure I didn't take OS X as an example of how it's done. In fact, I took it as an example of how it's not done, which is why I find it unpleasant that Gnome is following in their footsteps.

> The position of the window resizing buttons is entirely irrelevant when using keyboards shortcuts to control window layout is just much better.

It's much better when you have your hands on the keyboard. When I have a hand on the mouse already, having to rely on the keyboard is annoying for the same reason why having to rely on the mouse is annoying when you have your hands on the keyboard.

This is NOT true - IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/. It allows you to customize everything right upto the alt-tab behavior [1] and access to D-BUS for core OS behavior [2]

If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

[1] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/ [2] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/937/laine/

IMO downloading extensions to change your OS is not too different from downloading additional software to do the same [1][2].

[1] http://bahoom.com/hyperswitch

[2] http://superuser.com/questions/548146/change-command-tab-to-...

no - Gnome extensions are installed in 5 seconds from a browser. It is very different than the experience of traditional installing.

It is one of those It-Just-Works experiences.

Judging by Firefox Extensions: It just works until it breaks since extensions are usually not part of the core team's responsibility, and the APIs they use may change with every FF/Gnome release. The time it takes me to install something is really not that relevant, as long as it's <10min - what's relevant is the time it takes me to keep it running for the next 5 years at least.

> IMHO you havent seen https://extensions.gnome.org/.

Of course I've seen https://extensions.gnome.org/ , Gnome is almost unusable without it. But Gnome extensions aren't supported by the core development team. They can (and do!) break from one release to another.

The barrier for "customizing things" is pretty high, too. E.g. if I want to change my window decorations in KDE, I download a new set of decorations and change it. If I want to change my window decorations in Gnome, I have to install gnome-tweak-tool and that-program-that-removes-the-bloody-client-decorations-crap and now most (but not) all of my apps are going to use the decorations I want. With some glitches. That's not ok.

> If you really want to see where Gnome is going, please do check out Fedora 22. That really is the showcase for cutting edge Gnome (unfortunately, its not Ubuntu/Debian)

I don't need to check out Fedora 22, I can already compile Gnome from their public repos. The showcase for cutting edge Gnome isn't too impressive; it can be boiled down to "we really like tablets and you're going to like them too because two releases from now all our applications are going to look like they're running on a tablet."

Great. Could you let me know how to change the color of title bars so that it's not a light grey active window on top of light grey inactive windows?

http://imgur.com/iaaBe0n ;-)

Am... I missing a color picker there?

It's the 'invert colors' checkmark, which does do what parent requested - maybe not what he meant though ;-). The inverted colors don't show up in screenshots though.

As an aside, I decided to try out Cinnamon on my Debian box, and I actually found it to be a breath of fresh air. It's a modern approach to the non-bloated Gnome desktop of years ago. Reminded me a bit of when I first used xfce; very clean and straightforward. I feel Gnome and Unity try far too hard to dazzle and stand out, when it reality it all just gets in the way. No comment on KDE since I haven't tried it in a long time.

Some day though I'll go back to straight DWM, my old love.

I have very mixed feelings about some of the stuff Gnome is doing. Some of them are at least interesting from a certain point of view, like sandboxing applications. I get why this would be nice to have in corporate environments, and that brings money to Linux, which Linux does need. I also think it's solving problems at the wrong level for everyone else. (Selective) communication between sandboxed applications seems to be something they have no coherent framework for. Besides, as many Android applications show, savagely enforcing sandboxing has had questionable effects on privacy (as applications that really want your data will happily just request permissions to do everything and refuse to work otherwise). As for the security gains of such an approach, I'm skeptical about the effectiveness they add to an open source environment. What remains is offering additional protection against bugs (that e.g. allow otherwise unauthorized access). But proper desktop sandboxing is so incredibly complex that it's hard not to think a far more efficient approach would be fixing those bugs in the first place.

For better or for worse, they're also experimenting with a lot of new approaches to UI. Which is pretty much how innovation happens -- something that computer desktops could use since everyone else is, at this point, imitating either Mac OS or Windows 95. However, an opt-out solution for users who are happy to encourage innovation, but would rather not be the victim of failed experiments every other release would be nice...

I have positive feelings about the effort of Gnome to sandbox applications. When you want to run closed applications it is obvious why you would want to sandbox. Even with open applications there is an additional security layer which is _very_ valuable because security related bugs are the normality, not the exception. The permissions system in android has had a good effect on privacy since you can deny access to private data for individual apps, and if need be to not make it crash you can just feed it empty or random data.

> Even with open applications there is an additional security layer which is _very_ valuable because security related bugs are the normality, not the exception.

Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.

> The permissions system in android has had a good effect on privacy since you can deny access to private data for individual apps, and if need be to not make it crash you can just feed it empty or random data.

I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriously question its security ( if these guys are correct, at least: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/59093/how-does-th... ). Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.

> Considering that regularly writing secure servers or browsers seems to be beyond our reach for the moment, I think it's a safe bet to say that writing a secure sandboxing system is even farther beyond our reach. I doubt there is as much to gain in terms of security as we may think.

It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one.

> I know that Xprivacy does that in a way that makes me seriously question its security ( if these guys are correct, at least: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/59093/how-does-th.... ).

This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.

> Not sure about PDroid and other solutions (my phone isn't supported by Cyanogen Mod). But it looks like a big pile of hacks over another big pile of hacks to me.

I don't see your point here in regards to this discussion.

> It is harder to breach two layers of security at the same time than one. I think sandboxes are easier to realize than, say, a secure browser.

I'm not questioning the advantages that sandboxing seems to have, in general. What I am questioning is the ability of the development team that couldn't fix Gnome panel for several years to write a secure sandboxing solution, even when relying on cgroups & co..

Either way, I'd much rather run sane applications that patch and pray that neither the application, nor the jail, have any really disastrous bugs.

> This is a vague argumentum ad hominem against a third party. I don't see relevance to my arguments.

Your argument about permissions and sandboxing on Android is that they help privacy because you can feed fake or empty data to the application. I never managed to do that on my phone (but didn't try that hard, either) so I thought I'd see if there was any progress in that field. Xprivacy was the first result that showed up.

The way it does that, apparently, is by extending /system/bin/app_process to load a JAR file on startup, thus attaching itself to every process and replacing any method in any class. Yeah, no thanks. I can't wait to have the first catastrophic exploit in the Xposed framework making every single process vulnerable.

I tried a couple of other solutions a while ago, but most of them ended up crashing or freezing applications.

I absolutely don't disagree on your point regarding innovation. A number of people accused Windows 7 of taking UI ideas from KDE, which ultimately greatly improved their OS's usability. Still, a delicate balance needs to be found among innovation, enterprise requirements, and personal/community wants. Thankfully, at least covering the third group, with Linux there are often solutions to these experiments (though they might still end up being rather involved, such as creating your own solutions or moving on to a different window manager entirely). Yet if one doesn't like the Windows 8 UI approach, for example, the only real recourse would be to downgrade and hope things change for the better in the next release.

I wonder if the whole sandboxing thing will go the way of polkit, doing its best when it is disabled.

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU

You mean like happened with Gnome 3 and completely pissed off a large portion of the user base? I'm an advocate for sane defaults, but 'opinionated design' doesn't always nail the mark.

I think you actually want the default to be pretty vanilla. Opinionated design tends to polarise opinions which means put a lot of people off. KDE - especially now with the "get hot new stuff" interface - is very easy to mod and there are loads of style packs available.

The sort who'll be attracted to a specific look are also more likely not to go with the default IMO. Personally I like my UI like my DE - out of the way.

Well if the vanilla is itself ugly and polarizing, perhaps it's best that a distro take the initiative to make it better. As long as KDE retains its flexibility to make the desktop how you like it, why not try to make it better by default?

Disclosure: I've tried KDE several times, and have never stayed with it more than a few days, due to its wacky ratios of window and icon sizing, and bubbly appearance.

https://www.kde.org/workspaces/plasmadesktop/screenshots/gen... - ugly and polarising? It's a bit "candy" or "fisher price" but as a friendly default I don't think it does so bad.

http://kde-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=17x18x19x20x21x75... gives an idea of the thinks that are popular for KDE desktop style, decoration, etc..

I first installed Ubuntu either a few days before or a few days after the Hoary Hedgehog release. I recall using the Gnome version first and then adding in the Kubuntu packages a few days later.

At that point, I was fairly used to Debian and I'd used some of the other "shiny" distros at the time (like Linspire, shudder) but Ubuntu (and Kubuntu) was one of the first distros to work with my Atheros Wi-Fi dongle without significant amounts of pain. I mean, it was still a pain but I was able to get it done.

Ubuntu -- and Kubuntu especially -- was my obsession for a few months in the spring of 2005. I still remember torrenting episodes of a brand new TV show called "Grey's Anatomy" (that had taken the time slot of my beloved "Boston Legal") that had just debuted and watching it in variations of Mplayer in Kubuntu. Funny. Grey's Anatomy is still around a decade later too.

These days, I only use Linux on the server and very, very rarely on a test VM, but I have an enormous amount of respect to the KDE team and the Kubuntu team for keeping on keeping on.

There is not a single day that passes that I don't thank, silently and sometimes not, Linux and the distros it spawned (regardless of my own preferences). It must be clear by now that Linux OSs have recaptured and prolonged the spirit of the "personal computer" idea, which is basically to put the user in control of the machine, or the individual in control of something really. I can't be thankful enough for the hundreds or thousands of talented individuals who made that happen and still do. I think they deserve more praise than they get.

Great essay on Kubuntu, Tslolkovsky! It is an impressive overview of your accomplishments, in context, and that's perfect. I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds. My personal favorite is the one I use the most. Standard Ubuntu just does it for me. KDE is ok but Gentoo is just too lo-fi for me - I'm not interested in a product that is like living in a halfway house instead of a real house with a roof & doors & a working bathroom, if you get the point I'm trying to make here. I am aware that there are people out there who cannot lose their massive social anxiety problems & try to work on their computers. Red Hat Linux is apparently the one that's most like Windows & I've heard good reviews of it.

> I've personally tried a few distros of Linux, originally developed by Linus Torvalds.

Is there some Intro To Linux we can point just people to in order to avoid things like this? The "GNU slash Linux" conversation is wearing pretty thin but it should be common knowledge at this point that the GNU project did 10 ten years of work so Linus could add the kernel and have it be the first completed system.

Should we point to Revolution OS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c)?

Should we point to GNU's page about the issue (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html)?

Without getting into any finger-pointing, it's just history and we should all know it.

And GNU zealots persistently deny that Linux became successful because of XFree86 and Apache, neither of which GNU had anything to do with.

Grow up. There's a world of difference between being a zealot and pointing out that Torvalds didn't clone the Unix system in a year. He built the kernel, he did it well and he deserves credit for it. For the same reasons he deserves credit the GNU project deserves credit for their contributions.

edit: Really. This is a thread celebrating 10 years of Kubuntu. Kubuntu's downstream from Debian, probably 1/2 - 3/4 of their packages are untouched from their state in the Debian repositories. Debian was sponsored by the FSF (Richard Stallman's foundation) back in the early 90's. Good for Kubuntu, I wish them the best. I also think it's important to recognize the others who have made projects like this possible. It takes nothing away from Kubuntu.

IMHO your comment was informative and did not deserve downvotes.

ElectricFeel's comment may well signal a shift in Linux desktop adoption, in that the less-technical public enters the game. IMHO this is an Ubuntu success story. He's an Ubuntu user that probably does not even know what Debian is, and though this isn't good in itself, it might be good for GNU/Linux adoption. We all called for the "year of the Linux desktop" but due to various reasons, there aren't enough users, so it didn't materialise yet. But there is hope. And KDE is going the right way. I love it. IMHO Kubuntu 15.04 will rock!

I enjoy Kubuntu and use it's cousin / child, Netrunner. Ships with all (most anyway) the things I wish Kubuntu shipped with, but a little extra I don't want, but that's ok, it's easier to remove things (Firefox addons) than waiting for the updates and what not. It even lets me use the "Windows Key" to open the KDE Menu, or at least their version of it, which is something I'm all too accustomed to from Windows. Been running Netrunner (Kubuntu derrived) for months now, on my main Desktop and my school Laptop.

I used to love KDE when I first used Linux because of Slackware, back before KDE4. It was adaptable to whether I wanted a Windows feel, Linux feel, or Mac feel. It still delivers in that aspect, and now it's much more mature looking.

I never quite warmed up to KDE. I think the problem was that it was a "Windows-like" interface but it never felt quite the same as Windows. I found it easier to adapt to GNOME, precisely because it was different than what I was used to.

I did try the beta of Kubuntu with Plasma 5, however, and it seemed nice. I'll have to try it again sometime.

I started with KDE but then I fell in love with Gnome after KDE4 was too buggy to run for me, it was almost like the Vista fiasco, you needed a graphics card just to run a desktop environment, so I moved to Gnome and fell in love with how customizable it was. Then Gnome 3 came out, and my love for Gnome died, all that I loved had been taken out, I understand plug-ins and all, but Gnome was amazing out of the box, then I ran back to KDE my first love, ah this should be a movie or something, but now if anything goes wrong I may consider LXQt, seems promising enough. I don't know why people get religiously stuck to desktop environments, sometimes you just need to move on.

I've heard comments like yours before but this time it made me consider the other side of it. I wonder if your reaction is due to being a power user. If you've been a Windows power user for a while you're probably accustomed to doing things like setting PATH or other environment variables, installing/uninstalling things, starting and stopping services. If you have something that's a little "too much" like Windows but things are in a different place, that may be worse than starting from a mental framework of "completely different now." Particularly, I wonder if it is easier for nearly computer illiterate people to transition from Windows to something very close to Windows, or something else entirely.

I've been in both sides, but you're right to some extent, one of the main things I need is supported by Gnome 3 by default, the "Windows key" whenever I press it, I expect either a dashboard or a menu bar where I can start typing whatever application I want to run, honestly that speeds up my workflow on Windows and Linux (where it is supported), instead of browsing through categories and reading through the list of software, I just press "windows", type what I want to use "Visual Studio", "Qt Creator", hit enter, and move on. That is my main thing, I do enjoy tiling windows. I know there's wonderful tiling managers, but they get more in my way than anything. If I can't get used to it in an hour I just wont bother.

Anecdotally, I was able to set my mother up with an old Thinkpad running Lubuntu and she took right to it. She is pretty much the definition of computer illiterate, so I think you have something there.

I think you can probably customise Kubuntu as well; e.g. I always do remove the Ctrl+F4 key mapping from KDE so I get the "usual" Windows MDI behaviour.

I haven't tried in about two years, but I tried every six months for a few years before that (basically every time Ubuntu pushed a new release I'd try Kubuntu first). I really wanted the advanced configurability of KDE compared to Gnome and then Unity ... but something always either didn't work or just frustrated me to no end and I reverted to Ubuntu. A lot of my friends have switched to Arch now, which similarly seems to "just work" and does a much better job of keeping packages updated than Ubuntu does.

I agree, I run Manajaro, which is an Arch spin off. It seems stripped down in the same way that Ubuntu was when it first started getting popular.

That's my experience too. For some reason the desktop after startup looks amazing... but as soon as I start playing around with the applications I get a lot of crashes, things in the desktop that don't make sense and general slowness.

I think I've made this comment before, but it almost feels like new KDE releases are optimized for screenshots: it looks great, until you click on something.

Kubuntu is very hard because use KDE.

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