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?]
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.
I've always been annoyed at Canonical's packaging of different DEs as if they were entirely different distros.
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.
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
(burn, karma, burn)
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.
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.)
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.
I just keep separate partitions and do a full install on the ones I need. No sweat.
On the other hand, I did a "ubuntu" style upgrade to 10.04 LTS, and that worked fine, too (I run that on a netbook for their netbook interface). It took longer than a full install on Mint (perhaps being a slower machine had something to do with it), but it worked out ok.
Running 11.10, replaced unity with xmonad on laptop. Running kubuntu (kde 4.8 ppa) or xfce on desktop computer depending on the mood.
I still think that KDE is the best (and improving) desktop environment for Linux but for older machines xubuntu/xfce is probably a good substitute.
The reason I use [xk]ubuntu is that I like the debian package system but with the somewhat more up to date packages.
I still run some gentoo machines, some for many years, but the pain of compiling stops to be funny after a while so I run it only on servers now.
Unfortunately, in Mint 12 my lexmark printer no longer works. I think it's some issue between 3.0 kernel, cups, and Mint, but nobody has quite figured it out yet.
This happens with Windows upgrades too, so please no flame wars here.
Ubuntu is not limited to the default interface if you spend a little bit of time; probably that is far less time than getting to know a new distribution.
But maybe i have overlooked other distributions that "just work" out of the box.
Is this method of installing KDE still supported, or they are dropping support for KDE completely.
It'll just be closer, or even identical to upstream KDE (or rather, Debian's version of upstream KDE) with few modifications on Canonical's side.
it won't be the streamlined experience that
Unity is or Gnome was
That, combined with their utter inability to take community feedback into account, really makes me wonder whenever they do something like this. It's like traditional logic doesn't apply.
There is no harm in letting community driven efforts take place. Having a variety of desktop environments available to pick from has its advantages. For example, Xubuntu is really useful for people who need to cut down memory/CPU requirements.
It's a business decision I understand, they want to shift focus completely to ubuntu, especially since they are losing a huge user-base over their last gnome3 releases.
If it does then we need people to step up and take the initiative in doing the tasks that are often poorly supported by the community process. ISO testing, for example, is a long, slow, thankless task, and it is hard to get volunteers for it. We can look at ways of reducing effort from what we do such as scrapping the alternate CD or automating KDE SC packaging.
This is the biggest single challenge that free software has to over come if it every hopes to challenge proprietary versions. Testing, and verifying bug fixes, and bugs, and documenting. Its not the 'fun' work of building a distro, its not the 'glorious' work of building a distro, its not something that makes people want to sit at your table during a 'con.
But the reality is the for most software products the number of people who are 'users' and the number of people who are 'developers' are generally very different, with successful products having many more users than developers. Users have no option when they hit a problem or an incompatibility but to stop using, that is their only choice. They aren't going to learn C, they aren't going to try to fetch and build a newer version of a kernel module, all they really can do is try something else.
Everything else pales in comparison to that problem.