KDE to Become Better Supported on the Ubuntu Platform

Submitted by Ubuntu Fan 2006-05-08 Ubuntu 25 Comments

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

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Thom Holwerda

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25 Comments

2006-05-08 8:20 pm

Jezza
Hold on… Didn’t Mark “Commit” to KDE last release too? Saying he was using KDE at home and watnted full support of Kubuntu?

Shame that didn’t really appear, I use KDE on ubuntu here, and it’s had some awful long-standing bugs (especially with CUPS) throughout the whole release cycle.

Let’s hope Etchy will see this support of KDE actually materialise

2006-05-08 9:26 pm

da_Chicken
Etchy? The next stable Debian release (planned for December 2006) will be called Etch. The next Ubuntu release after Breezy Badger will be called Edgy Eft.

In Toy Story movies there appears a character named Etch-A-Sketch. Eft, apparently, is some kind of newt.
2006-05-08 9:36 pm

elsewhere
Hold on… Didn’t Mark “Commit” to KDE last release too? Saying he was using KDE at home and watnted full support of Kubuntu?

Yes, it’s deja vu all over again.

Shame that didn’t really appear, I use KDE on ubuntu here, and it’s had some awful long-standing bugs (especially with CUPS) throughout the whole release cycle.

In fairness, the CUPS bugs are mainly KDE’s fault for using non-standard API’s for CUPS that disappeared after an upgrade, the CUPS team has subsequently agreed to keep those API’s alive through the next release cycle, buying the KDE team some time to re-work printing. From what I gather, the matter was complicated by the fact that Ubuntu chose to use a cvs version of CUPS for Dapper that was implemented in a non-standard way and the KDE guys had a hard time figuring out how to fix it. At least, this is my understanding from the kde dev blogs.

Of course, doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, I never managed to get printing working under Kubuntu Dapper, whereas it worked flawlessly in Hoary and Breezy, as well as the latest version of Suse.

Let’s hope Etchy will see this support of KDE actually materialise

Beyond just porting the KDE goodies from openSuse that is

Actually, Kubuntu shows promise, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it as is for the average user. I actually started to really like using Adept for package management as well. Given the sorry state of package management in Suse right now, and the abandonment of Synaptic, I wouldn’t mind seeing Adept ported to work with apt4rpm maybe.

One of the nice things about KDE is that it’s fairly independent from the distros and implementation tends to be fairly consistent regardless of the distro it’s running on. The difference I think is with distros like Suse that build on it (ie. adding Kerry, knetworkmanager etc.) and try and do a better job of integrating it into the underlying OS, it tends to just feel more solid that way.

I’d like to see Kubuntu do something similar, and maybe build on or advance KDE rather than just settling for a well supported implementation. I mean, even Fedora has a decent enough, vanilla implementation of KDE. Kubuntu can do better, and in fact already has.

Part of me wonders if Mark’s just waiting for KDE 4.0 when much of the heavy lifting will already be done…? I’d be disappointed if that’s the case…
2006-05-09 2:49 am

jjmckay
Mark said he was using KDE on ubuntu *after* ubuntu breezy was released so no we are not seeing kubuntu as a primary focus yet. No promises broken.

– kubuntu user here

2006-05-08 8:33 pm

IkeKrull
As a previous poster noted there do seem to be some inconsistencies with printing, and many of the KDE apps (though mainly the very new ones e.g. Kontact from KOffice 1.5) crash a lot, but theres just no way I could bring myself to go back to GNOME Ubuntu, its just not functional enough.

I don’t think they should have too much work to do to get KDE integrated really well, but I certainly welcome this announcement.
2006-05-08 9:25 pm

shiny
“and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt”. WOW!
2006-05-08 9:55 pm

rakamaka
Please…don’t take title offended and not aimed derogatory

but before confusing average joe with Kde gnome and many other choices **buntu and your forked vision Mark should address these questions asked first..by Jaqui Greenlees

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6066271.html

Any expert from Ubuntu dare to say these problems are fixed in Flight..or whatever name it is…

2006-05-08 10:54 pm

theine

2006-05-08 11:34 pm

JCooper
He certainly has patience!!

I couldn’t believe what I was reading in that “article” and subsequent Q&A session at the end. I think Jeff provided precise, correct and very tame responses to some really pointless and uninformed questions. It is a shame there are people like her out there putting down the great work being done by the various distributors, contributors, etc.

I just hope she’s gone back to LFS and is now happy there isn’t even a package manager to utter the words “laptop-utils” and “bluez”

2006-05-08 11:00 pm

tristan
but before confusing average joe with Kde gnome and many other choices **buntu and your forked vision Mark should address these questions asked first..by Jaqui Greenlees

What “questions”?

I’ve no idea who Jaqui Greenlees is, but after reading the link you gave, I can only conclude that she is exceptionally small-minded and argumentative, and definitely not someone whose opinions I ever want to read again. I have to admire Jeff Waugh for having the patience to put up with her rubbish for that long. God know I couldn’t have.

There is absolutely nothing of substance there.

2006-05-08 10:45 pm

Terracotta
From what I see the journalist (or at least the one that asks questions) is just trying to troll Ubuntu, he gets answers anyway but is persisting to requestion the same things over and over again, I am happy that bluez is installed out of the box, I’m happy Konqueror is installed out of the box….

And what the hell is wrong with update notifications???? 😐 What’s wrong with sudo? it works and it isn’t more unsafe than a root-user.

Before you start trolling a distro, think about this: it’s not because the default isn’t what you like that it’s an unsafe distro, I’m a happy user, and to me they build a nice basic distro that just needs a few apps of my choice.

Edit: typo

Edited 2006-05-08 22:46

2006-05-09 3:31 am

theGrump
now see if that was an openbsd interview, they would have just told him to go f**k himself

2006-05-09 1:20 pm

arctic
Yeah, one must question only one thing in your beloved Ubuntu and immediately everyone is a troll for you. That is all you have to say?

The points made there were partially (not all of course) valid points for criticism and if you fail to realize that sudo CAN be a security problem and that e.g. being unable to remove firefox or launching an init 3 session only (it NEVER worked in Ubuntu… dunno why they borked it, but you are always forced into an init 5 environment, even after hacking inittab etc.) are some real showstoppers, than I don’t know really what to say except: You are new to Linux, right?

and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt.

Wow. Great move!!! *lol* If someone shows his commitment through a T-shirt, it shows that he knows some childish PR-tricks and that some guys are still prone to those cheap PR-tricks, but not much else imho.

“ubuntu”: popular piece of crap with pretty wrapper and million-dollar advertising campaign.

2006-05-09 2:30 pm

mjg59
sudo CAN be a security problem

Via what attack pathway? Unless you never use the “su” command either, it’s no less secure than having a separate root password.

unable to remove firefox

You can remove firefox. In the process you’ll lose certain other bits of infrastructure that depend on the gecko widget that it provides. Now that xulrunner is a viable alternative, that’ll be fixed.

launching an init 3 session

Debian (and most of its derivatives, including Ubuntu) has never had a policy of only starting X in certain runlevels. The boot menu offers you the option of booting in single user mode, which is equivalent for most purposes.

You are new to Linux, right?

No. The techrepublic article is woefully inaccurate – the author seems to know nothing about how sensible multi-tasking operating systems work, presents multiple claims as facts when they simply aren’t and spends more time berating Jeff than actually attempting to understand any of his answers. But even so, the author isn’t new to Linux. Experience doesn’t imply competence.

2006-05-09 2:46 pm

Terracotta
mhm, why this offensiv tone? The interview was offensiv too, and it may be that ubuntu is not for you, but it sure ain’t a piece of crap, they happen to target a rather big audience and they keep them happy, so what’s the problem? Didn’t have much problems, and there’s always room for improvement sure, but please, attacking someone has never worked in convincing someone he’s wrong, you rather get the opposite effect.

2006-05-09 5:01 pm

arctic
Sorry, I had a lousy day and had to leave my frustration anywhere…

2006-05-08 11:37 pm

Trollstoi
All ur base are belong to Ubuntu! For great justice!

2006-05-09 3:08 am

aseigo
> the CUPS bugs are mainly KDE’s fault for using

> non-standard API’s for CUPS that disappeared after

> an upgrade

well, it’s a bit hard to use public APIs when they don’t exist.

the private CUPS APIs were used to achieve features (namely async operations) that simply weren’t possible elsewise at the time.

where we fell down was when the APIs were improved and async operations were provided via the public API, our software wasn’t ported to those new APIs. so it’s not exactly so clear cut. however, we have an active kdeprint maintainer again, so it looks like such issues will be dealt with in a timely manner in the future.

btw, i just set installed my network printer on dapper using CUPS this afternoon via the kde printer control panel. it detected it properly via a scan of the local network and printing works just peachy. =)

Edited 2006-05-09 03:20

2006-05-09 4:44 am

elsewhere
well, it’s a bit hard to use public APIs when they don’t exist.

the private CUPS APIs were used to achieve features (namely async operations) that simply weren’t possible elsewise at the time.

where we fell down was when the APIs were improved and async operations were provided via the public API, our software wasn’t ported to those new APIs. so it’s not exactly so clear cut. however, we have an active kdeprint maintainer again, so it looks like such issues will be dealt with in a timely manner in the future.

Point taken, that makes sense. I was basically paraphrasing from one of the posts I read about it on planetkde a while back and it coincided with some serious issues I was having with CUPS/Kubuntu Dapper at the time, but my recollection ain’t what it used to be.

btw, i just set installed my network printer on dapper using CUPS this afternoon via the kde printer control panel. it detected it properly via a scan of the local network and printing works just peachy. =)

Excellent, that’s the problem I was having (network shared printer). Unfortunately I bunged up Kubuntu when I re-installed Suse, but I’ll try her again when final is out. That would have been a bit of a deal breaker for me.

Now that we have that settled, please quit wasting time here and get back to writing KDE 4.

2006-05-09 5:15 am

Celerate
Not too long ago I installed the kubuntu-desktop package on dad’s Ubuntu setup because it was preferred by some users (besides myself that is), and the first thing I noticed after that was that the menus (at least under KDE) were grossly overfilled with menu entries for almost all apps from both KDE and Gnome.

If I’m not mistaken the desktop files used for the current menu standard have a way of specifying under which desktop environment(s) they should be shown. This means that some applications like FireFox, Evolution, and a handfull of others can be shown in every desktop environment, but the rest of the GTK and KDE applications can be hidden outside of their native environment. See:

http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s04….

Look for the strings “OnlyShowIn” and “NotShowIn”.

Ubuntu is a decent distribution, but it could still use more polish of this sort. Another thing I find unfortunate, and this is shared amongst several distributions, is the long pause experienced while the network interface(s) are getting a DHCP assigned IP address. Without a IP address being given this delay can be painfully long. My computers aren’t always attached to the network, and laptops in particular shouldn’t be expected to always have a network connection available. This may not be Ubuntu’s problem, but fixing it would certainly earn them extra points with current and potential users.

Good luck to the Ubuntu developers, and especially to the Kubuntu developers whose work made Ubuntu a nice distro for me. Keep up the good work.

2006-05-09 5:28 am

DigitalAxis
Hopefully InitNG will help with that. (Probably) Among other things, InitNG starts unrelated services in parallel so you won’t have to wait for a DHCP response before it starts things like your X server.

I had it sort-of working on Breezy a while back via someone’s InitNG .deb, and my system not only booted much faster with InitNG, it didn’t take any longer to boot when my laptop wasn’t connected to the internet.

As to the sort-of working… well, the system couldn’t handle speedstep at the time. I don’t know about now; but now I have very little time to mess around with it.

2006-05-09 5:23 am

archiesteel
btw, i just set installed my network printer on dapper using CUPS this afternoon via the kde printer control panel. it detected it properly via a scan of the local network and printing works just peachy.

I can confirm that printing through CUPS on a network printer (Mandriva 2006) from my up-to-date Kubuntu dapper laptop works like a charm.

2006-05-09 7:38 am

REMF
thank god!

i distribute Ubuntu CD’s at the place I work which is a community IT resource because they look attractive and professional, but i will be much happier now that i can switch from Ubuntu to Kubuntu.

2006-05-09 7:25 pm

rakamaka
Ubuntu Lovers, Just slip into another shirt and you will feel this take on…..

Reply to post by By Terracotta

————————————–

mhm, why this offensive tone? The interview was offensive too, and it may be that MS WINDOWS is not for you, but it sure ain’t a piece of crap(ALMOST ALL HW SUPPORT), they happen to target a rather big audience(90%) and they keep them happy(EASE OF USE), so what’s the problem? Didn’t have much problems(PROPERLY SECURED MS), and there’s always room for improvement(Vista) sure, but please, attacking someone has never worked in convincing someone he’s wrong, you rather get the opposite effect(RUN AWAY FROM LINUX).

——————————————————

2006-05-09 11:13 pm

snozzberry
I’ve installed Breezy 5.10 on three PCs and one 500MHz G3 iMac successfully.

Konqueror needs to be more stable as a file manager. It crashes more often than I’d like, and I don’t remember this behavior in other KDE variants.

Adept and Adept-Update need to reliably open the first time I summon them from the menu and give my password. Apps should not inexplicably die while starting without even an error message.

Single-click to open is Gnome’s default and shouldn’t be imitated for its own sake. Standardize KDE on double-click to open and switchers will feel more at home.

If I insert a USB memory key and sda appears mounted on my desktop, opening it should open the contents, not give me an error (when Konq’s own navigator can open it fine).

Don’t enable KWallet by default unless you want to write and run a tutorial at first startup explaining it.

In fact, follow the original Mac’s lead and put together a tutorial explaining the basic K desktop and showing short animations of the default applications.

Unless there’s a FF-like licensing problem with using OOo2’s default application icons, dump those awful frisbees with the unreadable sub-icons. Also, OOo has SVG icons for those apps, so leaving low-res bitmaps in the “others” category is unnecessary.

Oh, and write a cogent explanation as to why mousing over the vector art in the Example Content folder yields the information that the Ubuntu logo files were authored in commercial software on a non-Linux platform and only exported to SVG as an afterthought.