Welcome to the first KDialogue session! Our guest today is Jonathan Riddell, who has graciously agreed to answer the questions.



Many know Jonathan for being one of the starters of the Kubuntu project, where he is also a package manager, but his involvement in KDE is much more than working on a KDE-flavored distribution. He maintains the Planet KDE blog aggregator (which helps everyone follow the blogs of their favorite develoeprs), and is one of the editors for the Dot. Also, he's been involved in the "People Behind KDE" initiative.
Code-wise, Jonathan has written printer-applet and system-config-printer-kde, two utilities to keep track of print jobs and configure printers, respectively, and the first non-C++ applications to land in KDE SVN.

He's also a rock star, or better, he has been treated like one when he went to Kano, Nigeria for a conference (along with fellow gearhead Adriaan de Groot).

Lastly, he is known for being strangely obsessed with hot tubs...

Now it is your chance to ask questions to Jonathan. Have a look at the KDialogue rules and keep them coming!

How do you deal with being one of the public faces of a distribution that seems to get a lot of flac for the quality of their KDE implementation, often being accused of playing second fiddle to Ubuntu?

Also, as a Kubuntu user, thanks for all the work you put into both it and KDE.

Edited to only be one question.

What is the hardest work for you about KDE and (K)Ubuntu?
EDIT: Split in order to honor the rules.

What do you like most at your work for KDE & (K)Ubuntu?

Was there any major difficulties in switching from KDE 3x to 4x?

What is the future of Kubuntu?

Will there be a kdenetbook edition of Kubuntu?

Will there be custom Kubuntu plasmoids?

Are you playing around with the activities to have several configured activities from a standard install?

What's with the hot tubs?

What's your day job?

redsteakraw wrote:Will there be a kdenetbook edition of Kubuntu?

I can answer this already: yes, there will be. It'll be available in the next version of Kubuntu, and will be available for general use by all distros in KDE 4.4.

Eep, I guess I better ask a question... By including Konqueror in Kubuntu by default, can we expect to see greater interest from developers in KHTML, or on the Webkit kpart?

Can we expect KOffice to be the default Office suite in Kubuntu by KOffice 2.2? Will any work from Kubuntu developers be contributing towards KOffice improvements when it is included?

What are your (or Kubuntu's) plans for KDE integration in Firefox. Are there any plans similar to Opensuse's? [1]

[1] http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/FirefoxIntegration

For me, one of the biggest reason why I decied to choose KDE distros other than Kubuntu is its package manager, KPackageKit. I don't find it complex enough to do any other things than install/remove one single package. Plus, it generally feels too 'big' (if you know what I mean) :

http://kde-apps.org/content/preview.php ... PackageKit

Are there any plans to make it look more like opensuse's Yast2 or Ubuntu's Synaptic? Maybe a qt port of synaptic?