I've tried it a few times, but I've always thought Kubuntu was a 2nd tier distro. It just never seemed that stable to me, and it never had that much support. When you used it you just knew that it was an unfavorable stepchild to Ubuntu.

Therefore I do not understand the tech-industry medias obsession with it's release from Ubuntu and 'what this means' for KDE...?

I mean, it was no Debian, no Linux Mint, It was certainly not RedHat or Suse. What's the big deal?

Oh, and by the way if anyone is looking for a great KDE based distro to use you should certainly check out 'Chakra.' It's simple and it works!

Well, I use Kubuntu since its very start and it is definitely the distribution which suits me best, and I have used many. With the kubuntu backports and updates PPA, maintained by the same developers, I get the latest KDE I need as well as new packages of all KDE software.

The reason for different distributions is that there are different users out there, so if one suits you better than another that is good.
But from a few tries (which you didn't specify nor by version nor by length) judging it as second tier is just plain wrong, it is certainly not, else there wouldn't be so many KDE developers using it.

For me Arch and Chakra are not suitable because they lack debugging symbols for many packages and I really need those for triaging bugs. My time is too precious to spend hours of machine time in compiling packages anew.

As for the "what it means for KDE..": did you know that there was a deployment of 500.000 PCs based on Kubuntu in Brazilian schools? This makes it one of the biggest installation of KDE.

I think that the new sponsorship will mean a better distro available for those who use it, and am hoping that with that sponsorship will come the person hours to contribute back more to KDE in areas like bug triage, app development and what ever else new sponsorship may allow. It should be noted Kubuntu always was a community project and Canonical did not provide a lot of manpower (1 or 2 bodies if I recall correctly)

As to the media's fixation I think that Ubuntu has built, thru marketing, a media presence that other distro's haven't - say what you will about their products but they do market well.

Of course with their new sponsor also sponsoring Mint KDE and Netrunner (built on Kubuntu) one wonders why 3 KDE variants and if that will continue. Fyi on their website they state they also support KDE Folderview ,Muon Software Center (QML port), KDE MenuEditor (QML port), kde-gtk-config and more to come http://www.blue-systems.com/

Mamarok wrote:The reason for different distributions is that there are different users out there, so if one suits you better than another that is good. But from a few tries (which you didn't specify nor by version nor by length) judging it as second tier is just plain wrong, it is certainly not, else there wouldn't be so many KDE developers using it.

Well, I "tried" to try it on several occasions but as you said elsewhere in your post it just didn't work for me. Granted I haven't tried it in over a year, but when I did it always seemed "heavy" and slow to me. I wanted to like it. I really did. I just never clicked with it. As for me using Chakra, I love it. It is the closest thing to a "pure" KDE distro out there. I began using KDE before the 1.0 release. I began with Linux by using Caldera and went on from there. So I've been around the block and tried many distros.

Mamarok wrote:As for the "what it means for KDE..": did you know that there was a deployment of 500.000 PCs based on Kubuntu in Brazilian schools? This makes it one of the biggest installation of KDE.

I am aware of that deployment. Kind of makes you wonder why the Brazillian school system didn't rush in to fill the sponsorship void, huh? Seems like they'd have a vested financial interest in keeping that code base up to date? Strange that I haven't seen that fact talked about in the discussions of late. Makes me wonder how serious they are about deploying linux long term? Someone should investigate just how many systems they actually have committed to running "Educational Linux (kubuntu)" Long term. Oh, and best I can find the actual number deployed is more like 42,000 in over 4,000 school systems. *EDIT* LWN.net does say that the eventual deployment should be 500,000 units. But 42,000 is a far cry from that. I do think the plasma active tablet could be THE game-changer for that school system and many others.

For me Arch and Chakra are not suitable because they lack debugging symbols for many packages and I really need those for triaging bugs. My time is too precious to spend hours of machine time in compiling packages anew.

Just for your info, Arch ain't Gentoo. Where Kubuntu takes an age and a half to install packages, pacman does it in a _fraction_ of the time. But I'm not sure what you mean about debugging - and to be frank, it don't really matter. Use what suits you best and be happy