The week saw this Kubuntu announcement being posted which mixes two news, reasons the one with the other and left some users imo rather confused as shown by this user comment: "IMHO this is a nice present by the Kubuntu Community and Canonical to the KDE Community". So what was announced?
Kubuntu 8.04 will ship KDE 4.0 as option/on an alternative CD (read KDE 3.5 will exist in Kubuntu 8.04 too). I guess this "news" does not surprise anyone. Also that the Kubuntu community developers want to focus on doing cool new stuff.
The real news is that Kubuntu 8.04 will be, unlike Ubuntu 8.04, no LTS release. LTS stands for "Long Term Support", meaning 3 years support on the desktop, and is a label given to certain releases by the commercial company behind Ubuntu called Canonical.
This is real bummer! So the next Kubuntu LTS we will see, if ever at all, will not appear before 2010. This leaves users/customers who eg planned to update from previous Kubuntu LTS release with a rather big gap by surprise. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will happen as expected, just the KDE packages on it will have only 18 months support. This means also the KDE 3.5 packages! Would Canonical have the burden to maintain KDE 3.5 alone for further 3 years? No, as eg the KDE 3.5 as contained in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 will be supported by Novell until 2011 (extended support even until 2013).
How the decision to support KDE 4.0 shall relate to not giving support (which basically is about critical/security bug fixes) for KDE 3.5 is a mystery to me. One is done by the community, while LTS is said to be a Canonical only thing. My guess is that from the community nobody will work on support at latest starting month 7 (when the next release is out) anyway.
Am I the only one who sees a growing discrepancy between Mark Shuttleworth, Patron of KDE as individual and who promised last year at LinuxTag to not treat KDE second class to GNOME, and what his company Canonical is actually doing?
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The one of the design
The one of the design principles of Ubuntu (which I have recently read) is that there should be only one recommended way to do something. Shipping Kubuntu with 3.5 and 4.0 breaks that principle, and here's my take on that:
Canonical wants to deliver the best support possible. This means that when a customer says "I just installed the latest version of Kubuntu", we shouldn't need to ask them questions about which desktop they are using. Some user may very well not even know. Canonical clearly believes in 4.0, and wants to make the KDE community happy by giving us 4.0 as soon as possible, and doesn't want to commit to supporting the 3.5 version 3 years down the road when it's likely to disappear as an option in less than a year.
Does this mean Kubuntu won't get LTS until 2010? Not necessarily. In fact, when I heard the news, I heard it as "LTS for Kubuntu got pushed back to Hardy+1"... Although I'm not sure that was any kind of official announcement, and I've forgotten the source of that. Official or not, it makes sense. If Hardy+1 is going to drop KDE3 entirely, Canonical could make that the LTS for Kubuntu and then just sync Ubuntu and Kubuntu back up on the next Ubuntu LTS release.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Re: The one of the design
> "there should be only one recommended way to do something".
Sounds like the GNOME desktop is it then.
> Shipping Kubuntu with 3.5 and 4.0 breaks that principle
I think you're mistaken seeing the state of KDE 4 as the single reason for this decision, that's only used as a pretextual argument.
> I heard it as "LTS for Kubuntu got pushed back to Hardy+1"... Although I'm not sure that was any kind of official announcement, and I've forgotten the source of that.
I will be happy when someone can point me to some official announcement telling that. Though I doubt it will ever exist, also because of seeing the obscurity behind this decision. It's the usual Shuttleworth strategy to keep everyone in hope as long as possible.
I think this is where I got
I think this is where I got the idea that Hardy+1 would be LTS:
"Why is Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Kubuntu 8.04 not LTS? Why is Ubuntu 8.10 not LTS and Kubuntu 8.10 is LTS?"
Nothing to see here. Move along.
jumping to conclusions?
While I agree on some of your points I have some problems with this statement;
So the next Kubuntu LTS we will see, if ever at all, will not appear before 2010
I'm not sure how you conclude this. I mean; can you predict what canonical will do? What the market will request that company to do?
The short story is that canonical is not making any promises right now; which is a sane thing to do. Burning them for it seems silly. Instead; lets work on making KDE4 a success and show that canonical has a good business proposition in creating a Kubuntu LTS next year or so.
Being constructive tends to have much better results then kicking people
yep
you're right, something is wrong. Of course, we can go into a conspiracy theory ("Gnomes in Ubuntu got afraid of KDE 4 and ensured Kubuntu got even less support"), but as far as I can tell - this isn't special. Despite what Mark said, Canonical hasn't given any more support to Kubuntu lately, and Jonathan seems rather overworked. They introduce new features in the underlying infrastructure in Ubuntu, and do that at such a timepoint it's impossible to support those features in Kubuntu - so it'll be left behind. Seems almost on purpose.
Apparently, the (few) KDE developers at Canonical aren't as good at political stuff as the Gnome developers. Rather typical, and I think the same happens at Suse where the majority of resources (ppl, money) goes into KDE technology - yet the whole world seems to think Novell is squarely behind Gnome. Gnomes often just get their message out a lot better. And of course management is most impressed by what they hear and see, not by what is actually done.
But this is FOSS, not dependend on company politics, and I still believe the best technology will prevail. Besides, despite all the talk and impressed managers, the majority of OpenSuse users is behind KDE - and KDE is getting better and better support in Fedora as well. Mandriva does great, etcetera - it's mostly Kubuntu which lately gets its ass kicked. Unfortunately.