At Kubuntu we value user feedback a lot and so we worked on new boot artwork that is largely based on input from previous releases.
It features not only our traditional but nevertheless excitingly awesome blue but is alltogether striving to be as subtile as possible.
(also we fixed a long-standing bug in GRUB, I hope you noticed 
)
Mark says that Jonathan is being a divisive leader.
So, Mark, let us take a step back and look at what actually happened.
Kubuntu has always taken pride in being the link between the Ubuntu and KDE communities, and looking out for each’s best interest in order to facilitate the creation of exciting and revolutionary free software products. Jonathan personally has been a great advocate of the Ubuntu way even at times when KDE did not find it appealing; right now appears to be such a time.
Recently members of the Ubuntu community raised concerns about the path we are on as a project and Ubuntu Desktop as a product that Canonical has a great interest in. Not because they were being melodramatic, or because they disagreed, but because presenting divisive software after 8 months of development as a new key part of the software stack is nothing more than infantilizing the community. Jonathan as a result suggested to join a different part of the Ubuntu project rather than leaving altogether.
You may think that KDE and other upstreams failed to deliver what is necessary to succeed in taking down the proprietary operating systems, however that does not make it true. Our colleagues creating flavors of the Ubuntu base, as well as the Kubuntu team, are part of the broader Ubuntu project, we are part of the Ubuntu community and we all share the common goal of bringing free software to all the people. Suggesting that only the Ubuntu products Canonical holds a stake in are part of the broader Ubuntu project is outright insulting to all the great community members pouring their passion into a flavor of the Ubuntu vision. Perhaps you think that what we do does not matter, but I say it does.
With a bit of delay the Phonominals today released the second maintenance release for the Phonon VLC backend 0.6. It features overall improvements to efficiency and behavior.
Changes:
Enjoy your multimedia!
The Phonominals are proud to announce the immediate availability of Phonon VLC 0.6.1. In this maintenance release for the 0.6 series we addressed some minor annoyances for music players based on Phonon.
Changes:
Enjoy your multimedia!
The Kubuntu Council is a group of 6 Kubuntu Members who get to vote on membership of Kubuntu Members and occasionally other decisions regarding Kubuntu.
Half the council is nearing the end of their 2 year appointment so we need to hold elections for the open positions to the council. This could be you! If you are a Kubuntu Member and are willing to turn up to Kubuntu meetings as much as possible for the next couple of years do consider putting your name forward.
We are particularly encouraging non-developers to put their name forward, as we feel that a less development focused council is beneficial for the Kubuntu community.
To put your name forward make sure you update your wiki page and then post to the kubuntu-devel email list (you will have to subscribe first).
To nominate someone else also write to the kubuntu-devel list. It might be a good idea to first have a chat with the affected person. Please note that everyone who was nominated by someone else will have to verify their nomination.
Closing date for nominations is June 9 at 23:59 UTC.
The poll will start on June 10. Voting instructions will be sent to members of the kubuntu-members team with public email addresses on Launchpad directly. If you do not have a public email address in Launchpad and wish to vote, email me privately with the address you’d like used you will get a ballot as well.
regards,
Harald for the Kubuntu Council
It is release day in Phonon land and the Phonominals are singing in joy of the new releases of Phonon VLC and Phonon GStreamer.
Phonon VLC 0.5.0 may be obtained from KDE’s servers as usual.
For more information on Phonon GStreamer 4.6.0 head on over to Trever’s amazing blog post.
by su-lin@flickr
Phonon VLC 0.5 is the most stable release yet to see the light of day!
Almost the entire code base was redone to be faster, more efficient, more maintainable and of course more reliable. Additionally this release introduces compatibility with the upcoming VLC 2.0 release as well as improved support for more advanced video features such as subtitle and audio channel selection.
Enjoy your multimedia!
Harald and the Phonominals.
There appears to be some confusion regarding the meaning of yesterday’s announcement that Kubuntu 11.10 is going to be the last release Canonical is offering commercial support for.
For those who have not yet read about it, let me quickly recap the situation. Up until now Kubuntu was a Canonical supported flavor of Ubuntu. This essentially means that you can buy a support contract from Canonical to help you with your Kubuntu infrastructure. Every once in a while Canonical would stamp ‘LTS’ on a Kubuntu release to indicate that they would support this release for 3 or 5 of years to come (delivering security and major bug fixes primarily). The 11.10 release is the last release for which Canonical offers these services. As a direct consequence Jonathan Riddell, a good friend of mine and fearless leader of Kubuntu, will work on other technology during work hours.
You might have noticed that I was writing a lot about Canonical just now, and the reason for this is that the change mostly is about Canonical and not Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is and always has been a mostly community driven project. To give you an idea what mostly means in this case: out of the 25 people who notably contributed in the past year, 1 person was employed by Canonical to do so (i.e. 4% of general Kubuntu work was financed by Canonical). Please do not get me wrong though. Jonathan is a great developer and does a considerable amount of work, particularly in those areas where the community currently lacks motivation, hence some workflow revision is in order to make the ‘new’ Kubuntu equally efficient.
So what changes for real?
Is this bad?
It probably is if you wanted to adopt Kubuntu in your company and were counting on a Canonical support contract. However this is probably more of Canonical’s loss than your’s. As noted earlier there is a pool of more than 25 people one could employ directly to get the same result, perhaps even better. It is certainly sad that Jonathan will not be able to continue getting payed for working on his baby though.
Is this good?
Moving to universe bares a great deal of opportunities for Kubuntu. Primarily it gives the community yet bigger control over what the distribution looks like as we do not need to get software approved to be worthy of Canonical’s support. At the same time it also reduces the policy overhead (main inclusion for those who have heared of it). The detanglement allows us to move even closer to KDE without having to worry about conflicting interests, as what is good for KDE is not necessarily what is good for Canonical.
All in all I expect Kubuntu to become more agile and continue to regularly deliver an easy to use Linux distribution featuring the latest and greatest KDE software.
There is an occasional and not very amusing urban myth that Kubuntu is a stepchild of Ubuntu based on the idea that Canonical is not giving the same amount of care to Kubuntu as other flavors of Ubuntu. It’s not true because Canonical has given much more care to Kubuntu than many other flavours. But all those who believe in this myth may now rejoice as the stepchild is moving out and going to share a flat with its much loved siblings \o/
