@ Jeff:

This article is barely a review. It spends the majority of the time complaining about “branding”. Who the hell cares? I just want software that works. The only useful piece of information which would pursuade/discourage me from trying Kubuntu is that the package manager sucks. Its sounds to me like your complaints about the distro missing certain apps is easily fixed using the sucky package manager (otherwise I would have assumed you would have mentioned that that they weren’t available).

This is a 7 page rant about branding. You should label it accordingly.

I HAVE INSTALLED KUBUNTU AND FOUND IT EASIER THAN UBUNTU HOWEVER I AM NOT FAMILIAR WITH THESE OS SYSTEMS ENOUGH TO COMMENT ON HOW THEY WORK
I HAVE A BIT OF A PROBLEM WITH IMPLEMENTING ANY SERVICES LIKE INTERNET OR MUSIC STREAMING HOW EVER THE DESKTOP IS NICELY ORIENTED AND I AM SURE WITH SOME MORE CONSENTRATION TO OTHER ASPECTS I WILL GET TO KNOW THE INS AND OUTS OF THIS OS
THE REASON I HAVE HAD TROUBLE GETTING ANY LINUX TO WORK IS THE ADDITION OF AN EXTERNAL DRIVE AND ON MY ORIGINAL DRIVE I WAS ABLE TO USE UBUNTU UNTIL DISK SPACE RAN OUT
THE KUBUNTU OS IS PROVING TO BE A CHALLENGE AND I AM NOT SURE WHY BUT A QUESTION I HAVE CAN I INSTALL UBUNTU DESK TOP INTO KUBUNTU OR WILL THAT DESTROY THE KUBUNTU ?

I have Kubuntu 10.04.1 LTS installed on my systems, so I took another look at it tonight. I don’t know what the issue is with KPackagekit, but for me, it is about as easy and solid as they come. It always works for me, and if all I am doing is upgrading the system, it has about as easy an interface as there is with any GUI-based package manager. Kubuntu is stable, too. I have not seen any Plasma failures. Then again, I have since added the PPA (Personal Package Archive) to give me the very latest KDE release, and the latest have quite a few Plasma improvements, so perhaps that is one reason that I have fewer issues. Can’t say I got a lot of Plasma issues earlier though.

In any case, with the most recent updates, this release is about as solid as they come. I did not even see any warnings during the entire time that I was using it.

@ KenP:
Kubuntu is by far the best distro for KDE. tested in our labs. It by far out succeeds SUSE, Fedora, LinuxMint KDE, and the list goes on. Only Kubuntu has succeeded in a non linear lag for this GUI. I don’t want sound rude. But alot of you guys need to test Gnome, and KDE on multiple systems as our firm has.

All I got out of this article is someone hooked on gnome. first the install routine is not alot like ubuntu. it is better…HOW? it keeps a index on right showing ever step visually as to give reference in how far through the install you are along with catagory. Ubuntu is totally different in means of this and lacking due to its late 90′s looks and feels. I take it this guy likes the 80s and 90s approach to things and plain and simple. Thats great. But rest of world is moving on. Example? North east arkansas our firm has switched over 800 computer systems from ubuntu to Kubuntu with merely allowing users to sample for them selves the difference. You also go on to say plain and boring. lol. the graphics level of Kubuntu without doing math but just looking is at far higher lvl of graphics then ubuntu has ever musturd of the orange and brown block segment. Ubuntu is a very good program for slow older computers. But if you own a new system and need a design maximizing your output. Kubuntu has that Award. As for disliking the no cano logo on the login screen. thats a matter of personal choice i would say seeing that most end up changing it to there feel and like with gnome. But i notice with users on Kubuntu they tend stick to the original Air theme. Can’t Hardly blame them.

Don’t take this reviews word for dittly. it is bias and personal choice. Go kubuntu site. get a install on your system or off a pin. And let yourself be the judge:). 1 year ago kubuntu was making ever wrong move in book. Today I applaud them for the hardwork they have achieved to for go that outlook.

I disagree with your review 100%. With the k environment, it is good to only use qt based applications such as amarok, konq, etc. Why would you want gtk based ones like gimp. Kde is supposed to bring a uniform design with its applications. When you install something like gwibber, you are ruining the uniformity. It will stand out from the rest of your applications which is not a good thing at all. If you do not like the fact that kubuntu doesn’t come with ubuntu like packages, then kubuntu is not even meant for you. Kubuntu should never try to imitate ubuntu or it will become a disgrace..

I have to say the quality of reviews on this blog are really bad, especially this one on Kubuntu. It is extremely superficial to say the least.

As a new convert to the Linux world, I have tried most of distros on distrowatch’s top 30 recently, and so far Kubuntu 10.04 is one of the most beginner friendly KDE distro I have seen.

The installation was flawless and very intuitive. Comparing to PCLinuxOS 2010.1 KDE, which is also a renowned beginner friendly distro, but during its installation why I need to be presented with that 2 screens of grub options selection? Most beginners do not know how to choose and do not care. And why I need to be asked type in the root password to start the installation from live CD session? I know the password is shown on top of the screen, but it is certainly an extra step and unnecessarily not beginner-friendly. Kubuntu 10.04 does a much better job in this area.

And talking about internationalization support. Remember a significant portion of users would be non-English speakers. Kubuntu did a remarkable job on this. Everything works out of the box. Everything on screen is translated, the fonts look pretty nice and iBus installed automatically and works great. In comparison, in Linux Mint 9 KDE, everything on screen is still in English and I can find nowhere iBus. The situation is a little better for PCLinuxOS 10.1 KDE, menus etc are translated properly, but the fonts are weird and in weird size that make them essentially unreadable. And unlike in Kubuntu 10.04 I select my language to be used right during installation and that is it, in PCLinuxOS 10.1 KDE I need to click and run that Localization Manager after installation, which is really anti-intuitive and inconvenient. And what if my English is not good enough, and I still need to go through the entire installation process in English, and even after the installation I still have an English system, and I need to again find and run that Localization Manager, in English, before I can have a system in my native language.

And Samba share support. I certainly still have lots of windows machines I need to access. That is why I need Samba share support. In Kubuntu 10.04 it works right out of the box. I can access all my windows share folders on my other windows machines. The story is not so simple for other distros.

And it is pretty much polished. In contrast in PCLinuxOS 10.1 KDE, several times I encountered dialog boxes that ask me choose between OK and CANCEL but I had only 2 buttons of YES and NO to choose. It is sometimes hard to do the guess work.

I do agree with this reviewer that lacking a Software Center leaves something to be desired. It took me a while to find out how to install new packages. And those packages like build-essential should be included in default installation. I guess it is limitation of CD size. In my opinion for KDE nowadays it is really hard to package a properly functioning and configured out of the box system into something as small as 700MB. Maybe it is the time to move to DVD size packaging.

Also the default coloring scheme is far from attractive. In my opinion openSUSE 11.3 has the most attractive appearance in current KDE system.

Another is, I would like to see the most recent user names I used to show up in the login screen. The good example here is PCLinuxOS 10.1 KDE, I can simply click on the user name and start typing my password to login. That is something we called user-friendliness.

Overall, I am very happy with Kubuntu 10.04. It certainly needs some more work. But for beginners it comes with least difficulties, which is its goal, to be a beginner friendly distro. Its major competitors all trail behind. I would rate it 4/5 or even 4.5/5.

In the end, I would like to suggest the reviewer of this blog to put some real work into it, if you want to run something called DesktopLinuxReviews. Better be more professional. Learn from some other linux review sites. It is a better idea to design a set of standardized tests, like 20, covering different aspects of installation / usage. Conduct each test and rate each aspect individually, like ease of installation 5/5, internationalization support 5/5, Samba share support 5/5, appearance attraction 3/5 etc, and then sum them up to get the overall score. That will make your reviews much more material, consistent and valuable.

Regards,

Al

Ravenheart wrote:

Are you seriously complaining about the KDE4 theme? Have you SEEN how many KDE Themes are available? There are like 20 and only about 10 of them are any good. ALL KDE4 based Distros use one of 2 themes. Oxygen or Air, period.

Yeah. He is. This is the worst review I’ve ever seen.

I agree with this review. As a dedicated KDE user I found Kubuntu to provide a lacklustre experience. Compared to other prominnent KDE distros it really is the pits. The software selection is terrible and the distro-specific tools are few and unpleasant.

I think Canonical should just be open and admit that they are moving in a monoculture direction with regards to desktop distros and kill off their secondary releases because everyone else out there is doing a better job of things.

Hi,

Although I am a new linux user, I’ve been using Linux distros long enough to know whats good and whats not.

1. Comparing kubuntu with ubuntu is not the way to do it because thats not comparing apple to apple.

2. All linux distos (or at least most) are know to be highly customizable, which is one of the main reasons why people use linux. Thus, Kubuntu shouldn’t lose points because of the way it looks. Besides, Kubuntu shouldn’t look like ubuntu at all because they are targeting different users with different preferences, Gnome users and KDE users.

I think Canonical do a great job with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Mint/Gnome is fine to. But if you prefeer the KDE desktop I have so far not tryed any better than PCLinuxOS 2010.1 and Pardus 2009.2.

This really a bad review. The author takes 5 web pages to complain about 2 things, both are EXPECTATION related, i.e. the cause is with the author himself.
1. “It doesn’t look like I want to”. Well, it’s KDE man. You can tweak it to death and make it look like whatever you want. KDE customization surpasses GNOME’s capabilities by about 300%. Spend the time man and stop whining.
2. “There’s no Ubuntu software centre”. So what?

The review contains zero nada nothing about things that don’t work in Kubuntu.

Seriously, if you’re writing reviews, stay objective.

the title bar buttons are supposed to be on the right in any KDE distro because KDE is supposed to handle like windows.

I agree with you Jim. Canonical should either bring Kubuntu on par with Ubuntu or drop it as an “official” distribution. As it stands now, it is making KDE look bad. If you compare Kubuntu with PCLinuxOS (for example), Kubuntu is a memory hog whereas PCLinuxOS with KDE4 uses less memory for its default desktop even as compared to Ubuntu!
Just one of the things I feel is wrong with Kubuntu. The Kubuntu devs are an energetic bunch but it feels they are chasing Ubuntu’s tail-lights all the time.

i think that the ubuntu theme sucks and that the kubuntu look and feel rocks.

Pretty poor review I thought, I’ll expand on that in a moment, but first I’ll just say yes I am a KDE user mainly, although I do use both.

I do agree with you on some points, particularly that the default Kubuntu theme should more closely mirror the Ubuntu release, but then Kubuntu has always had a “blue” theme rather than the brown. It certainly deserves more work, IMO.

You main gripes however seem to be the lack of Canonical branding (is this really such a big deal?), and the lack of certain software that is installed by Ubuntu (Gwibber etc.)

If you don’t understand why Kubuntu developers do not include Gnome/GTK+ apps, then I think you should stick to reviewing Ubuntu based distro’s.

@ Jim Lynch:

I have to agree with the review. My first experience with KDE 4 was with Kubuntu and I hated it. Its VERY poorly implemented.

Since 2008, however, I have tried openSUSE. Thats how KDE SHOULD look & feel, IMO. Kubuntu has been a disappointment for me since 8.04

I too found your review to be very unfair.

I happen to love the default KDE theme and find it to be more polished/appealing than the custom themes of other distros. Lack of obnoxious branding is a plus to me.

I don’t want my os to include a music store or built in online storage. If I wanted to buy music or store files online I’d use a different provider than Canonical. I find integration of these kinds of services a very slippery slope towards adware or the kind of bundled bloatware that you immediately uninstall from a newly purchased computer.

What you missed in your review is that Kubuntu 10.04 / KDE 4.4 is now very stable. The graphic driver and network management bugs that plagued 9.04 and to a lesser degree 9.10 are absent. KDE integration of non-KDE applications like Firefox is pretty fantastic.

Documentation could be significantly better. Maybe kpackagekit could be better? I use apt for updates and software management so haven’t really looked at it.

If you’re looking for a debian based, vanilla KDE distro, with a large community, and giant software base, that is easy to use what other distro are you going to pick? A lot of the hate Kubuntu gets is based on people having had bad experiences with KDE 4 a year ago and refusing to reevaluate the state of KDE 4 today.

Everything you criticized made me want to move to Kubuntu 10.04. A fairly pure KDE 4.4 with the Ubuntu-style hardware driver installation automation but none else of the Canonical fuckwittery and wankery? (What’s wrong with KPackageKit? Why does Ubuntu have the Fischer Price “Software Center” AND Synaptic?) Sounds good to me. All in all, this is a really stupid review. For people who actually like KDE, what you described sounds great. For people who like Canonical’s kludged up bullshit, perhaps not.

Ha, I always love all the comments stating that distro X or release X is the worst ever, cause some small thing didn’t work by default. I have Ubuntu 10.04 running on my laptop, and it’s pretty damn solid (on my hardware). This surprised me as 9.10 didn’t work (on MY hardware), tho 9.10 worked flawlessly on my desktop.

I haven’t tried Kubuntu 10.04 yet, cause of all the flaws that the article stated. I tried to like Kubuntu for so long, hoping they would get more resources and get their act together. Before this release they were talking smack about updating their image etc. The only thing I see different is that their web-site looks a bit nicer (but will probably stay the same for 5 more years). It is hard to blame the Kubuntu team though, because as I understand it, Canonical only pays one person to work on the project and that is about the extent of their support. Personally I think if your not going to do it right, don’t do it at all. Although vanilla KDE is nice, it’s getting boring and some default theme more similar to Ubuntu (but kde’d) would be nice. Basicly it seems all they do is take Ubuntu, remove gnome and all the default apps, install vanailla KDE and some buggy beta KDE apps (ok most are pretty good by now), add the 2 logos you mentioned, then test it a bit to make sure it’s not TOO buggy (tho it usually is). I’m pretty sure I could do this myself…

Lately i’v been using linux mint KDE, though not much different, it seems a little more dressed up and a little more tested. Plus I generally like the added mint apps. Plus i’m so used to the *buntu base that I don’t think I could stand switching back to Suse or Fedora (or wait 5 years between stable Debians). I love and have always used KDE, though Gnome is finally looking sort of modern, my heart still lies with KDE.

I disagree with the assessment here… at least in part.

While the supportative things said were for the most part quite good, some of the negatives were off-the-mark

1 – Theming, while I do think it could do with some more canonical/kubuntu-izing that it is nothing like Ubuntu itself is not a bad thing, the KDE-ized ubuntu isn’t just Ubuntu + KDE its the base of Ubuntu with a well integrated KDE desktop… Kubuntu having its own theming as opposed to ubuntu’s is more appropriate than it using ubuntu’s… although I’m not abject to some similarities… same thing goes for button placement, I must admit it is quasi-windows-like to have the buttons where they are in KDE, but thats normal for KDE, its not a kubuntu thing nor is it due to it being a mac or windows-alike thing (besides that is customizable, its just a default. if the truth be told from what I’ve seen of Ubuntu (the default gnome desktop) it doesn’t appear all that unique, it appears to me very much a Mac OSX Leopard-alike (with darker decoration) but similar colour desktop background…

2 – apps, and social media, afaik Kopete is an Instant messenger, I’d be suprised if it wasn’t in Kubuntu, along with Quassel (although personally I’d prefer Konversation) for IRC… but there is the newbie on the block (which to me is somewhat kopete-like) called choqok, its a twitter client (that is quite new in terms of application maturity in Kubuntu) … its the beginnings of a microblogging client … also with Kdevelop and Koffice both being relatively new to KDE4 the apps that will come along with them, like Krita/Karbon for Image enditing is why a GIMP alternative is currently missing… KOfficce will likely be intending to fill those functions, The only part of that I can see needs extending upon is Choqok (plurk anyone?), a full-blown Blogging (ie WordPress, LiveJournal, etc.) client although most of those things can also be comfortably done in a browser it seems more useful to have a client) Note: this doesn’t address Ubuntu One which is probably likely to be addressed in the future since Ubuntu One is relativly new, still in beta last I saw…

3 – Its a pity but it does seem true that Canonical don’t put much into development of Kubuntu, it does feel like a second-rate cousin who they don’t care about a great deal…

4 – another note is the similarity of Quicksilver and Gnome-Do… looks like Gnome has resorted to trying to be very much OSX-like…

5 – Package Manager, this one I agree with, I’m not sure what is really going on here, I miss Adept, but I think KDE/Kubuntu will look for a better solution…

6 – OK so obviously I’m a KDE supporter, I hope it wasn’t too jaded a view, but many of the points there that weren’t so great are things that will be addressed either in backports or coming releases… the problems seem to me mostly a matter of timing and a little lack of KDE love on Canonical’s part, however for the most part Kubuntu is still a strong OS…

kubuntu. install it, work very good..
fast boot
nice task bar (for me)
until now had one problem, Wi-Fi not work. But Ethernet cable works fine.
generally good distro.
Note: about the article above…it’s a fast look just.

What you call “review” is only a whining on kde look and the fact that Kubuntu don’t have a ingeniously patents like making an OS purple and moving the buttons that whole world knows to be on the right to the left?!
Some programs are missing? Oh, what a problem. You need to be an IT expert to install them? C’mon…
In this, so called “review”, there is no a single word about usability, stability and functionality and those are the things that matters. And in all of those, Kubuntu is brilliant. If you like your buttons on the left, just move them. It is not a big deal. Just try to really test the Kubuntu, and then write this article again…

I tend to agree with Elder-Geek in his thoughts on Ubuntu and Mint. I had not quite put a handle on why I did not prefer them, other than their use of GNOME, but Elder-Geek helped me clarify some of my reasons. For Ubuntu, the choices made are very good ones for a beginner, but they are not right for me. Regarding Mint, especially the KDE version of Mint, but also the main GNOME version, both are stable but rather stale in the software they provide. When I do want older, more mature, stable software, I find that I have, for me, a better delivery mechanism in SimplyMEPIS. It is even more defect free than Mint, and tends to be lighter and it runs faster, yet it is simple.

One other observation is that the Slackware distribution is perhaps the most pure vendor implementation of KDE of any distribution. Patrick Volkerding does not modify it AT ALL. The Kubuntu distribution is a lot like that, but it is much more current than Slackware. Along with Mandriva and openSUSE, it tends to be a very early implementation. This latest release is the best one they have ever done.

To me, everyone has valid points, and everyone has a right to an opinion. The ratings, anyone intelligent enough to realize, are clearly subjective – my opinion is, and so is yours. Jim has clearly articulated what his reasons are for saying what he said. Look, he got some controversy and some readership. Reminds me of John Dvorak. He always says controversial stuff and I love to read his pieces. Jim Lynch has always been, even more so than John, one of my favorites. I don’t agree with his viewpoint this time, but it takes nothing away from enjoying reading these pieces. Some of you “hot heads” here make reading these comments quite amusing, too, so thank you all! I am so glad that like free software, we are free to openly share our opinions, and I thank each one of you for yours. This has been one of the most entertaining threads here in recent memory! -Brian