As for Kubuntu not being LTS, that was and is Canonical’s decision, it wasn’t Kubuntu’s, and release schedules had nothing to do with the dropping of LTS. Unless Canonical releases why they chose to not make Kubuntu 8.04 LTS, then all we can do is speculate, and all that does is lead to the production of FUD and rumors.

The one great thing about going with KDE 4 this release as an option, is it allows us to stay with the curve, and to strive to get in front of the curve. One thing we do know about KDE 3, it isn’t going anywhere. Hopefully Canonical didn’t assume that it was in their decision to drop the LTS.

Time will only tell. If it wasn’t for Gnome, there would be no Ubuntu, and if there were no KDE there would be no Kubuntu. If there were going to be a standard for release schedules, then distributions should follow the DE groups, because w/o the DE groups, Linux wouldn’t be brought up in mainstream talk for the desktop. KDE and Gnome have excelled for 2 reasons, 1) their developers are simply amazing, and 2) their user community is just as amazing as well as supportive. This is part of the reason that I don’t accept the “see what Ubuntu has done for Gnome” mentality, as it takes the award for excellence away from the work the Gnome developers have done.

If anything by dropping the LTS moniker, Ubuntu will give up the possibility of a greater enterprise presence. You don’t see Fedora/Red Hat nor openSUSE/Novell dropping their enterprise KDE environments. My gut instinct is that it is moves such as this, that will only hurt the greater enterprise community, and obviously many have provided their feelings concerning this justly.

Richard: Thanks for responding to my post. I am not suggesting that KDE follow Ubuntu’s schedule, but that they would benefit from having a schedule.

Martin: Perhaps it is not to late for Kubuntu 8.04 to be an LTS release. Let’s hear from Canonical about their reasoning behind this decision. Based on Canonical’s previous good treatment of Kubuntu, I don’t think they are trying to lower its standing. KDE 4.0 will not be ready for 8.04 as the default DE, but why can’t there be a Kubuntu 8.04 LTS using KDE 3.5?

Tristan

We are really happy with the number of our home users and we’re really happy that people seem to like Kubuntu. However, we’d like to be able to find the funding to help Kubuntu grow and become an even better distribution. Therefore, we’re also aiming at the production systems.

This recent move by Canonical to remove the “LTS” suffix from Kubuntu is a strange one. In practice, it blocks our attempts to gain more funding by gaining more support contracts for Canonical. What Canonical is (in my opinion) effectively telling us is “become a community distro for the home users, you will get less and less funding from us”. And that is not nice seeing as how much potential the new KDE4 has.

From my point of view, this is a serious situation. In the worst case, it might cause many Kubuntu developers to “jump ship” and look for another distribution they can help with, one that wants to promote KDE and not lower the number of corporate installations by bad marketing for it.

I would love a link to your post and your blog actually when you are finished. Thanks for the comments!