A public spat!
Disclaimer: this entry is personal, and does not reflect any official, issued opinion of the KDE project.

Well folks, it's fun as an observer to see some of the public, high publicity spats that occasionally occur around KDE throughout the blagotubes. First, Aaron posts a rather long (arg! I hate multipage interviews, an excuse for more ads!) interview over at linuxworld.com.au. On page 2, Aaron takes a shot at *ubuntu for being entrenched in certain decisions of their past. Well, Jono Bacon (PHB type at canonical these days) didn't like it, and fired back via his blog.

Now folks, public spat aside, I think that it is true that there are many disenfranchised KDE users on the kubuntu front who are tired of being second class citizens, lagging a year behind on many features going into Ubuntu, or getting broken patches that are only occasionally sent upstream.

To those users, don't believe that kubuntu is the only good KDE distro out there! There are many very popular KDE distros in the world that treat KDE as a first class citizen. I will recommend, based on their support of the KDE community, a few very good alternatives for those kubuntu users that are tired of waiting for change:

OpenSuse: This distro has always been one of of KDE's strongest friends, both past and present, under all sorts of capitalization schemes which I may or may not get correctly in any given post. They have many people working on KDE directly or indirectly, and contribute frequently to upstream which helps to improve KDE for everyone. However, since OpenSuse is tightly associated with Novell, and there are some that morally object to their agreement with a certain American Behemoth, which rules them out. It's too bad, because it is an extremely good distro.

Mandriva: Mandriva is on the upswing these days. It was originally created under the name Mandrake, which was Redhat+KDE in origin. This alone should tell you how important KDE is to them, however their story is a little more interesting. After a few years and several releases, they merged with Connectiva, a south american distro that was also KDE-centric to be renamed as Mandriva. They are huge supporters of KDE via conference hosting, developer hours (directly and indirectly), and like the openSuse folks, they have a very good relationship with KDE. (As a side note, I run this happily at home now, since I moved from kubuntu).

Slackware: Well, my recent post somewhat illustrates Slackware's long-term commitment to KDE. Slackware has outlived most other distros, and tries to keep things simple, and unpatched where ever possible. If you are looking for a 'virgin' KDE, and don't have issues with occasionally having to much around in the bash prompt, I highly suggest slackware. Reporting bugs form slackware's KDE packages are appreciated by most KDE maintainers, as the KDE in slackware is pretty much exactly the KDE that we issue from SVN.

Fedora?: Kevin and the folks at Fedora have recently spent a lot of time re-factoring Fedora in order to make it desktop agnostic. The KDE SIG group there is doing much to improve Redhat/Fedora's image of being historically anti-KDE. If you like *ubuntu, but don't like their implementation of KDE, this might be a good place to move to, as KDE visibility and support is on the upswing (rather than in limbo). They recently did some rebranding to ensure that KDE and Gnome are given equal billing for the download discs, which is one of the main suggestions to *ubuntu that seems to be frequently rejected.

Arch: For those that prefer to watch things compile, but are not comfortable with going straight to gentoo (and all the community issues that come with gentoo), try out Arch. They ship two versions of KDE, one that is more-or-less virgin, and another known as kdemod. kdemod is special, as it is basically a complete collection of all the best KDE patches that have been floating around the internet, and are pulled from almost every distro around. The downside is that reporting bugs from kdemod to kde is not really too useful, as the patches may make the behavior unique, but this is a problem that is common for the more customized distros. The arch folks tend to have fairly decent communications and relations with the KDE community, via irc or otherwise.

PC-BSD/Desktop-BSD: While not linux at all, these two KDE distributions are based on the FreeBSD system. They offer high amounts of polish for KDE users, and can introduce you to the world of free operating systems that exists outside of Linux. I would say that 99% of KDE will work the same on Linux and FreeBSD, but the hardware support may be different. Some people have reported that FreeBSD based KDE installs tend to be much faster than Linux based KDE installs, although this isn't necessarily the case for all hardware. The downside for these two is that KDE 4.x is still unusable, although I'm sure that [ade] and friends will have this all worked out shortly.

There are many other good KDE distros out there, and I have only listed a few of them. There are regional distros such as Red Flag (China), TurboLinux (Asia, recently rebased on Mandriva), Pardus (Turkey), ALT Linux (Russia), as well as successful commercial distros such as Xandros (made popular on the Asus EEE), which come with their own set of unique advantages and problems. These distros have huge user bases that are simply not talked about in the North American (or even European) open source media outlets. I'm sure that there's good KDE distros that I forgot to mention (add them to comments if you want!). A quick check of distrowatch will show you how many KDE distros are out there right now, however many are much more popular than distrowatch's regionally biased statistics would suggest. Don't simply believe the slashdot commenters and related internet groupthink that seems to think that KDE is not shipped by default by any distros that matter. I guess the slashdot crowd only ever uses Ubuntu or Redhat and doesn't care about global reality :)

I love Riddell for the job he tries to do with kubuntu, but without more support from the top-down, he's sadly fighting a losing battle (imho) against the sheer amount of support that goes into the other parts of *ubuntu. Maybe Riddell can use this post as justification to apply for more manpower, which would be a great positive outcome for those users that don't want to leave just yet. If he doesn't get that help, then those users might consider moving elsewhere...

So, to those kubuntu users out there who are only hanging on by the thin thread of hope that the situation will improve in a few years, why not consider your options. You are not alone, and many KDE people who were previously on kubuntu (because it just worked) have left it for greener pastures. Jono and Canonical make a lot of money on KDE (kubuntu) deployments, support, and more, despite how little they put into kubuntu. Users migrating away might be the only message we can send to them that they will understand.

Either way, KDE is very strong outside of kubuntu; you just need to take a look around.