Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu pulls the 'official' plug on Kubuntu

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Art Alexion <art.alexion@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is really bad news for those of use who prefer KDE and have used Ubuntu
> since Warty in 2004.  I am not a big fan of xfce, and absolutely hate the
> Ubuntu version of Gnome.  This comes at a time when KDE 4 has finally
> matured and is really stable and functional again. Even the netbook
> interface is nice.

A recent slashdot discussion touched on a closely related issue that I
mentioned in the last PLUG N:

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/02/14/1345245/linux-of-the-future-may-be-about-which-environment-not-which-distribution

Increasing vertical integration is leading towards a trend where any
particular distro will find it hard to support more than one option
for any of the major system components (udev, sysvinit, X11, desktop
enviornment, etc).  Gnome is working towards requiring udev and
systemd, and I think Ubuntu is moving towards only supporting Unity,
Upstart, and Wayland.  Without replacing half the guts of your system
that would mean that getting Gnome to work on Ubuntu will be very
difficult at some point.

Getting rid of Kubuntu is just one step along the path.

On the Gentoo mailing lists this has been a fairly controversial
topic.  Gentoo is all about choice, and we're slowing finding that
upstream projects are going to be making it much harder to offer that
choice to our users.  While Gentoo ships a default configuration, it
is fairly straightforward to swap out even fairly major subsystems,
like installing systemd, or KDE vs Gnome, or having one of several
initramfs implementations or none at all, or even using busybox mdev
or devfs instead of udev.  When your choice of web browser starts
depending on what sysvinit implementation you're using, I'm not sure
it is a good thing.  It will become much harder to support Gentoo on
FreeBSD or Windows or OSX at this rate...

Rich
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