I read with interest today about the brouhaha between Kubuntu's lead developer and some factions in the Ubuntu community.

Now, most people don't know what Ubuntu is, let alone Kubuntu, and even fewer know who Jonathan Riddell is, but in a nutshell, some sort of "council" of self-appointed volunteers wants to be rid of Riddell for rather vague reasons that point to either a personality conflict or a conflict of interests or maybe both. A lot of issues boil down to money and power, and maybe this is another one of them. On the other hand, it's entirely possible people just rub each other the wrong way, although they must be spending a lot of time writing emails for that to happen, since they don't actually see one another from what I understand. It's just a cyber-community. Oh, the drama.

I am interested only to the extent that I have installed and used Kubuntu as well as other flavors of Ubuntu for a couple of years. I have never installed Ubuntu. Ubuntu's desktop, Unity, had the same concept as Windows 8, wanting the same look and feel for every device from a phone to a desktop computer. Thus the name, Unity. Well, guess what, Ubuntu, desktops are here to stay and will be around long after Unity and Windows 8 are footnotes in history. Phones are nifty toys, but human beings like big screens that fit our field of vision, a big keyboard that fit our hands, big sound that pleases our ears, and a big mouse that fits our hand. That ain't gonna change no matter how many I-phones fly off the shelves. Desktops now, desktops tomorrow, desktops forever, and those betting against the desktop are just dead wrong.

I use Linux Mint Xfce or Xubuntu on my Linux boxes simply because it gives me the desktop options I need, uses the minimum in system resources, and just freaking works all the time. I don't need an experimental OS to test my nerves. Work out the bugs first, then release an OS, but don't ask me to beta something.

Now on to Kubuntu. Kubuntu is ambitious, because the KDE desktop is ambitious, aiming to be beautiful and flexible and give the user everything but the kitchen sink. I have felt Kubuntu has not been ready for prime time, with the glitchy Muon software manager the worst thing of all, but maybe the ultimate cause was the rapid pace of releases to keep time with Ubuntu releases. The strange decision to pursue development of Muon seemed to consume a lot of development resources. Kubuntu only had one main dev for a long time, and that's a huge problem when releases are generated faster than once a year. Microsoft has thousands of devs and takes years off between releases, spending most of that time apologizing for Windows 8.

Ultimately, if this fracas results in the final divorce of Kubuntu from Ubuntu, well, then... good. Release according to when the product is ready, not to the beat of Ubuntu's drum. In the end, there needs to be more dev, less drama. Instead of sending nastygrams back and forth, the principals need to get back to coding. One of the problems with Linux is everybody wants to reinvent the wheel. Merge with Linux Mint, join with other devs, make new friends, whatever it takes to cooperate and work together in a logical fashion. This game of being a nomad developer alone in the wilderness is for the birds. Just solve all the problems and release something out that really works all the time.