Ten years of Kubuntu

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Kubuntu will turn ten years old this April. Kubuntu is a Linux distribution that has tried to remain true to the community that makes and uses it while working with the commercial sponsors and users who give it direction and help it succeed. Over the years, its technical, social, and commercial successes have been as fun as the challenges.

Fresh out of university in Scotland a decade ago, I'd learned about software development from leading a KDE project: the Umbrello UML Modeller. Now I've had the pleasure of being involved in the Kubuntu community for the lifespan of the project. Ubuntu celebrated its tenth anniversary last year. The Kubuntu story, creating a flavor of Ubuntu with KDE software, began six months later.

A new distribution

I first heard of the "Super Secret Debian Startup" (which became Canonical) while organizing a KDE stall at one of the commercial Linux exhibitions in London. A charismatic former spaceman named Mark Shuttleworth was hanging around with the Debian team. At the time KDE was the most popular of the two rival desktops, but to some of us it felt like it was on the descent, because GNOME had begun to focus on usability through simplicity and it got praise for its accessibility.

News of a new Linux distribution founded on the solid technical foundation of Debian, but usable to non-enthusiasts, was exciting. However, I worried the choices made by the distribution would mean that the community I had grown to love and that had let me learn how to program and collaborate would be left out. I wrote a blog post to alert the KDE community to this forthcoming change in the Linux distribution market, but there was muted response. "Not another Debian based distribution. We've had UserLinux and umpteen others" was the first comment.

So I set about updating KDE packages, held back by one of Debian's long freezes. Ubuntu had made an impression by making a few configuration tweaks to Debian and GNOME and I tried to do the same for KDE by removing duplicated applications and excessive toolbars. When the first Ubuntu membership meeting was held, I was the first to be grilled about why I wanted to be part of the developer team and to have upload rights. Fortunately it's a welcoming process and much of it has been the inspiration for similar processes in community distributions created since.

The first Kubuntu

I launched Kubuntu 5.04 on April 8, 2005. KDE founder Matthias Ettrich, who was growing disillusioned with the lack of discipline in his creation, came onto IRC to congratulate me for putting together a nice setup. At the talk I gave at LugRadio Live, I was happy to be able to hand out as many Kubuntu CDs as I could fit in my car.

After this success, I received a contract from Canonical to keep working on Kubuntu and to build a community around it. From the start, I wanted the project to be aligned with KDE in terms of developers and users as well as to keep the spirit of KDE's branding. It seemed the natural way to create a community around a distribution that used software from a project like KDE was to ensure that it worked well with that distribution. So I worked to get the configuration changes we'd made to the default desktop adopted into KDE. The reward for that work was being able to rely on KDE developers when the Kubuntu project got stuck on some technical details.

During 2005 we had the first Ubuntu Developer Summits (UDS). One perk of free software development is traveling the world to meet interesting people in interesting places. With Ubuntu, you got to do that in a private jet and stay at fancy hotels. These first summits were held in a single room with talks around tables. They differed from the open-source development conferences I'd been to before, which were based around presentations and hacking. UDS was based around writing project specifications and getting them proofread and approved. It was a deliberate attempt to bring some focus to the open development method; it worked well once everyone understood it and the bureaucracy was streamlined. It's another innovative community process that has been adopted by other projects such as Linaro and Qt.

In 2006, longtime KDE supporter SuSE, bought by Novell along with Ximian, was having internal struggles between supporters of the rival desktop camps. A couple of staff members were laid off and I took the opportunity to invite Ken Wimer to a design sprint in London for the first Long Term Support (LTS) release. There, we worked on the next major step in changing the way open-source software was produced and delivered. At the time, open-source software was typically designed by the programmers who wrote it, with some usability groups trying to tidy up after. Here we moved to doing what Apple is successful in doing, by designing the software and user interface first. We replaced the clunky installers common on Linux distributions with one that let you preview the desktop before you install.

Support and adoption

Showing off the new installer at LinuxTag 2006 in Germany, Shuttleworth wore a KDE T-shirt and announced commercial support for Kubuntu. The project succeeded in changing Canonical's single desktop approach into a dual-desktop approach; now Kubuntu just had to get the world to follow.

The world started to follow in 2007, when I met the people who rolled out Kubuntu in schools in the country of Georgia. That summer I was invited to Tenerife, where the government of the Canary Islands had also used it in its schools and the university had started basing its teaching around Kubuntu. Later, I got invited to Kano in northern Nigeria to talk to government ministers and run a conference about the advantages of open source. I like to say that success in free software really does let you feel like an international freedom fighter.

The KDE 4 release event was held at Google's offices in California in 2008. There we hoped to show off to the world how KDE could not just match the proprietary competition but surpass it. Kubuntu made a dual release to allow it to cope with the features still not ported to the new Plasma 4 desktop; one with KDE 3 and one with Plasma 4. The release of KDE 4 has been remembered as a failed launch, one which lost KDE a lot of users, but the project was ambitious at the time and that release laid the groundwork for a desktop that could compete with the innovation that was happening elsewhere.

Differing directions

Canonical was also searching for answers to the problem of creating a product for people who didn't care about operating systems. Its response was to move further into doing what open source has always been poor at: design-led software. Canonical hired a team of designers, people with expertise in usability, art, and the psychology of devices, to work from an office in London. I got a phone call from Shuttleworth asking if KDE wanted to be part of the new development. Naturally I said yes; I didn't want Kubuntu to be left behind.

A couple of KDE developers were soon hired along to work on the designs coming out of Canonical's London office. One of the first designs was to change the notifications system to be ephemeral and not to include actions, a design which stood in contrast to what KDE and most desktops did at the time. At the UDS that followed, a heated debate erupted where long-term Kubuntu contributors Scott Kitterman and Celeste Lyn Paul told Shuttleworth that replacing functionality of the KDE desktop would destroy much of the credit for cooperation that had been built up over the years between KDE and Kubuntu.

An agreement was worked out where the Canonical-developed features would be committed to upstream KDE before being accepted into Kubuntu. This preserved the connection between Kubuntu and KDE while allowing the project to benefit from the work Canonical was funding. This joint relationship ended when Canonical decided to impose copyright assignment requirements and unilaterally moved development away from the KDE infrastructure.

The Kubuntu team had grown strong and confident with successful releases over the years. Some of the team countered the move away from community-made software to that of Canonical-made software by launching Project Timelord, which had a manifesto to work more closely with upstream developers. Translations, which had been forked from the beginning of Ubuntu into Launchpad, were instead taken directly from upstream, bug reports moved upstream except for those specific to packages, and we promised to drop any patches that weren't approved by upstream developers.

Tensions between community and company were finally sidestepped for good in Ubuntu's desktop flavor in 2011 when Canonical dropped GNOME for its own design: Unity. At the time, I said that I agreed with Canonical's move away from community-developed desktop software; nobody has made money from that while we all carry Android phones in our pockets. But it was the start of Canonical also stepping back from supporting Kubuntu.

Canonical steps back

In 2012, a car crash on a tropical island left me with head trauma to recover from, and unfortunately it turned out to be a difficult year to recover in. I received a phone call from my manager at Canonical telling me I wouldn't be able to work on Kubuntu any more and that commercial support would be stopped. As an example of the difficulties Canonical has had working with community, the communication of this change didn't mention what the change actually was. I had to step in and explain it.

During this time, the Kubuntu community had a period of soul searching. Did the world need a KDE-based distribution as part of a project that was increasingly unwilling to work with community-made desktop software? Then it was announced that Ubuntu would move away from X and Wayland, in favor of its own creation, Mir. Could Kubuntu live as part of a project where much of the software it depended on now was not supported by the main developers? At the same time the week-long trips for UDS were replaced with online video meetings. Could Kubuntu work effectively without the developers being able to meet together face-to-face?

During the soul searching, people started telling project members how much they depended on Kubuntu and offering their help. A company called Emerge Open had been founded by Niall McCarthy with ideas from Samba's Dan Shearer to try to put open-source projects together with companies that can make some revenue. It's a non-profit company that is so open it even publishes the salaries of its directors. McCarthy set up a deal with Canonical to allow him to offer a commercial support service for Kubuntu where the proceeds would come back to Kubuntu. Blue Systems, a company run by Clemens Tönnies Jr., a German developer with deep pockets, that supports KDE financially in multiple ways, hired me to keep working on the distribution. And Kubuntu was able to replace meeting at UDS with meetings at KDE's Akademy conference and in the city of Munich, which uses Kubuntu on its computers.

At KDE's Akademy conference last year the project worked out the details for a closer collaboration with Debian. Kubuntu and Debian now share packaging repositories to replace the inefficient manual merging method Ubuntu has always used. Harald Sitter has also set up Kubuntu CI, a continuous integration of KDE sources with Kubuntu packaging that produces packages ready for testing as soon as changes are made. In addition, the new weekly ISO images have been vital to the Plasma team for testing Plasma 5. The sprint in Munich last autumn let us see how the city is saving millions of euros by switching the council's computers to free software. The sprint also let us collaborate with projects like Kolab and LibreOffice to ensure a complete desktop experience.

Ten years

As we approach the tenth anniversary, Kubuntu can show many of the successes as well as many of the challenges of taking free software into the hands of users. It is now only one of many desktop flavors of Ubuntu and there are no signs of taking over the world yet, but we continue to have fun producing ever-improving software that is innovative and helps people who in turn help the project. Kubuntu gets used throughout the world, including in the world's largest desktop deployment in Brazil. The whole Kubuntu team is deeply integrated with KDE; I'm now the release manager for Plasma as well as Kubuntu.

The previews of Kubuntu 15.04, which will be the first distribution to change to Plasma 5, are receiving great reviews. The support of the project, including all the infrastructure from Canonical and the rest of the Ubuntu community as well as the international travel, even if not so often by private jet these days, shows the importance many people place in the project's continued existence. We always welcome new helpers on our IRC channel to join the team. Please do say "hi" and help change the world .