At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest we had some great discussions outside scheduled sessions. Amongst the topics was also how Kubuntu works with the upstream KDE community.

For quite some years the Kubuntu team has made it their personal goal to do as much of their programming effort as part of KDE as possible, rather than making generally great software that is of no use to anyone but Kubuntu.

This went to such an extent that it has sometimes become difficult to decide whether a Kubuntu member is contributing enough to Kubuntu in order to become Kubuntu Member, because they were doing most of their work from within the KDE community. As much as this makes it difficult for the Kubuntu council to decide whether someone deserves to become Kubuntu member, I believe it is a truly great thing. Not only does it mean that we are doing a great job in achieving our “as much upstream as possible” target, but it also proves that one can be an integrated part of both the KDE and the Ubuntu Community; essentially this is what Kubuntu is about, bringing two amazing communities and their equally amazing products together and achieve a whole new level of awesome.

Building up on this great history we are renewing our commitment to KDE technology. Despite strong competitors Kubuntu will continue shipping Rekonq as the default browser of choice and invest more time in improving the user experience.

Romain Perier, one of our newer contributors, has taken it upon himself to bring userconfig, our user management tool, back to the mother ship that is the KDE software collection and by that give every KDE user the possibility to use this excellent piece of software.

Rodrigo Belem, from Kubuntu Mobile fame, is bringing much improved file sharing experience to the KDE workspace. He completely reworked the whole file sharing dialog in Dolphin along with the underlying technology. As this currently only implements SAMBA, there is WebDav and perhaps even Netatalk (for Mac interoperability) support planned for the not so distant future.

Those are but three examples, but there are many more, certainly also more subtle things.

The entire team is dedicated to this mission and so we are going to continue doing work upstream and forming it into a coherent distribution downstream.

Kubuntu sends contributions to KDE with love, because Kubuntu loves KDE :*