Kubuntu 12.04 has been released into the wild today. Once again, I had absolutely nothing to do with this release.

The Kubuntu community is proud to announce the release of 12.04 LTS, the Precise Pangolin: the new Long Term Support version of our friendly operating system.

Check out the Release Notes for much more information on this release.

Viva La Kubuntu

I am certain that this release proves that the Kubuntu community is as strong as ever. They showed up for work, and serious work at that, in the face of adversity, with all the negative commentary floating around the interwebs. I am proud of each contributor in the community, and that includes Ubuntu as well. Congratulations everyone on a job well done!

Welcome Blue Systems

With that, I am very excited to see what the new sponsorship by Blue Systems brings. I have witnessed what their sponsorship has provided to Linux Mint, and that excites me even more knowing that Kubuntu will have that same sort of support. Here is to the future of Kubuntu and Blue Systems!

If you aren’t using Kubuntu, I highly recommend you check it out. If you are using Kubuntu and appreciate what you were given, it would be wonderful for you all to say “thank you” and show some love. I think every contributor deserves at least that, and I feel that every user deserves that same amount of gratitude. If it weren’t for the users there would be no need for all of this.

To download Kubuntu, head on over to the Get Kubuntu page. There they offer you the options to buy CDs and/or DVDs, or download Kubuntu the regular way and the BitTorrent way. If you are good at Googling, you can also find local mirrors in which you can download from as well. Here in Chicago, I have a few options that give much faster access to the ISOs as well as the repositories. Check your local universities, government agencies, and telecommunication corporations for a mirror.

Thank you once again to everyone involved with this release. From the developers to the bug reporters, and even to the complainers and naysayers, THANK YOU!

Kubuntu 12.04 Released is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

• Politicians: “We’re not Evil”
• Google: “Neither are we!”
• Emacs: “We’re still a text editor”
• Vim: “So are we!”
• Kubuntu: “We’re not Ubuntu”
• I can do this all day…

Linux: “We’re not GNU” is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

• “Kubuntu is the worst distro ever!“
• “Kubuntu has been dead since day one“
• “Nobody cares about Kubuntu anyways“

If you are one of those people who have said something like the above recently, why? I want solid reasons and I don’t want to hear stuff like:

• Kubuntu doesn’t have Ubuntu One – neither does the KDE-based distro you switched to
• There isn’t a Kubuntu for Android – besides a YouTube video and a couple of fanboy sites, Ubuntu doesn’t either :p Oh, and neither does your KDE-based distro
• DO NOT, AND I MEAN DO NOT, RESPOND IN A 1990s Linux User KIND OF WAY! (thanks to my buddy Jorge Castro for showing me and preaching about it lately).

If you use another distro because of issues with Kubuntu, why? What caused you to switch, and by switch I mean recently, not 2 years ago.

Okay, before you start flinging this fanboy crap at me, note the following. I really haven’t contributed to Kubuntu nor KDE in well over a year (personal life is pretty cool when you come up from your parent’s basement and shave your neck (that’s for my buddy B-HUMP)). Also, my daily systems are as follows: Debian (servers), CentOS (servers), openSUSE (KDE), Fedora (KDE), Arch (KDE & DWM – be careful, their screenshots forum is more than enough to cause addiction), Linux Mint (KDE & Cinnamon), and Kubuntu. You want fast? You use Debian or CentOS servers (headless) or Arch with DWM. You want slower, then use KDE, GNOME, or Cinnamon (which is kind of hot by the way) on any of the other distros I use. To back up why I use these machines (multi-boot on my big desktop) is because I have clients that use them, and trying to support openSUSE from a Kubuntu box isn’t always the easiest. Also, I like building packages in a native environment and not in chroots. Oh, and another reason, is I like playing with them in the cloud while testing crazy hardware in remote data centers for clients. I started playing with Linux Mint recently to see if any of the problems I experienced with Kubuntu were there or not (they are there too unfortunately), plus everyone has enjoyed the Mint lately.

Please don’t respond with a fanboy or tin-foil hat on. I hate moderating comments, but I have no problem making you look like a bigger douche bag than me OK, so the reason I want to know the above, is because I am seriously thinking about getting back into the development swing of things in Kubuntu and KDE. Maybe you can motivate me to make Kubuntu not suck, or at least build beautiful caskets, since many think Kubuntu and anything KDE-related is dying. Did I just feed the trolls? Probably, but trolls need love too!

Why Does Kubuntu Suck? is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Did you know that the 11.10 release of Kubuntu was damn near 100% a community effort? Did you know that Jonathan switched rolls during that release to work on bzr and not Kubuntu (which is something I wish more companies would do, that being allow their employees to move around to try different jobs). Did you know that pretty much every release has happened because of the volunteer community more so than Canonical?

Canonical is not stopping Kubuntu, they are stopping the funding. Stopping the funding doesn’t mean that Kubuntu is dead. If you support the idea that Kubuntu is dead because of this, then damn near every distribution that you want to jump ship to is also dead.

Jumping ship in a time like this equates to nothing more than a slap in the face of everyone who has worked their asses off to offer to you, free in every sense of the word, Kubuntu. Remember, Jonathan was the only paid Kubuntu developer, everyone else did it for free. Don’t disrespect their hard work with your flawed logic.

And if you still believe Kubuntu is dead, why don’t you hop on IRC and join #kubuntu-devel. Does that look dead to you? Just this morning I saw the volunteers working on bugs and discussing updates and fixes for 12.04. Instead of giving up so quickly, why don’t you support the community? Let the developers know you appreciate their work, let them know your issues, help mold the future of Kubuntu.

Kubuntu Is Not Dead is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

So today she took the iPhone back, headed over to Costco, and got hooked up with a free Droid and a complete accessory pack. Her total was $15 which was just the taxes on the value of the phone. She now has a way bigger screen, 2 cores of 1.2GHz of love, twice the storage of the 16GB iPhone, and more apps at her fingers than she knows what to do with. One thing I noticed when she had the iPhone, is that she wasn’t intrigued, or really interested in messing with it. With the new Droid, she hasn’t put it down. The only thing she is missing is some silly graphical waste of phone case now. One mistake I made though, is I didn’t transfer her contacts or pictures off of the iPhone before she returned it. Luckily we have her old phone she upgraded to the iPhone from. It is as dead as one could get, but luckily I was able to snag her contacts off of the SD card and import them in her new GMail account in seconds. She hadn’t realized I did that until I heard her say, “Oh, there are my contacts, hrmm!” She thought they just magically appeared The photos are a loss unfortunately, or fortunately for many. You see, mom was damn near on her death-bed this summer, and while on it, she received really nasty bruises from all the needles injected. Well, she thought it was a good idea to take pictures of them to show to people. Now people will not have to hold back throwing up all over the place, so I guess I kind of won there

Also on the Android front, I got a Kindle Fire free in December. A stock Fire sucks the big one. Luckily a few hackers are creating an ICS ROM for it over at XDA Developer Forums. I put it on the other day and finally the Kindle is worth the $199. There are still a few minor bugs, but I can use it and be happy I am not looking at the garbage that Amazon created. If I were Google, I would make Amazon stop telling people it is Android.

Mom Finally Using Linux is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.