Kubuntu 8.04 will include KDE4, no long term support

One of the nice things about the Ubuntu Linux distribution is that it has a regular development schedule. Every six months a new version of the operating system is released. And every two years, Canonical (the corporation behind Ubuntu) puts out a "long term service" release which will be officially supported a bit longer than the typical 18 months.

But now it looks like one arm of the Ubuntu team is going and messing with the schedule. Kubuntu features the same core as Ubuntu, but it uses the KDE desktop manager instead of Gnome. And while the next version of Ubuntu is scheduled to be a long term support release, the Kubuntu team has decided that Kubuntu 8.04 will not be an LTS release.

Now before you get yourself all worked up about this change of protocol, you should know that there's a pretty good reason for this decision. It turns out that the folks behind KDE are planning on releasing KDE 4 early next month. It's got a bunch of new features including a new file manager, pretty desktop effects, and a new icon set. A lot of people have understandably been interested in trying out release candidates of KDE 4 on Kubuntu, and a huge number of people have downloaded an unsupported Kubuntu 7.10 disc image with KDE 4.

So the Kubuntu team has decided to include KDE 4 in Kubuntu 8.04. But since the new desktop manager is still new, and represents such a major change from KDE 3, the developers are reluctant to promise long term support for this release.

[via Digg / video via kdecommit-digest]

Tags: kde, kde4, kubuntu, kubuntu-8.04, osupdates