The canonical dropping sponsorship was announced quite some time ago (I believe?). But it's definitely great news that Kubuntu has picked up someone else.
Kubuntu is for me takes the best usability of Ubuntu and KDE. Great news. For me they still need someone to improve usability and someone to create instructional materials so users can find some hidden features.
IME, this should be trivial. For Intel and AMD cards, just use xrandr. For Nvidia cards, use the provided control panel. What did you have trouble with?
Nvidia control panel would _constantly_ segfault. You're right, it should be trivial, but it wasn't. I ended up using disper and disregarding the xservers entirely.
I think this is excellent news for everyone involved. This frees up Ubuntu's development resources to focus on Unity (which I like), and provides a more stable revenue stream for Kubuntu.
While Kubuntu was reliant on funding from Ubuntu, there was always a (admittedly minor) conflict of interest, and Kubuntu was always going to be a second-class citizen in that respect.
I use Lubuntu for my desktop, and this line of thought has occurred to me. I expect sometime in the near to medium future I'll be using LXDE on Debian. Unity was the writing on the wall for me. No grudges toward Canonical, I'm just gradually becoming less of a good fit as a user.
Lubuntu (and Xubuntu) are great distros. They definitely deserve more sponsorship, so that they can be more fully fleshed out. There's a large number of people who aren't going to put up with Unity who could be converted to Lubuntu and Xubuntu users.
I've been looking for an alternative to Ubuntu because I'm unhappy with how paternalistic Canonical has been leaning in the latest Ubuntu releases. This may be a great time to switch to Kubuntu.
I was hoping to install Trisquel GNU/Linux recently. It's based on Ubuntu but is recommended by the Free Software Foundation as it uses the Linux-libre kernel and has all proprietary code/firmware and binary blobs removed.
Unfortunately, the only drivers for the wifi on my laptop are non-free, so the wifi works under Ubuntu but not under Trisquel.
It's worth booting up the live image to see if it works for you though. If you care about these things that is.
This is great news. I tried Kubuntu briefly and I thought it was a great project for those familiar with Ubuntu but looking for an alternative desktop environment.
Moreover, the name is generic enough that blindly searching Google for further info yields far more noise than signal. On the other hand, they do also sponsor Linux Mint and Netrunner (another Linux distro). So while Kubuntu is probably going to be the largest project they've sponsored, in terms of userbase, it's not going to be the first.
