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As I told in my previous post, I am now using Linux at work. I have been running Arch at home since October, and I never looked back, but in this case, the servers are Ubuntu 9.04, so I decided to give Kubuntu a new chance. I installed Kubuntu 9.04 to stay in sync with the servers.

So, I installed it myself, then activated the Kubuntu backport PPAs to get the latest KDE version. Well, it was not the latest, but at least it was 4.3.1. It looks like they had stopped updating the Jaunty short before Karmic's release. Well, it wasn't bad.

The Eclipse was a little old, like 2 years old, so I went for a manual install. The rest of the dev environment I needed was there. Java 1.5, Tomcat 5.5, VirtualBox, etc. Not bad, and I was happy.

Then, KDE 4.4 was released, and I realized the Jaunty packages in the PPA had been deprecated. I expected they wouldn't be upgraded to 4.4, but I never anticipated the packages would be removed. As usual in these cases, 4 hours later I needed the dev packages, which I hadn't installed yet, and now I couldn't. So, either downgrade to KDE 4.2.x or upgrade to Karmic. I felt like left in the cold for no good reason. Were you in such a need of space that you had to remove these packages? I know there is no guarantee for anything in the backports, but you would at least expect a blog post, a notice on the site, something. Not realizing on your own that you are no longer supported if you are using the version previous to the current one, and which is supposedly still good for another 9 months, half of the purported support life.

Ok, what to do now? I knew that 4.2 sucked compared to 4.3, so I went ahead and upgraded to Karmic. The upgrade went fine, but I had a few unpleasant surprises. Some packages I needed for development were no longer there. Java 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5 were deprecated in Karmic, and Eclipse has been upgraded, but it's broken, so I had to keep using the manual install. Tomcat6, which I had to install later, was broken too. So, my current development is almost fully manually installed, because the relevant APT packages are deprecated or broken. I'm running KDE 4.4 now, but it cost me more time than I expected.

Anyway, now I'm running a dev environment which is mostly manually installed. That's where Kubuntu loses the edge over Arch. So, this week I'm getting new hardware, and this time I'm going to install Arch+Kdemod. If the Chakra ISO works, I'm going to install that, otherwise I'll install Arch and then add the KDEMod repos.

I read Harald's last post about Kubuntu. It's good to see that the situation is being finally acknowledged by some of the people in the Kubuntu team. Kubuntu is the blue-headed step-child. That's something users felt, but until it is acknowledged and the distro team starts acting on that, the issues won't be solved. A lot of denial has been written to come to Harald's post. I hope it's the begining of a new path for Kubuntu. Me, I'm back to Arch, but there is a lot of users counting on you. BTW, translations were a lot better this time, so there's hope.