Greetings, Kubuntu Community!

Today marked an important Kubuntu Council meeting, where we witnessed significant progress and collaboration among our esteemed council members – Darin Miller, Rik Mills, Valorie Zimmerman, Aaron Honeycutt, Jonathan Riddell (Kubuntu Treasurer), and Simon Quigley(Lubuntu). In this blog post, we’re excited to share the highlights and outcomes of the discussions that took place.

1. Focus on the Upcoming Kubuntu LTS Release 24.04
   
   A primary focus of our meeting was setting the objectives for the imminent Kubuntu LTS release. The council engaged in in-depth discussions to ensure that the upcoming release meets the high expectations of our community and continues the Kubuntu legacy of excellence.
   
2. Ubuntu Flavours Statement of LTS Support
   
   Understanding the importance of clear communication, we considered the necessity of a statement regarding Long-Term Support (LTS) required by Ubuntu recognised flavours. This move aligns with our commitment to provide transparency and detailed information to our users.
   
3. Exciting Collaboration with Scarlett Gately Moore
   
   We’re thrilled to announce that we have agreed to contract Scarlett Gately Moore for a three-month period. With a preliminary budget allocated, Scarlett will play a crucial role in delivering key projects:-
   
   – The 24.04 LTS Release,
   – Updating the Kubuntu Installer to Calamares,
   – Preparing an Alpha of Plasma 6 targeting the 24.10 release.
   
   This decision was unanimously agreed upon and reflects our dedication to continually enhancing Kubuntu.

Actions Moving Forward:

Coordination and Oversight: Simon Quigley will be coordinating with Rik Mills and Scarlett Moore, managing the intricate details and ensuring the smooth delivery of our objectives.

Financial Processes: Simon Quigley will oversee the invoicing process with Scarlett Moore, following the agreed pro-forma. Jonathan Riddell, our Kubuntu Treasurer, will handle the commissioning of payments.

Communication and Documentation: As a part of our commitment to keep the community informed, I, Rick Timmis, will be updating the Kubuntu Council mailing list about the meeting’s outcomes. Additionally, I will draft an LTS Statement for submission to the Ubuntu Technical Board, detailing our approach and commitment to Kubuntu’s Long-Term Support.

This meeting was a testament to the dedication and passion of our council members and the broader Kubuntu community. We’re excited about the direction in which Kubuntu is heading and are eager to see the fruition of these projects.

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for your continued support of Kubuntu!

Closing:

Best Regards,

Rick Timmis
Kubuntu Council

The Kubuntu Focus NX can be ordered with either the i5-1135G7 or i7-1165G7 11th generation Intel^® CPU. Both are fast and power-efficient. They also include the Xe iGPU, which is often 3x faster than the prior-generation and drive up to four 4K displays concurrently. Systems are built to order and can be customized with up to 64 GB of 3200Mhz dual-channel RAM, 6 TB of total storage (2 TB NVMe, 4 TB SSD), and optional full disk encryption.

The NX has many high-speed ports and features to make connecting simple and fun:
* 2 x Thunderbolt 3 / USB-C with DisplayPort 1.4
* 1 x HDMI 2.0b
* 1 x Mini DisplayPort 1.4
* 3 x USB-A 3.2 Gen2
* 1 x RJ-45 Intel i225-V 2.5 GbE LAN (10/100/1000/2500 Mbit/s)
* 1× Audio Jack 2-in1 with Headphone and Microphone
* 1 x Far-Field Quad-Array Microphones
* 1 x SDXC Memory Card Reader
* 1 x Kensington Lock Mount
* 1 x VESA Compatible Bracket for Monitor Mount

“The NX is perfect for developers, creators, and engineers that want or need compatibility with the OS that powers the internet and billions of other devices,” says Michael Mikowski, General Manager. “We feel its tiny footprint, high performance, and the Kubuntu 22.04 LTS OS makes it a great choice for development workstations, office servers, and media centers. Thanks to the great port selection, one can easily add an eGPU to run large ML pipelines or turbo-charge rendering performance when needed.”

Paco Nathan is a renowned Machine Learning expert and consultant. Here’s is what he has to say about his experience with the Focus M2:
“KFocus pioneered ‘DevOps’ to the Desktop, which I leverage to run bare metal on a GPU laptop, in much the same environment as my HPC cluster in the cloud. No messing around with excuses like ‘brew’, ‘xcode’, or ridiculous paths that involve backslashes. Get to work straight away with zero tech giant overhead, while KFocus has your back with responsive experts, tested system management, and drama-free patches in daily package upgrades. Crunch your data and build large models without waiting for permission.”

On 11 September I (Rick Timmis) will have been a councilor for the Kubuntu Council for 5 years. Being a councilor is a lot of fun, provides a wonderful sense of fulfillment and also carries a lot of ‘Kudos’ in conversations with those of a technical persuasion.

If you have been using Kubuntu for a while, and have explored some of our community, why not consider getting involved a little deeper ? We are always looking for testers, contributors, bug reporters, documentation, and blog writers.

Becoming a Kubuntu member is the next step up from being a contributor, and if you’ve already made a few contributions over the last 3 to 6 months, then you should consider making an application to become a member.

Kubuntu members are also entitled to stand for election to the Kubuntu council, where you get to support the development of the Kubuntu project.

3 council positions came up for election, as their 2 year terms were coming to an end. We are delighted to announce that existing councillors Myriam Schwiengruber, and Valorie Zimmerman were elected for a further term of 2 years. Simon Quigley has step down from the Council, and we thank him greatly for his many contributions to the project.
Stepping in to replace Simon, we are delighted to have Darin Miller join the Kubuntu council, Welcome Darin.

Chris stated that the Kubuntu Focus was “The most unique laptop, and I am not talking about the Apple M1, and neither I am talking about AMD Ryzen.” he says.

In the review on his channel, not only did he put our Kubuntu based machine through it’s software paces, additionally he took the hardware to pieces and demonstrated the high quality build. Chris made light work of opening the laptop up and installing additional hardware, and he went on to say “The whole build out is using branded, high quality parts, like the Samsung EVO Plus, and Crucial memory; not some cheap knock-off”

The Kubuntu Focus team have put a lot of effort into matching the software selection and operating system to the hardware. This ensures that users get the best possible performance from the Kubuntu Focus package. As Chris says in his review video “The tools, scripts and work this team has put together has Impressed the hell out of me!”

By using the power optimizations available in Kubuntu, and additionally providing a GPU switcher which makes it super simple to change between the discreet Nvidia GPU and the integrated Intel based GPU. This impressed Chris a lot “I was able to squeeze 7 to 8 hours out of it on battery, absolutely amazing!” he said.

The Kubuntu Focus is an enterprise ready machine, and arguably ‘The Ultimate Linux laptop”. In his video, Chris goes on to demonstrate that the Kubuntu Focus includes Insync integration support for DropBox, OneDrive and GoogleDrive file sharing.

The Kubuntu Focus is designed from the get-go to be a transition device, providing Apple MacBook and Microsoft Windows users with a Cloud Native device in a laptop format which delivers desktop computing performance.

Chris ran our machine through a variety of benchmark testing tools, and the results are super impressive “Deep Learning capabilities are unparalleled, but more impressive is that it is configured for deep learning out of the box, and took just 10 minutes to be up and running. This is the best mobile solution you could possibly get.” Chris states.

To bring this article to a close it would be remiss of me not to mention Chris Titus’s experience with the support provided by the Kubuntu Focus team. Chris was able to speak directly to the engineering team, and get fast accurate answers to all his questions. Chris says “Huge shout out to the support team, I am beyond impressed”

Congratulations to the support team at MindShare Management Ltd, delivering great customers support is very challenging, and their experience and expertise is obviously coming across with their customers.

WoW! this is a monumental YouTube review of Kubuntu, and the whole Kubuntu community should congratulate themselves for creating ‘The Ultimate Linux Desktop’ which is being used to build ‘The Ultimate Linux Laptop’. Below is the YouTube review on the ‘Chris Titus Tech’ YouTube channel. Check it out, and see for yourself how impressed he is with this machine. Do remember to share this article.

About the Author:

Rick Timmis is a Kubuntu Councillor, and advocate. Rick has been a user and open contributor to Kubuntu for over 10 years, and a KDE user and contributor for 20

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

It is yours in title, deed and asset

A common miss perception with Open Source software is the notion of free. Many people associate free in its simplest form, that of no monetary cost, and unfortunately this ultimately leads to the second conclusion of ‘cheap’ and low quality. Proprietary commercial vendors, and their corporate marketing departments know this and use that knowledge to focus their audience on ‘perceived value’. In some ways free of cost in the open source software world is a significant disadvantage, because it means there are no funds available to pay for a marketing machine to generate ‘perceived value’.

Think, for a moment, how much of a disadvantage that is when trying to develop a customer/user base.

Kubuntu is completely and whole contributon driven. It is forged from passion and enthusiasm, built with joy and above all love. Throughout our community; users use it because they love it, supporters help users, and each other, maintainers fix issues and package improvements, developers extend functionality and add features, bloggers write articles and documentation, youtubers make videos and tutorials. All these people do this because they love what they’re doing and it brings them joy doing it.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

Today Linux is cloud native, ubiquitous and dominates wholesale in the internet space, it is both general purpose, and highly specialised, robust and extensive, yet focused and detailed.

Kubuntu is a general purpose operating system designed and developed by our community to be practical and intuitive to a wide audience. It is simple and non-intrusive to install, everyday it continues to grow a larger user base of people who download it, install it and for some, love it! Further more, some of those users will find their way into our community, they will see the contributions given so freely by others and be inspired to contribute themselves.

Image from Wikipedia

Anyone who has installed Windows 10 recently, will atest to the extent of personal information that Microsoft asks users of its operating system to ‘contribute’. This enables the Microsoft marketing teams to further refine their messaging to resonate with your personal ‘perceived value‘ and indeed to enable that across the Microsoft portfolio of ‘partners‘!
The story is identical with Apple, the recently announced Silicon M1 seeks, not only to lock Apple users into the Apple software ecosystem and their ‘partners‘ but also to lock down and isolate the software to the hardware.

With this background understanding, we are able to return full circle to the subject of this article ‘Kubuntu is not Free, it is Free‘ and further more Kubuntu users are free.
Free from intrusion, profiling, targeting, and marketing; Kubuntu user are free to share, modify and improve their beloved software however they choose.

Photo by RF._.studio from Pexels

Let us revisit that last sentence and add some clarity. Kubuntu users are free to share and improve ‘their’ beloved software however they choose.
The critical word here is ‘their’, and that is because Kubuntu is YOUR software, not Microsoft, Apple, and not even Canonical or Ubuntu’s. It is yours in title, deed and asset and that is the value that the
GNU GPL license bequithes to you.

This ownership also empowers you, and indeed puts you as an individual in a greater place of power than the marketeers from Microsoft or Apple. You can share, distribute, promote, highlight or low-light, Kubuntu wherever, and whenever you like. Blog about it, make YouTube videos about it, share it, change it, give it away and even sell it.

How about the for perceived value ?

About the Author:

Rick Timmis is a Kubuntu Councillor, and advocate. Rick has been a user and open contributor to Kubuntu for over 10 years, and a KDE user and contributor for 20

As markets shift towards creative intelligence, more users are finding themselves hampered by the daily Windows or MacOS desktop experience. Cloud native means Linux, and to interoperate seamlessly in the cloud space you need Linux.

Kubuntu Focus Linux Laptop

Here at Kubuntu we were approached in late 2019 by Mindshare Management Ltd. MSM wanting to work with us to bring a cloud native Kubuntu Linux laptop to the market, directly aimed at competing with the MacBook Pro. As 2020 has progressed the company has continued to grow and develop the market, releasing their second model the Kubuntu Focus M2 in October. Their machines are not just being bought by hobby and tech enthusiasts, the Kubuntu Focus team have sold several high spec machines to NASA via their Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Lenovo launches Linux range

Lenovo also has a vision for Linux on the Desktop, and as an enterprise class vendor they know where the market is heading. The Lenovo Press Release of 20th September announced 13 machines with Ubuntu Linux installed by default.

“These include 13 ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series Workstations and an additional 14 ThinkPad T, X, X1 and L series laptops, all with the 20.04 LTS version of Ubuntu, with the exception of the L series which will have version 18.04.“

When it comes to desktops, at Kubuntu, we believe the KDE desktop experience is unbeatable. In October KDE announced the release of Plasma-Desktop 5.20 as “New and improved inside and out”. Shortly after the release, the Kubuntu team set to work on building out Kubuntu with this new version of the KDE Plasma desktop.

KDE Plasma Desktop on Linux

Our open build process means that you can easily get your hands on the current developer build of Kubuntu Linux ‘Hirsute Hippo’ from our Nightly Builds Repo.

It’s been an exciting year, and 2021 looks even more promising, as we fully anticipate more vendors to bring machines to the market with Linux on the Desktop.

Even more inspiring is the fact that Kubuntu Linux is built by enthusiastic volunteers who devote their time, energy and effort. Those volunteers are just like you, they contribute what they can, when they can, and the results are awesome!

About the Author:

Rick Timmis is a Kubuntu Councillor, and advocate. Rick has been a user and open contributor to Kubuntu for over 10 years, and a KDE user and contributor for 20

The Kubuntu community are delighted to announce the release of Kubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla. For this release Kubuntu ships with Plasma 5.19.5 and Applications 20.08. The desktop carries the fresh new look and gorgeous wallpaper design selected by the KDE Visual Design Group.

Cloud Ready

With the rapid growth in cloud native technologies the kubuntu community recognise that Kubuntu users need access to cloud and container technologies.
Kubuntu 20.10 also includes LXD 4.6 and MicroK8s 1.19 for resilient micro clouds, small clusters of servers providing VMs and Kubernetes.

Kubuntu 20.10 includes KDE Applications 20.08.

Dolphin, KDE’s file explorer, for example, adds previews for more types of files and improvements to the way long names are summarized, allowing you to better see what each file is or does. Dolphin also improves the way you can reach files and directories on remote machines, making working from home a much smoother experience. It also remembers the location you were viewing the last time you closed it, making it easier to pick up from where you left off.

For those of you into photography, KDE’s professional photo management application, digiKam has just released its version 7.0.0. The highlight here is the smart face recognition feature that uses deep-learning to match faces to names and even recognizes pets.

If it is the night sky you like photographing, you must try the new version of KStars. Apart from letting you explore the Universe and identify stars from your desktop and mobile phone, new features include more ways to calibrate your telescope and get the perfect shot of heavenly bodies.

And there’s much more: KDE’s terminal emulator Konsole and Yakuake; Elisa, the music player that looks great ; the text editor Kate; KDE’s image viewer Gwenview; and literally dozens of other applications are all updated with new features, bugfixes and improved interfaces to help you become more productive and making the time you spend with KDE software more pleasurable and fun.

The Kubuntu Focus team, announce the immediate availability of their second generation laptop, the Kubuntu Focus M2.

Customers experience power out of the box acclaimed by both experts and new users alike. The finely-tuned Focus virtually eliminates the need to configure the OS, applications, or updates. Kubuntu combines industry standard Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the beautiful yet familiar KDE desktop. With dozens of Guided Solutions and unparalleled support, the shortest path to Linux success is the Focus.

The M2 is available now and is smaller, lighter, and faster than the prior generation M1. The 8c/16t i7-10875H CPU is faster by 17% single-core and 58% multi-core.

Full details are available on the Kubuntu Focus website at kfocus.org

Our own Kubuntu Councillor, and Community Manager Rick Timmis, who has been leading the project for the Kubuntu side, provides us with a festive, sneak preview, and unboxing experience.

We are expecting the pre-order site to be available in mid-January 2020 and the first consumer units to ship at the beginning of February 2020.

We will keep you posted.

These new laptops will be available in early 2020.