Maybe it's time to promote KDE Plasma and retire the different flavours' logos?

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Hi everyone, I was just thinking the other day … I don’t know who is old enough to remember: in the beginning, Ubuntu had two official flavours, i.e. Ubuntu and Kubuntu. They were on an equal footing, as some of you may remember.

Historically, Ubuntu’s different flavours have all had their own logos, some of them nice-looking, whilst others - together with their more overall branding - kind of generic and ill-considered.

With Fedora’s recent move to promoting KDE Plasma to becoming more than just a regular ‘spin’, maybe it’s time for Ubuntu to again make Kubuntu an equivalent to the default GNOME edition.

On top of that, wouldn’t more people gravitate to (k)ubuntu if the branding on the KDE Plasma flavour was more in line with the general branding of Ubuntu/Canonical? …

Your thoughts? …

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Not sure I agree with the premise of your question, but let’s go in with vibes and data.

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There certainly weren’t equal amount of human resources behind the main flavour and Kubuntu. Everyone works on the same archive of software, but most of the work on Kubuntu was done by Riddell. If you take a look at October 2005 or November 2005. (this is just a snapshot, and only shows uploads, not the wealth of other work done on the distro)

Same goes now, while the flavours all work together, and discuss things that are impacting everyone, they mostly work on their own packages.

stephanie-tanner-how-rude

With respect, “Opinions are like arseholes, everybody† has one”

If you believe there is an improvement to be made somewhere, whether that be code, design, translations, get involved, help out. Saying “That thing is bad” isn’t tremendously useful to anyone.

Are you asserting that’s all it needs? I mean, what about engineers, security professionals, designers and all the other things that “Ubuntu Proper” has? Who’s paying for that?

I don’t mean to be a negative nancy, or arrive to the party with a barrel full of stop energy, but I have heard this assertion that “All you need to do is this one thing”, and it’s almost never right.

From memory, "All Ubuntu needs is… "

  • Free USB keys
  • TV Adverts
  • Sponsoring a racing team
  • Steam
  • Adobe products

etc.

I’d love to see a well fleshed out argument for how this whole thing would work beyond “Make better logo = better distro”.

:man_shrugging:

† Except some people with unfortunate disorders such as Crohn’s disease

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wouldn’t more people gravitate to (k)ubuntu if the branding on the KDE Plasma flavour was more in line with the general branding of Ubuntu/Canonical?

I appreciate your thoughts, but…

No. I use what I use because I like it and it works for me. I don’t choose it because of the branding or logos.

I’ve been with Linux since 2008 (and used Unix prior to that), and I’ve looked at a number of distributions — the various *buntus, Mint, Pop!_OS, AntiX, Bodhi, Puppy, and more.

My final decisions (Ubuntu, or Lubuntu for low-spec computers) were based on usability, functionality, support, reliability, and subjective “look and feel”. In none of those cases did the branding make an iota of difference; in fact, I’m not sure that I even noticed the branding.

I don’t think that anyone chooses between Windows, MacOS, ChromeOS, Linux, BSD, etc., or between Android and iOS, based on the branding. Marketing, yes (Apple in particular is good at that), but not the branding and logos.

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Hi, I appreciate the answer. I was kind of expecting it, and that’s OK. I do agree that it’s just an opinion, obviously, and coming from someone without any technical background, and so: incapable of actually helping out.

I do think that it’s more than OK for ‘dreamers’ (as they are called at Disney, I once learned) to pitch ideas, either inside their teams or in a forum like this one, without thinking about the feasibility or viability of the idea. When ideas are pitched, it is others’ role to contemplate and comment on the feasibility, the marketability, etc.

I do think, @paddylandau , that branding does make a difference, but even here, I’m not the expert, so I leave it to the members in this forum to complement, criticize, … all the other aspects of the idea. I try not to think in terms of ‘what is best for me’, or ‘what would clench my thirst’ personally, but more in terms of what could, in my unsollicited opinion, help the Ubuntu community. Having KDE Plasma as a first tier option will arguably brand Ubuntu as providing people with more options. And more options are better are generally consider to be better, right?

Anyhow, I’m not here to tread on terrains like engineering, developing or marketing any more than I need as an outsider and stick to my role of painting a picture and leave it to this exclusive and fine community of people to talk about it some more, if they feel like it.

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Not with that attitude! :smiley:

Everyone has no technical background, until they do something that gives them some technical background.

If you want to change something in the world, you have to change something in the world. It’s very much the open source ethos, that if you think something should change, you should feel empowered to action that change. That’s very much the Ubuntu way.

I am not a logo designer, but I imagine it’s possible to learn how to be one, as I know other people have done it. It’s also possible to commission other people to do it.

Nobody is going to stop you from creating a new icon, or building something else. The problem comes when there’s a thousand things to do, and small team to do them. You’re gonna need more than one forum post to get people motivated to fix what you’re perceiving is broken. Have at it! See what you come up with?

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Thanks, TonyS.

I’m not sure that that would be the case. All of the flavours are already on the Ubuntu website. Ubuntu, specifically, is the “original” flavour that Canonical prefers.

You might not know that all of the others were started by people outside Canonical, and they made their flavours sufficiently good that Canonical accepted them into the “family”. To the best of my knowledge, they are still maintained by the original people, not by Canonical, although they have to adhere to Canonical’s standards.

Perhaps what you might be suggesting is to make the alternative flavours more prominent on the Ubuntu website? Hmm, that might be an idea. But, as Canonical prefers its own Ubuntu, I think that it would rather not, bearing in mind Canonical’s target market (with the exception of Kylin, which is specific to the Chinese market).

The sort of people who look at other distributions (and therefore aren’t Canonical’s target market) would find the various flavours without extra help.

Still, it’s an idea worth considering.

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I’d personally suggest just put it all under one umbrella and get rid of the flavor concept in the first place. It just seems to dilute peoples efforts. In many cases duplication of work is surely happening. Have an installer that has a default but gives an option to pick any other flavor package set if you so choose. Debian does this quite well via tasksel. Is there a reason it can’t be done here?

This or I just don’t get what the so called flavor options really provide as they all (to my knowledge) use the exact same repositories.

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There are plenty of links/cross-links inside and out of Ubuntu and flavors. It’s perhaps not necessary to create more.

As for homogenization :roll_eyes:, I would hope we would fight this urge, tooth and nail… Non-uniformity and choice is one of the more beautiful things about Linux in general… Not to mention Ubuntu & flavors.

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You’re suggesting that the same people that develop the flavors do everything else. That’s a false premise. The flavors are done by volunteers, or are crowd-funded. So that argument is untrue.

And this is a little insulting to those that work on the flavors. For them it is a passion in some cases to provide a different experience of Ubuntu than Ubuntu Desktop (the so-called “Ubuntu Proper”) provides. Sometimes that’s with a different desktop environment, sometimes that’s with a specific use-case in mind (Edubuntu for education, Ubuntu Studio for content creation).

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Nope. Flavors mostly work on the components that are not shared with Ubuntu. We’re not all working on developing GRUB (unless we have the spare time and desire to or if it specifically affects flavors in a unique way), for example. On the other hand, almost no one besides the Lubuntu Team is working on LXQt. We’re too small to maintain the whole of Lubuntu, but we benefit from the work of Ubuntu/Canonical on the base components.

Non-starter given we use different installers.

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@TonyS I understand where you are coming from and have some sympathy.
With KDE and Plasma, there perhaps is an opportunity to liaise between the two dominant strains of Linux with Fedora and Ubuntu. That would strengthen both, but to get realistic cooperation between Canconical and Red Hat may be a step too far.
It also may put the Gnome, XFCE etc., communities noses out of joint.
Tony

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We already have open dialog with @Conan_Kudo from Fedora (KDE) who joins our meetings frequently.

You would be surprised how much cooperation and friendliness there is between the communities.

Additionally, all of the Ubuntu flavors work together, and we work at promoting them as not being islands on their own, but part of the greater Ubuntu community.

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Elevating Fedora KDE was multiple years in the making. It required building up a strong team, developing a roadmap, following through on that roadmap, and doing a lot of community engagement.

To put it bluntly, it’s not for everyone and not every flavor desires to do this work.

I was around in the Ubuntu community back in the days when it was just Ubuntu and Kubuntu. If the situation around Kubuntu now is anything like it was back then, Kubuntu would not be able to handle being at the same level as Ubuntu, not with the presence Ubuntu has these days.

That said, I think Canonical does more to support the flavors than people realize. I was invited to the flavor sync meetings and I participate a bit with Kubuntu and Lubuntu in large part because there are opportunities to collaborate on the teams I’m part of in Fedora and my Ubuntu-based counterparts (I’m also involved in Fedora LXQt and even gave a talk at Ubuntu Summit about my recent work on that front with Mir!). @ilvipero and @aaronprisk do a lot to support the flavors. They bring in the relevant teams within Canonical to engage with flavor teams to make sure messes like what happened in the long past due to lack of coordination between Canonical and the community don’t happen again. They deserve a lot of credit for making the situation with flavors so much better.

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FWIW, Kubuntu turns 20 with the release of 25.04, Edubuntu will turn 20 with the release of 25.10 (ignoring the 9-year hiatus), and Xubuntu turns 20 with 26.04 (although it would truly be in June of 2026 to coincide with 6.06). That’s what I have off the top of my head.

Do you feel old yet? :joy:

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14 years of official status for Lubuntu this year.

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Oh jeez, I started using Ubuntu with 5.04 and joined the community shortly after. :older_man:

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I don’t think 25.04 makes you old. Typo, perhaps?

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Yes, I meant Ubuntu 5.04 :older_man:

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Nice to know there is way more co-operation around the various linux groups than I was previously aware. Since my first linux experiences with 3 1/2" floppies in the early days linux has come a long way. As mooted by @gmgibson81, it would be really good to have an universal installer providing pathways to a multitude of linux flavours at install time, maybe with a brief text to display the virtues of each flavour in a pop-up box to help end users decide which is best for them.

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Well, it varies. The collaboration is somewhat accidental. It started when @eeickmeyer briefly ran Fedora Jam and wound up converting Ubuntu Studio to KDE because of it.

Some of the flavors operate in a much more isolated fashion than others. I can only speak to the flavors I engage with regularly (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Budgie).

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