Kubuntu

Kubuntu (kʊˈbʊntuː ) is an official flavor of the Ubuntu operating system that uses the KDE Plasma Desktop instead of the GNOME desktop environment. As part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu uses the same underlying systems. Kubuntu shares the same repositories as Ubuntu and is released regularly on the same schedule as Ubuntu. Kubuntu was sponsored by Canonical Ltd. until 2012 and then directly by Blue Systems. Now, employees of Blue Systems contribute upstream, to KDE and Debian, and Kubuntu development is led by community contributors. During the changeover, Kubuntu retained the use of Ubuntu project servers and existing developers. "Kubuntu" is a registered trademark held by Canonical. It is derived from the name "Ubuntu", prefixing a K to represent the KDE platform that Kubuntu is built upon (following a widespread naming convention of prefixing K to the name of any software released for use on KDE platforms), as well as the KDE community. Since ubuntu is a Bantu term translating roughly to "humanity", and since Bantu grammar involves prefixes to form noun classes, it turns out that the prefix ku- having the meaning "toward" in Bemba, kubuntu is also a meaningful Bemba word or phrase translating to "toward humanity". Reportedly, the same word, by coincidence, also takes the meaning of "free" (in the sense of "without payment") in Kirundi. Kubuntu typically differs from Ubuntu in graphical applications and tools: Development started back in December 2004 at the Ubuntu Mataró Conference in Mataró, Spain when a Canonical employee Andreas Mueller, from Gnoppix, had the idea to make an Ubuntu KDE variant and got the approval from Mark Shuttleworth to start the first Ubuntu variant, called Kubuntu. On the same evening Chris Halls from the OpenOffice.org project and Jonathan Riddell from KDE started volunteering on the newborn project. Shortly after Ubuntu was started, Mark Shuttleworth stated in an interview that he recognized the need for KDE-based distribution in order to maintain diversity in Linux distributions, which in his belief aligns with Ubuntu project's overall purpose of increasing the adoption of free software.