Kubuntu ( ) is an official flavor of the

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

that uses the

KDE Plasma Desktop KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was first released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default ...

instead of the

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

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. Canonical Ltd. is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth to market commercial support and related services for Ubuntu and related projects. Canonical employs staff ...

until 2012 and then directly by

Blue Systems Blue Systems is a German IT company. It is most prominent as a major KDE supporter and previous driving force behind Kubuntu with a number of KDE developers working for Blue Systems. According to Blue Systems employee Aurélien Gâteau, "Blue S ...

. Now, employees of Blue Systems contribute upstream, to

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

and

Debian Debian (), also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software, developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of D ...

, and Kubuntu development is led by community contributors. During the changeover, Kubuntu retained the use of Ubuntu project servers and existing developers.

Name

"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 Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

'' is a

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for National ...

term translating roughly to "humanity", and since Bantu grammar involves prefixes to form

noun classes In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

, 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 Kirundi, also known as Rundi, is a Bantu language spoken by some 9 million people in Burundi and adjacent parts of Rwanda, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, as well as in Kenya. It is the official language of Burundi. Kiru ...

Comparison with Ubuntu

Kubuntu typically only differs from Ubuntu in graphical applications and tools:

History

Development started back in December 2004 at the Ubuntu Mataró Conference in

Mataró Mataró () is the capital and largest town of the ''comarca'' of the Maresme, in the province of Barcelona, Catalonia Autonomous Community, Spain. It is located on the Costa del Maresme, to the south of Costa Brava, between Cabrera de Mar and Sa ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

when a Canonical employee Andreas Mueller, from Gnoppix, had the idea to make an Ubuntu KDE variant and got the approval from

Mark Shuttleworth Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. In 2002, Shuttleworth became ...

to start the first Ubuntu variant, called Kubuntu. On the same evening Chris Halls from the

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

project and Jonathan Riddell from KDE started volunteering on the newborn project. Shortly after Ubuntu was started,

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.

K Desktop Environment 3 K Desktop Environment 3 is the third series of releases of the K Desktop Environment (after that called ''KDE Software Compilation''). There are six major releases in this series. After the release of KDE 4, version 3.5 was forked into the Trinit ...

was used as default interface until Kubuntu 8.04. That version included

as unsupported option which became default in the subsequent release, 8.10. On , Canonical employee Jonathan Riddell announced the end of Canonical's Kubuntu sponsorship. On ,

was announced on the Kubuntu website as the new sponsor. As a result, both developers employed by Canonical to work on Kubuntu–Jonathan Riddell and Aurélien Gâteau–transferred to Blue Systems.

Releases

Kubuntu follows the same naming/versioning system as Ubuntu, with each release having a code name and a version number (based on the year and month of release). Canonical provides support and security updates for Kubuntu components that are shared with Ubuntu for 18 months – five years in case of

long-term support Long-term support (LTS) is a product lifecycle management policy in which a stable release of computer software is maintained for a longer period of time than the standard edition. The term is typically reserved for open-source software, where i ...

(LTS) versions – after release. Both a

desktop A desktop traditionally refers to: * The surface of a desk (often to distinguish office appliances that fit on a desk, such as photocopiers and printers, from larger equipment covering its own area on the floor) Desktop may refer to various compu ...

version and an alternative (installation) version (for the

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introd ...

and

AMD64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging mod ...

platforms) are available. Kubuntu CDs were also available through the ShipIt service (which was discontinued as of April 2011).

System requirements

The desktop version of Kubuntu currently supports the

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

64 architectures,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

x86 support was discontinued after the 18.04 release and existing

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

users will be supported until 2023.

Deployments

Kubuntu rollouts include the world's largest Linux desktop deployment, that includes more than 500,000 desktops in Brazil (in 42,000 schools of 4,000 cities). The software of the 14,800 Linux workstations of

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...

was switched to Kubuntu LTS 12.04 and KDE 4.11. The

Taipei City Government The Taipei City Government (TCG) is the municipal government of Taipei. History The Taihoku City Government was founded on 10 October 1920 in Taihoku Prefecture during Japanese colonial rule. The original city hall was located at the site of ...

decided to replace Windows with a Kubuntu distribution on 10,000 PCs for schools. The

French Parliament The French Parliament (french: Parlement français) is the bicameral legislature of the French Republic, consisting of the Senate () and the National Assembly (). Each assembly conducts legislative sessions at separate locations in Paris: ...

announced in 2006 that they would switch over 1,000 workstations to Kubuntu by June 2007. A Kubuntu distribution, by La Laguna University, is used in more than 3,000 computers spread in several computer labs, laboratories and libraries, among other internal projects in the

Canary Islands The Canary Islands (; es, Canarias, ), also known informally as the Canaries, are a Spanish autonomous community and archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, in Macaronesia. At their closest point to the African mainland, they are west of Morocc ...

. Since October 2007, Kubuntu is now used in all of the 1,100 state schools in the Canary Islands. The second point release update in February 2021 to Kubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (Focal Fossa) contains all the bug-fixes added to 20.04 since its first release. Users can run the normal update procedure to get these bug-fixes.

Gallery

File:Kubuntu.5.04.KDE.png, Kubuntu 5.04 File:Kubuntu.5.10.KDE.png, Kubuntu 5.10 File:Kubuntu.6.06.KDE.png, Kubuntu 6.06 LTS File:Kubuntu.6.10.KDE.png, Kubuntu 6.10 File:Kubuntu.7.04.KDE.png, Kubuntu 7.04 File:Kubuntu.7.10.KDE.png, Kubuntu 7.10 File:Kubuntu.8.04.KDE.png, Kubuntu 8.04 File:Kubuntu GNU-Linux 8.10.png, Kubuntu 8.10 File:Kubuntu-9.04-DesktopEffects.png, Kubuntu 9.04 showing some of its Desktop Effects File:Kubuntu-9.10.png, Kubuntu 9.10 File:Kubuntu-10.04 netbook.png, Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Netbook Edition File:Kubuntu 10.04 main menu.png, Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop Edition File:Kubuntu1010.png, Kubuntu 10.10 File:Kubuntu-desktop1104.png, Kubuntu 11.04 Desktop Edition File:Kubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Netbook Edition KDE 4.6.2 Northern Sami.png, Kubuntu 11.04 Netbook Edition File:Kubuntu-11.10-cat(2).png, Kubuntu 11.10 File:Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin alpha1 empty desktop.png, Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop Edition File:Kubuntu 12 04.png, Kubuntu 12.04 LTS Netbook Edition File:Kubuntu-12.10-desktop.png, Kubuntu 12.10 Desktop Edition File:Kubuntu-netbook-12.10.png, Kubuntu 12.10 Netbook Edition File:Kubuntu 13 04.png, Kubuntu 13.04 File:Kubuntu 13.10.png, Kubuntu 13.10 File:Kubuntu 14.04.3-LTS.png, Kubuntu 14.04 LTS File:Kubuntu 14 10.jpeg, Kubuntu 14.10 File:Kubuntu 15.04 with a dark theme.png, Kubuntu 15.04 with a dark theme File:Kubuntu1510.png, Kubuntu 15.10 File:Kubuntu 16.04.png, Kubuntu 16.04 LTS (''Xenial Xerus'') File:Kubuntu 16.10 Desktop.png, Kubuntu 16.10 (''Yakkety Yak'') File:Desktop Kubuntu 17.04.jpg, Kubuntu 17.04 File:Kubuntu 17.10 Eng.png, Kubuntu 17.10 File:Kubuntu 18.04 Desktop.jpg, Kubuntu 18.04 LTS File:KubuntuCosmic.png, Kubuntu 18.10 File:KubuntuDisco.png, Kubuntu 19.04 File:KubuntuEoan.png, Kubuntu 19.10 File:Desktop Kubuntu 20.04.png, Kubuntu 20.04 LTS File:Kubuntu 20.10 2880p 31 12 2020 16 00 23.png, Kubuntu 20.10 File:Kubuntu 21.04 Desktop en.png, Kubuntu 21.04 File:Kubuntu 21.10 Desktop.png, Kubuntu 21.10 File:Kubuntu 22.04 eng.png, Kubuntu 22.04 File:Kubuntu 22.10 Screenshot Beta 1.png, Kubuntu 22.10 showing Breeze Twilight Theme

References

External links

* * {{Authority control 2005 software IA-32 Linux distributions KDE Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media Ubuntu derivatives X86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions