Why Kubuntu is Good For KDE

My friend and hero, Riddell, on his blog posts a great article ‘Why Kubuntu is Good for KDE“

I think a lot of his points are great, and I won’t argue the accuracy of his statements, which is done in the comment section.  I will just argue the reason I feel Kubuntu is Good For KDE.

MORE USERS

That’s it, the more people use KDE, the better it gets.  The more people spend time reporting bugs, triaging those bugs, and solving those bugs, the better the system gets.

Let me give you a very simple example, myself.  Before Kubuntu showed up I had pretty much given up on Linux and all those distributions.  Why?  Cause none worked well for me.  I always had to tweak something to get it working correctly.  The other reason I had given up on Linux/OSS/whatever you want t call it, is what I viewed as an elitist community.  I wasn’t a developer, I don’t even pretend to play a developer on TV.  And this was an area that I struggled trying to “give back” to the community.  I had no opportunity, I didn’t know where to begin and couldn’t find a community that welcomed a non-coder/non-developer to help “give back.”  I found it in the Kubuntu world.

Currently I give back by working on documentation, helping the Kubuntu devels by triaging and being a nuisance  along with being a co-author of The Official Ubuntu book.  I have also started several manuals I will one day push “upstream” on Keep and Adept, along with maintaining the manual for Speedcrunch. 

While this is all a small role that I play in the KDE world, without Kubuntu and the community, I won’t be involved and those areas might still be lacking.

Thoughts?