*Ubuntu Proliferations?

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Tue, 1 May 2007, Fritz wrote:

> Does anyone have any idea why Canonical makes separate
> distributions for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc.?
> 
> For example, I seem to recall other distributions that let you pick one or
> both of Gnome and KDE at install time.  Later, depending
> on whether your ".xinitrc" is set to "gnome-session" or
> "startkde", one of the two desktops is activated when X starts up.

It is more than just the startkde or gnome-session, but the add-on 
software to that use the KDE/QT toolkits versus GNOME/GTK toolkits versus 
just GTK. I think that is part of the reason.

For example, the Xubuntu webpage says "Xubuntu will use, as far as 
possible, GTK2 applications ..."

An easy-to-use distribution for novices should not be cluttered with too 
many choices.

> Is there some real (technical) reason these are separate
> distributions?

  Jeremy C. Reed