… and is the OP seriously asking for somebody to train him to code, or did I incorrectly translate!? Buy a book and learn, or pay somebody to fix the code you care about.

First of all, I’m already involved in Kubuntu. Bug testing is the area in which I help out. I’m sure you already knew that, because you’ve probably already looked at my profile before replying. I’m sure you already seen one of my replies in this same article to Jonathan Riddell, where I told him that I would be more than happy to develop some code if I was trained on how. Until then, I’ll continue to write articles to raise awareness on the weak points of different projects and where they can improve. That too, is getting involved.

Kubuntu not having LTS support was a dissapointment for very obvious reasons. First, the LTS status was removed at a time where Kubuntu was just starting to get criticized because of not having as many features as Ubuntu. That was the worst possible time to remove such a status from Kubuntu. It certainly didn’t help the perception at all. Second, it was stated that the purpose of removing LTS from Kubuntu 8.04 was to focus on KDE 4.x. This made me (and I’m sure others) think that would mean we would get an awesome KDE 4.0 implementation. The implementation we received was garbage, completely vanilla and unpolished, and it actually had more bugs (that I’ve reported directly to launchpad before release) than KDE 4.0 on any other distro. Finally, for someone that has been following Kubuntu and using it since its inception, it’s a huge dissapointment to see that (yet again) your favorite distro was snubbed for it’s more popular brother again. The LTS status doesn’t affect me personally in the area of corporate support, it’s kind of like your favorite players in a sports team not being picked for the draft that year. It’s not going to kill you, but it is REALLY dissapointing.

I will definitely stop using the term “step child” to describe Kubuntu when Kubuntu stops earning that title. I don’t want to promote a view of Kubuntu getting less love either, but when it is actually getting less love that’s hard not to do. Besides, I’m not really promoting a view as much as I am stating facts. Canonical may have given birth to Kubuntu, but giving birth to something and raising it are two completely different things.

Thanks again for the reply, and I hope my response sheds some light on my views that you may have been confused about.

That is why branding and PR is not everything. But these two things are all that Ubuntu can reasonably get done.