Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
As part of our series on the other ‘buntus, Linux distributions that are based on Ubuntu and still carry its name or at least parts of it, I thought this month we would look at a slice of Linux history: Cubuntu.
Developed from 2012 until the project ended in 2017, I recently discovered that the last release, Cubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, is still available for download from the official Cubuntu SourceForge project page. That means that despite being a bit of a historical artifact, given the right hardware, it can still be run today. Even though it is out of standard support, extended support is still available.
Background
The story of Cubuntu is really tied to GNOME 3. When GNOME 3 was publicly introduced in 2011 as a replacement for the very popular GNOME 2 desktop, it was notable for how many people hated it. Even Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, termed it a “total user experience design failure”. But, in the Linux world bad things generate good things and Linux developers everywhere set to work to make a better desktop. Those efforts at Ubuntu resulted in Unity, from South America came a reboot of GNOME 2 called MATE and from the Linux Mint developers, Cinnamon.
Ubuntu launched Unity in Ubuntu 10.10 for netbooks and as Ubuntu 11.04 for the general desktop. At that time, there were already flavors of Ubuntu with several different desktops including KDE and Xfce and LXDE so creating Ubuntu flavors with Cinnamon and MATE made sense, it just needed someone to take the projects on.
In 2012, Eric Kranich of France started Cubuntu with a first release of 12.04 LTS. He conceived Cubuntu to be different from the other existing Ubuntu flavors, though. Kranich termed his project a “100% Ubuntu Ultimate Edition”. He kept everything Ubuntu had, including the Unity interface, and added two more desktop installation options. The default would be the new Cinnamon desktop, with MATE and Unity as options at installation, providing three of the desktops that resulted from GNOME 3 dissatisfaction. He included a fairly long list of media codecs, plug-ins and proprietary drivers, including drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. He also added some proprietary applications.
Getting Cubuntu 16.04 LTS
I discovered how to get the last Cubuntu version download from an interesting website, ArchiveOS.org. It is a sort of an online Linux, Solaris, BSD and Open DOS museum which has a page and at least one download for many old distributions, most of which are hosted on ArchiveOS’s own SourceForge page. The ArchiveOS Cubuntu page pointed me to the still-existing Cubuntu official SourceForge page as the place to get Cubuntu 16.04.3 LTS.
I downloaded the 2.8 GB file via https as there is no BitTorrent download. There are too few people downloading it for BitTorrent to work anyway. ArchiveOS provided an MD5 sum to validate the downloaded ISO file and that worked fine. There is no SHA256 sum provided.
Installing
As usual, I did not install Cubuntu for testing but, instead, ran it as a live session from a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.0.96. Cubuntu is not listed as having been tested as working with Ventoy but it booted up just fine.
System requirements
I was not able to locate any system requirements. That said, this release uses Linux kernel 4.10.0 which will not necessarily support hardware newer than 2017 or so. I ran it on an old desktop computer that I have which dates from 2012.
Trying out Cubuntu 16.04 LTS
Booting up Cubuntu presents a nice Cinnamon desktop with an Ubuntu style purple and orange wallpaper.
In addition to the simple Cinnamon menu, Cubuntu comes with a dock that can be turned on from an icon on the panel. The dock then appears vertically on the screen’s right side. It is very Mac-like in appearance and the icons “swell” on mouse over. The dock can be easily turned off using a button on the dock itself.
Even though version 16.04.3 LTS was the last Cubuntu version and was the product of five years of development, it still has some oddities and failings. On boot up, you notice that the splash screen says Ubuntu. I guess this was never updated.
I also had issues with the Cinnamon menu. It worked fine using the keyboard but did not work well with my mouse, closing the menu on any mouse click instead of selecting the desired application to open. This may have been a unique issue to my 2012 vintage test hardware.
Cubuntu boots up in a live session with a default French keyboard arrangement. There is a quick panel setting to change this to English, which is good, as my English keyboard did not work right with a French keyboard arrangement set. There are only the two keyboard layout choices given, English and French.
More of an issue, one also noted by contemporary reviews, is that all versions of Cubuntu boot up in French only. Installed systems are also in French (although the installer is in English). Once you have it installed in French, you can use the included Synaptic package manager to install other languages but you have to be able to read enough French to accomplish that!
Overall, these drawbacks probably go a long way to explain the lack of popularity of Cubuntu during its lifespan and contributed to its 2017 demise.
Settings
Cubuntu comes with a wide variety of settings for user customization. These include 48 wallpaper designs, five cursor styles, 13 icon sets and an amazing total of 56 window color themes, although I have to note that the majority of these don't work right.
The default window theme is a custom one called “Cubuntu” which is an attractive and simple light theme.
Applications
Some of the applications included with Cubuntu 16.04.3 LTS are:
Audacity 2.1.2 audio editor Brasero 3.12.1 CD/DVD burner Cheese 3.18.1 webcam utility Empathy 3.12.11 contacts Evolution 3.18.5.2 email client FileZilla 3.15.0.2 file transfer protocol client Firefox 54.0 web browser Geany 1.27 Integrated Development Environment GNOME Disks 3.18.3.1 disk manager GNOME Document Viewer (Evince) 3.18.2 PDF reader GNOME System Monitor 3.18.2 system monitor GNOME Terminal 3.18.3 terminal emulator GNOME Text Editor (gedit) 3.18.3 text editor Google Chrome 60.0.3112.90 web browser* GParted 0.25.0 partition manager Kazam 1.4.5 screencasting LibreOffice 5.1.6.2 office suite Nemo 2.8.6 file manager Openshot 1.4.3 video editor Radio Tray 0.7.3 online radio streaming player Remmina 1.1.2 remote desktop client Rhythmbox 3.3 music player Shotwell 0.22.0 photo manager Synaptic 0.83 package manager Skype 4.3.0.37 video conferencing* Spotify music streaming client* Thunderbird 52.2.1 email client Transmission 2.84 BitTorrent client UXTerm (Bash) 4.3.14 terminal emulator VLC 2.2.2 media player XTerm 322-1 terminal emulator
* indicates proprietary software
This list of included applications is quite long and includes a great variety of capabilities. For instance, there are not a lot of distributions that include a video editor by default. The default applications do include some redundancies, though, including two web browsers and three terminal emulators!
There are three proprietary applications included: the Google Chrome web browser, Skype video conferencing client and the Spotify music streaming client. I suspect these inclusions did not thrill free software advocates at the time, especially Skype, which has many known security issues and was compromised by law enforcement backdoor access.
The Cinnamon desktop has its own file manager, Nemo, which is a fork of GNOME Files (Nautilus) with much of Nautilus’ previous functionality and customization restored.
Like mainstream Ubuntu, Cubuntu includes the LibreOffice office suite which is complete except for the LibreOffice Base database program which is probably the least-used part of LibreOffice.
Conclusions
Overall, Cubuntu was a promising concept, bringing a choice of three GNOME 3 alternative desktops to Ubuntu along with a lot of additional functionality. Its flaws, including the use of proprietary software, as well as single language, French-only out-of-the-box support, probably explain why Cubuntu never gained the traction hoped for. Of course, when Cubuntu was introduced in 2012 Ubuntu already had the Unity interface so making that available was not a big attraction. A dedicated version of Ubuntu with the MATE desktop, called Ubuntu MATE, was introduced in 2014, just two years after Cubuntu was started. Ubuntu MATE became an official flavor in 2015 which probably also reduced Cubuntu’s attraction in offering that desktop.
Cubuntu development halted with its last point release in 2017 and that marked a temporary end for an Ubuntu flavor with the Cinnamon desktop. Two years later, in 2019, Ubuntu Cinnamon was introduced to fill that niche and became an official flavor in March 2023.
While Cubuntu itself only lasted five years and never gained official Ubuntu flavor status, in many ways it broke ground for today’s Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Cinnamon and even Ubuntu Unity which was first introduced in 2020. All three went on to become official Ubuntu flavors and have achieved enthusiastic user acceptance.
Today Cubuntu remains as just a footnote to Linux history. It is gone, but its legacy endures in three new Ubuntu flavors.
External links
Official website: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cubuntu/