Now, employees of Blue Systems contribute upstream to KDE and Debian, and Kubuntu development is led by community contributors.

Reportedly, the same word, by coincidence, also takes the meaning of 'free' (in the sense of 'without payment') in Kirundi.

Shortly after Ubuntu was started, Mark Shuttleworth stated in an interview that he recognized the need for the 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.

That version included KDE Plasma Desktop as unsupported option which became default in the subsequent release, 8.10.

[1] As a result, both developers employed by Canonical to work on Kubuntu–Jonathan Riddell and Aurélien Gâteau–transferred to Blue Systems.

[118][119] The Taipei City Government decided to replace Windows with a Kubuntu distribution on 10,000 PCs for schools.