Development started in December 2004 at the Ubuntu Mataró Conference in
Mataró,
Spain when a Canonical employee Andreas Mueller, from Gnoppix, had the idea to make an Ubuntu KDE variant and got the approval from
Mark Shuttleworth to start the first Ubuntu variant, called Kubuntu. On the same evening Chris Halls from the
OpenOffice.org project and Jonathan Riddell from KDE started volunteering on the newborn project. 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.
K Desktop Environment 3 was used as default interface until Kubuntu 8.04. That version included
KDE Plasma Desktop as unsupported option which became default in the subsequent release, 8.10. On , Canonical employee Jonathan Riddell announced the end of Canonical's Kubuntu sponsorship. On ,
Blue Systems was announced on the Kubuntu website as the new sponsor. As a result, both developers employed by Canonical to work on Kubuntu–Jonathan Riddell and Aurélien Gâteau–transferred to Blue Systems. Since 2019, Kubuntu has partnered with MindShare Inc. to offer "Kubuntu Focus" laptops and mini-PCs optimized and supported specifically for the LTS releases. ==Releases==