Seven Years of KDE Celebrated

Ashcrow writes "Almost exactly 7 years ago, Matthias Ettrich announced the start of a new desktop environment, originally called Kool Desktop Environment. Check out LinuxFrench's article (English translation) and the news at Dot KDE. Thanks to the KDE Team for a great 7 years!"

Comments

KDE or Gnome

[mgarriss]

I recently built a new box and got to the point where I had to go with either KDE or Gnome (not both, time was an issue). I choose KDE because it seemed that the project has more momentum. Am I way off here? I'd love to hear slashdoters sound off on this one.

Re:KDE or Gnome

[LX.onesizebigger]

You're not way off. You're not spot-on either. Fact is, you make your own choices, and that's a good thing. Personally, I prefer KDE, but I probably know as many, if not more, people who use the Gnome. (This could be because most geeks I know, I know through Uni, which insists on the Gnome, though switching to KDE is a matter of issuing a single command.

My reasons for KDE are first and foremost its configurability. I can set shortcut keys in any native KDE application and for the system as a whole to do what I want it to do. I find that the integration is slightly better for the things that I use, but that all depends on what you do use and what your priorities are.

You'll hear a lot of people flaming KDE. The thing I hear most often is that it is too Windows-like. My response to this is that you can configure it to act very much like a number of different environments, and I fail to see how this is a bad thing, especially given that Windows have made a few sane user interface design decisions (though they have also made some really poor ones in later years, and the underlying structure is helplessly flawed).

A lot of the bucketings that KDE cops are due to experiences with earlier versions, and indeed they were pretty sad, but some Gnome-users that have seen my setup of KDE have been impressed to the point where they went ahead and downloaded it. It really has come a long way, and I'm amazed to see the rate at which it has been improving just over the last few months.

So Kongratulations to KDE. Have some Kake.

Early screenshots?

[caluml]

Anyone got any screenshots of the earliest KDE?

The Seldon Plan

[timothy]

["KDE Sucks! GNOME rules!" (reverse, repeat)] (reverse, repeat)

Both of these projects are so good now, it's great while browsing to run into comments occasionally (going back years) asserting that one or the other would cease to be, or that the presence of both in the world of free / Free software was harmful, because it mean duplication of effort, dilution of attention, etc.

Ha!

Hari Seldon *must* have been involved, to see how much these allegedly self-motivated projects catalyze each other.

However much you like either one, note that KDE now has integrated CD (and DVD!) burning software -- IMO on par with anything I've seen on the commerical side (Nero, etc) whereas before I prefered GnomeToaster to anything else, and GNOME now has a good file-chooser (which had been one of my least favorite points about GNOME apps).

Meanwhile, with the right libraries on your system, the Virtucon-backed fluxbox gives you access to the best of both worlds ;)

timothy

Interview with Mathias Ettrich...

[joestar]

There was an interesting interview with Matthias Ettrich, done in 1998, and available here.

Amazing to see how KDE grew since then, and a good reminder of all these (past) issues with Qt, and the QtMozilla huge hack...

And by the way, is this "KEmacs" thing a reality somewhere? :-)

I'm using it...

[binary paladin]

I switched over to KDE from Gnome about 2 months ago after using Gnome since 1.4ish (and I used 2.0, 2.2 and 2.4).

I like KDE better. That's really all I can say. Gnome isn't bad, but I spent too much time wondering if Gnome was ever going to get polished. That and Nautilus just sucks.

When I was using Windows I used Directory Opus as my file manager and when I first started to use Linux full time that was the program I missed the most. Then... then I found Konqueror. Life's been good ever since. From that point it was a slow conversion to KDE as a whole.

I'm very happy with it. Koffice included. I'm very much looking forward to SVG support in the next version as well as a few other little bits I've read up on.

Good job guys!

And just a clarification, I like Gnome. I just like KDE better and you know what's cool? I'm not longer stuck between these two choices:

Windows DE or Windows DE.

Re:Long enough

[WhodoVoodoo]

Problem is, Desktop environments are a tricky subject by virtue of their complexity.

KDE isnt something that just sits there and manages and beautifies little boxes for you. It tries to be much, much more. It's a whole "Desktop Environment" and experience. Much like windows explorer is a desktop environment, and a huge OS tacked on. Windows has been around for much longer than 7 years, and their budget is BILLIONS, where open source usually has a budget of exactly zero. Sometimes less. KDE doesnt employ legions of people to specifically make things as stupid-proof as possible, either.

In any event, there are other Window Managers that don't come with the "Experience" of KDE, GNOME, CDE, and others. Such as, windowmaker, afterstep, fvwm, blackbox (/me pimps blackbox) and a HUGE number of others. They work fabulously, quickly, and quite elegantly. As for KDE, I would say they've done fan-fucking-tastic given the budget, free development, FREE product, and so on. They are not perfect, but MS isnt either (remember code red, nimda, Blaster, Klez, and every other cirus on the face of the earth? KDE's "Experience" doesnt include mass propagating internet worms, have you noticed?)

In the interest of not excluding a big guy, MacOS is great too. Mostly because they arent a bunch of Lobotimized numbskulls who push out software as fast as possible, and they employ plenty of Interface Designers.

Mono nay-sayers

[yerricde]

Even Microsoft doesn't charge for people to use their API.

Some Mono nay-sayers have suggested that Microsoft may indeed start doing exactly that, charging for use of its .NET framework by asserting its patents.

mostly wrong

[Ender Ryan]

1) The file dialog. KDE 0.x ALPHAs had a better file dialog than gnome! Today, the KDE one is the best file dialgog in existance, with influence from all desktops.

Yes, KDE's file dialog is superior to GNOME's. This is the one thing that I find annoying.

2) More apps! KDE comes with over 150 Apps in the full install, with applications for all fields, plus its sleak integration with non kde apps (eg gimp, openoffice) make things more consistant.

KDE comes with over 150 apps that are mostly worthless, really. GNOME comes with most of the same functionality, a nice terminal, web browser, pdf viewer, calculator, etc. GNOME also has the best OS spreadsheet in existence.

As for integration, KDE's "make other apps use KDE colors" hack is disgusting. If you want "integration," -- if by integration you mean widgets that look the same -- use Geramik, Bluecurve, or Mandrake's whatever-it's-called.

3) Configureable as hell. The KDE control center has loads of knobs/dials/sliders and boxes to fiddle with, yet keeps things elegent. In gnome, half the options don't exisit and you are rudley told "use gconf-editor n00b by gnome zealots" (not joking about this, telling the truth gets you a -1, troll and footnotes).

Yes, KDE is pretty configurable -- if by configurable you mean you can change colors, fonts, and keybindings. You can do the same with GNOME, without touching GConf. For some more advanced tweakage, you will need to use GConf, which is pretty easy(not near as painful as windows's regedit).

5) Its development framework rocks. Take a good look at kioslaves, kparts, dcop, arts and qt and see why KDE is a programmer's dream. Modern c++, wonderful IDE, powerful command line scripting. Gnome gives you obsolete c, with a bunch of kludge libraries such as glib, Orbit, bonobo to hack together a application.

GNOME has C++ bindings for everything you need.

6)The defacto choice on Linux. All major Distributions support it by default.

Yeah, and Windows is the defacto OS on x86, what's your point? However, several of those distros also support GNOME, and RH is pretty nice on desktops too.

<snipped the rest of your trolling>

Please stop this nonsense, just stop it.

Fucking kids...