Slashdot Mirror
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!"
at least it wasn't "kewl d3skt0p env."
though sometimes when seeing the latest junk for karumba I start to wonder..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
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.
In 7 years they have created a wonderful desktop. For some years now we have olny used Linux at home and at office, and my wife (designer) and my son (7 years old) use it comfortably thanks to KDE, OpenOffice, Mozilla et al.
Thanks for a wonderful product, and for demonstrating that a holy war (QT license, QT vs GTK, KDE vs Gnome, etc) should not deminish your efforts.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
I really had to install Wine sometimes just to play solitair, what an overhead!
So now the real reasoning behind KDE is revealed: To build a non-windows solitaire device.
Kongratulations to the KDE development team. I kan hardly believe that it has been seven years for this krazy and kool environment for linux. There's gno way that Gnome kan katch up with your konstant innovations in application naming! Gnow that I think about it, Gnome's gnot even kapable of kashing in on single-letter usage they way KDE kan! Keep the gnew stuff koming!
Anyone got any screenshots of the earliest KDE?
Get your own free personal location tracker
In this month's edition of Linux Journal, KDE was rated as the favorite desktop environment by the readers. There's a nice birthday present for you KDE!
WURD!!
Around 1999 I had for a few years been experimenting with Linux but hadn't really ever made the switch for more than a week or two, due to lacking real desktop usability. I discovered Slackware and KDE almost in the same heartbeat and converted....and stuck, finally. KDE was the power behind keeping me on Linux and off Windows. Now I have a great desktop that I use every day for hours on end and love every minute of it.
Good job, KDE, and keep going. Gnome? Don't you boys give up, either, because it gives KDE motivation to keep churning out quality. However, you should buy them a beer or two because they've done some fine work for the *nix world, no matter which side of the fence you like to sit on.
Blog,Twitter
Once again, GNOME is behind KDE by a year. No matter how much effort developers put into GNOME, it well never catch KDE in the annivesary department.
KKK?!?!? uggggghh
Thank you KDE, for beautifying my desktop for 5-6 years now.
Matthias Ettrich, you showed it was possible to do something we thought was not possible or did not have the confidence/ability to do. Even Miguel de Icaza was amazed with the potential KDE was showing and we all know that led to GNOME! You started something great, man.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
["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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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?
Everytime KDE is mentioned, gnome advocates try and convince me why is GNOME is better, when it is NOT! Here is a detailed description WHY GNOME SUCKS KDE RULES!
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.
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.
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).
4) I-kandy!
The Kde eye candy is really powerful, with styles such as dotNEt, mosfet liquid, kermamik, Crystal and more. Looking at art.gnome.org reveals the same old theme in different colours. Since gnome dosen't provide a colour changing dialog for its widgets most "themes" are just colour changes. The Crystal from CVS is an Aqua killer, your eyes will want to love it.
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.
6)The defacto choice on Linux. All major Distributions support it by default. This means Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros, ArkLinux, Jamd, Lindows, Slackware, Knoppix, Gentoo and more. How many gnome ones can you mention (Redhat, sure if you like using server distros as your desktop Debian, nope thats the old 1.4 branch Gnoppix, a retarded knoppix rip off.) Most distributions offer gnome as an unsupported alternative.
Also, the only reason why gnome was created in the first place is null and void. Now that Novell has taken over Ximain you can expect VENDOR lock in. Want groupware for linux? Thats $300 a seat.
Get the new Mandrake 9.2 and see the Quality of KDE vs the Sorry state of Gnome 2.4 (and, they STILL haven't fixed that ****ing file dialog), not to mention they REMOVED ALL THE FEATURES. Gnome 2.2 is probably the only gnome version remotley close to kde, that is, KDE 2.0, not the KDE 3.2. I tried the "brokenboring" alpha of it and when it is released this december it will finally put Gnome out of it's misery and kill it off the Linux desktop.
You can do this. Many of the KDE libraries are also under the LGPL. But the fact is that many of the KDE classes that you want to use are actually extensions of QT classes. If you want to use those particular QT classes and the functions that go with them you have two choices, pay TrollTech or GPL. It sounds reasonable to me.
If you don't like the choices then don't use KDE classes and functions. Write your own. The licensing is NOT stopping you from developing your own software for any desktop and licensing that software as you see fit.
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.
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.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The only thing I dislike about TrollTech's license is that their windows and mac implementations are not offered under their open license.
Another Slashdot user informed me that KDE has been ported to Cygwin+XFree86. If KDE for Windows doesn't Just Work(tm) for you, what problems did you run into?
Will I retire or break 10K?
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...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It stands for "Kommunist". From the 3.2 CVS changelog :
- Replaced the gears with a scythe
- Changed mascot name from Konqi to Kommie
- Changed default colour scheme to red.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!