KDE Turns 19

prisoninmate writes: Believe it or not, it has been 19 long years since Matthias Ettrich announced his new project, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE). "Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI," wrote the developer back in October 14, 1996.

Comments

XFCE KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[tomhath]

Dang, I missed it.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

19 years and they are going backwards... Soon they won't have been born, and the classics of UI can fix this mess for them.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[jellomizer]

The year of the the Linux Desktop will be the same year the Desktop Dies.
Linux (kernel) actually bypassed it by taking center stage on the mobile market, with Google's ChromeOS, really only competing with Apple, and winning in numbers of units sold.
The Desktop will stay a windows world, until Microsoft stops making windows for desktops, then people will switch to Linux as their alternative. By that point the desktop wouldn't be a profitable business, so other than being made by a group of hobbyists, the market will be dead.

However what I don't get, is why the Linux community hasn't been pushing for dominance in the Work Station market. Those who use larger Personal Computers to do real computational work. KDE is one of the closest to offering this type of work environment. But there needs more work in multi-screen display abilities, Being able to scale windows down on the WM level and just shrink or expand the content dynamically. Faster ways to switch windows, perhaps even eye tracking where the content you are looking at is expanded, while the other windows are shrunk. Maximizing your viewing state. There is plenty of room of technology growth in the work station market, focusing less on making it so Grandma can browse the web, but more for expert users to be productive while using the computer for computational needs.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[fbk_775375]

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Dutch Gun]

People keep misinterpreting the decline of the PC as a fall toward inevitable death. It's simply finding a new niche as a higher-powered computing device among the computing device spectrum. Think of the PC as the pickup trucks and full sized utility vans of the automotive world. Most people don't need them, but there's really no substitute for them with specific types of work. A smartphone, tablet, or netbook is never going to replace laptop and desktop PCs in the office, nor for anyone who actually creates content. Supplement certainly, but not replace.

Also, these days, aren't most workstations really just high-end PCs? There used to be a real difference (SGI, Sun, etc), but nowadays I think it's more of a semantic difference, other than some hardware choices, like Xenon processors, ECC memory, etc.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[MBGMorden]

As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998), nah, we're pretty good. There are some projects that are going in odd directions, but open source is showing its strengths there with people still taking a more traditional approach (ie, the Cinnamon interface in place of regular GNOME3).

Using Linux back then was a chore - you really had to WANT to use it because the apps were lacking and the UI was downright clunky, not to mention the famed stability of Linux that was always touted really applied to the console running server apps - KDE and most of the desktop stuff crashed constantly. Now most of the Linux desktop stuff is pretty stable.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Linux back then was a chore - you really had to WANT to use it because the apps were lacking and the UI was downright clunky, not to mention the famed stability of Linux that was always touted really applied to the console running server apps - KDE and most of the desktop stuff crashed constantly. Now most of the Linux desktop stuff is pretty stable.

I guess you haven't tried Plasma 5.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, these days, aren't most workstations really just high-end PCs? There used to be a real difference (SGI, Sun, etc), but nowadays I think it's more of a semantic difference, other than some hardware choices, like Xenon processors, ECC memory, etc.

Yup!

As somebody who started out with Sun SPARCstations and SGI Indigo machines, it really was weird for me when Linux (and for that matter SCO and BSD) on Pentiums started to approach the performance of RISC workstations. I think the tipping point for me was when the Core 2 Duo (we got a few systems with Conroe based Xeon) came out and we loaded up Redhat and it felt natural for the devs. After that, unless there was a damned valid use case (fuckin' AIX developers heheh) we started going Intel with Supermicro workstation boards.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Blaskowicz]

Windows replaced Unix workstations. What Unix workstations did linux can't do, like running a 10-year-old binary, Windows can.

Windows now has a disproportionally advanced graphics stack, while linux is still waiting for Wayland coming when, 2017? By then 18-year-olds will be facebooking, touch-wiping idiots that don't know how to use a computer. They'll laugh at you for plugging a USB stick at the computer and using a file manager.
Weird that Wayland wasn't available in 2012 (as in selectable in the installer with debian and ubuntu) and stable in 2014.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[bluefoxlucid]

People keep misinterpreting the rapid increase in PC specs and the constant buying of a new $300 eMachine every 6 months as a healthy product market, and the more moderate pace of PC replacement as the death of the PC. They're also misinterpreting the boom of excessive numbers of mobile apps--mostly games--as the end of the PC industry.

People aren't throwing computers out the window. You don't see people living without a computer in their house, only a smart phone and a Galaxy Tab to do all their computer work. Some folks have just a Surface, but we had people with just a laptop or just a macbook back in 2000 during the "you need a laptop for college" fad; the Surface is a bona fide PC platform with touch screen and stylus capabilities.

PCs fell into the comfortable niche of common goods. They became like multiple pairs of shoes or wardrobes with several sets of clothes: even poor people have them. Remember when seeing a book probably meant you were never going to see that book again in your life, so you better memorize its contents? We order books from Amazon now.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[bluefoxlucid]

Every time someone updates the graphics stack, I see little difference except an upheaval of software rewriting. I was there for X loadable modules, DRI, DRM, and now Wayland; it's a lot of talk for "we can already run OpenGL and have full graphics systems; we just don't have DirectX drivers, but fuck DirectX."

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

> As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998)

Me, too, but in November or December, so I really managed to use Linux in '99.

> Using Linux back then was a chore

Not so much because of Linux IMHO. Traditional distributions were somewhat complicated to install (ahem, Slackware), but Red Hat and make everything much nicer.

> you really had to WANT to use it because the apps were lacking and the UI was downright clunky

I really wanted because I didn't want to use Windows without a license (yeah, I'm weird); at the time, Windows 98 was really better than Linux' alternatives (fvwm, Windowmaker, Afterstep etc.), but not by much... those alternatives were usable (and they still are!). And then came KDE and, in my experience it crashed because we lacked memory back then -- it was not about serious bugs (that was my impression).

I had a weak machine back then, so however nice I found KDE, I had to use Xfce (2 or 3, can' remember), which was much better than the window managers. Actually, outside of KDE, I still consider Xfce much better than any other option in usability, so I don't use Mate or Gnome or Cinammon if KDE is not an option. That may change if those Trinity guys can make KDE3 be more widespread.

Regarding usability, it's KDE bar none for me (though using Compiz might even things out). One can have lighter (and faster) Linux desktops, but KDE makes the user faster.

> KDE and most of the desktop stuff crashed constantly.

Back then, I managed to get a second PC and used it as a X server -- just to have a little more memory available. I then realized KDE stopped crashing (so it was mainly out of memory problems). Even so I had to use Xfce to have a little more room for apps -- and Netscape 4.7 was already somewhat heavy. Wordperfect (8, I believe) was pretty good, too, better or on par with Word, but worse than Lotus Wordpro. Then came the Gimp, and, for me, the Linux desktop became complete.

> Now most of the Linux desktop stuff is pretty stable.

The Linux desktop is much more stable than Windows 7, for instance (I could mention some weird bugs in Windows Explorer, but what for?)

For Windows users, the Linux hasn't happened yet. For you, as you say, it was '98. For me it was in the following year -- 16 years ago.

I'd like to publicly thank all KDE developers for taking care of an area into which kernel devs don't dare to go -- and for making such a nice desktop (I'm using it now). Excellent work, folks, you're awesome!

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Penguinisto]

Oh lord yes... and don't get me started on the need to compile half the binaries you wanted/needed, not to mention the dependency chains from Hell that you occasionally stumbled across.

Today, most binaries install with just a click or two. You don't have to beg a publisher to come out with a Linux version of something (because it's either already there, you run it with WINE, or you just run it in a VM).

As for Linux on the Desktop? Nowadays, the "desktop" is irrelevant - outside of us geeks, hardcore gamers and the occasional impoverished family? Everyone else uses laptops or tablets nowadays - some of the younger folks don't really go beyond their smartphone. Hell, I use my last desktop as a home server for backups, printing, media, and general mass storage. I gave away my old dual-G5 PowerMac and junked my white-box gaming rig eons ago... and my power bill is grateful for it. I use my MBP laptop and my wife uses an iPad, no sweat. I'm looking to replace my last remaining desktop, but this time it's going to be a hyper-efficient shoebox with a bit of CPU, a bit of RAM, and a shitload of storage. Home server and all that.

I may bother building a gaming rig while I'm at it, but honestly I've got too many other hobbies nowadays to bother (not to mention that my home is Windows-free... why would I want to screw that up?)

Anyrate... desktop? Yeah, I remember those days. I doubt they'll exist for much longer, though.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Kjella]

However what I don't get, is why the Linux community hasn't been pushing for dominance in the Work Station market. Those who use larger Personal Computers to do real computational work.

Meh, those probably fit inside the 1% Linux already has. It's the general business desktop you'd like to conquer, the one that consists of Office, Outlook and [very business-specific something]. Where the latter might be cross-platform, web application or some other fairly platform-agnostic business. But it doesn't matter because you all need to run Windows to do the basic collaboration.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[greg1104]

As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998)

Those two facts are mutually exclusive. In 1998 you were already standing on someone's lawn.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[xrobertcmx]

The decline in the desktop market is just that, a decline in the market. What we had was 20 years of adoption that has since leveled off, everyone who wants one now has one. We have also reached a point at which CPU performance has so far exceeded the need of the average (non gamer, I want to pay my bills and play this here malware infested flash game, and then look up some porn) user that a Core 2 Duo machine from 6 or 7 years ago is still good enough. Typically we would call it a mature market, similar to car, large appliance, or furniture sales. There is some growth, profit to be made, but by and large it is a 2% or 3% per year growth market, not a 10% or 20%.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[budgenator]

I had a Linux running dual-boot with DOS 6.1/Window 3.1 on my 80486SLC home-brew machine; I later got a store bought machine with a Pentium and a free upgrade voucher for Windows95.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

by (4295749) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @06:45AM

What is this Unicode in usernames, but not in posts!?

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[tlhIngan]

People keep misinterpreting the rapid increase in PC specs and the constant buying of a new $300 eMachine every 6 months as a healthy product market, and the more moderate pace of PC replacement as the death of the PC. They're also misinterpreting the boom of excessive numbers of mobile apps--mostly games--as the end of the PC industry.

The rapid rise in specs really occurred in the 90s. The 2000's had increase in specs, but at a far slower pace.

Though, there was a trend in the early 00's that everyone needed a computer, so when the netbook came out in 2007-ish (remember them), these low-margin, low spec PCs sold like hotcakes because now everyone in the household could have their very own PC and not need to share.

Then came the tablet, and the realization that netbooks were getting more pricey (approaching laptop pricing), and the only reason people needed PCs was for stuff like Netflix and web browsing and other "content consuming" tasks that tablets were better suited for.

The PC will never die - it's like a truck. You need trucks as they accomplish tasks cars can't do. But not everyone needs a truck - most people can get by with a car.

The days of people needing 1 computer per person is over, but 1 computer per household is probably the least you need.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[bluefoxlucid]

I worked at Best Buy around 2005-2006, when eMachines and Gateways were selling for $300-ish, and people were bringing in 6 month old computers and refusing to pay Geek Squad $500 for repairs, and just buying new $300 eMachines with better hard drives. That jump from 200MHz to 800Mhz to 1.5Ghz to 3GHz happened earlier, but the rest of the industry was still catching up for a decade after the gigahertz wars.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[budgenator]

Most desktop computers now will blow-away what were considered super-computers when KDE first came out, a Cray-1 had 160 MFLOPS and 2MB ram, Cray X-MP peaked at 942 MFLOPS now a reasonably modern computer, 8 Floating point ops per cycle per core * 3.4 Giga cycles per second * 4 cores = 108.8 GFLOPs, a Radeon 6990 can do over 5 TFLOPS!

Now since most modern supercomputers run Linux, most desktops will run Linux, you can develop and test your software on low cost commodity machine, then run it on your big-iron, usually with only a minor tweek or two. The difference between desktop and supercomputer is mostly quantitative, not qualitative now, how fast can you afford?

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[advocate_one]

Windows is now about to die.. people are really, really going to get pi55ed off with Windows 10...

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows replaced Unix workstations. What Unix workstations did linux can't do, like running a 10-year-old binary, Windows can.

And yet... My newly-installed Debian Jessie server is happily running the binary that I need to access my DAB tuner and control it and stream from it. Which I obtained round about 2003 (sadly not open-source, but I prefer functionality to principles on something like that).

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[MouseR]

19 years and it hasn't aged a bit!

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

The deathmarch of PC has less to do with pure sales numbers and more with primacy. With lower sales comes a smaller market. With smaller market you have reduced competition and R&D. With reduced R&D, well... you get the idea.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are talking about are running Windows Server on a Xeon/ECC machine you are talking about a different class of machine entirely. If you want a workstation these days you either build it to specification and run Linux or drop close to $10,000 on a Mac Pro.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[vandamme]

Microsoft is to blame. People used to get new computers when theirs had an "old" operating system that was crudded up. Now you can install Windows 10 for free and clean out all your old cruft.

Add to that the people converting to Linux, and you don't need new PCs to surf cat videos. Of course Windows is the main reason people convert to Linux.

Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux desktop is much more stable than Windows 7

Multi-monitor support, 3D acceleration, Systemd.

K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using kDE because of its name. The K in kDE has political meanings in Argentina. K is synonym of corruption.

Change its name. Delete all traces of K in kDE and I will return. Until then, I prefer to use Unity, Gnome, Xfce, even WindowMaker.

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using kDE because of its name. The K in kDE has political meanings in Argentina. K is synonym of corruption.

Change its name. Delete all traces of K in kDE and I will return. Until then, I prefer to use Unity, Gnome, Xfce, even WindowMaker.

And I stopped eating snickers because it rhymes with knickers.

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

If Slashdot was less US-centric you'd be modded "funny"

Re: K in KDE

[bill_mcgonigle]

better ditch the metric system while you're at it. Nobody needs corrupt mass measurements.

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are an idiot. Please don't mix your political preferences and opinions in unrelated matters. Also, please stop spreading your local political opinions as global truths, as this is not the appropriate forum.

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody knows that the K in "KDE" stands for Krap, you insistive clod!

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

*klod

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

The name "WindowMaker" has a K in it.

Re:K in KDE

[unixisc]

I didn't like the name since it seemed a kickoff from CDE.

But in truth, it has developed into an ecosystem all its own - I think of Koffice - thankfully renamed Calligra - and other apps that come w/ it. Only thing - it seems a bit heavy for standard usage. I think if there was an SMP server, KDE would be good for that. But for any lightweight Linux or BSD, it seems overkill.

From being a Qt based environment, I thought it had value, except that today, you have Razor-qt or LX/QT for Linux, and Lumina for FreeBSD/PC-BSD. So not too important to me. But I do hope they do a name change

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't given up eating knickers yet, they're just so satisfying.

Re:K in KDE

[Grishnakh]

And this is why the metric system is wrong and should be abandoned: it's used in North Korea. Since North Korea is a horrible regime and uses metric, I refuse to use it.

Also, Iran has a horrible regime, and they fly F-14 jets. Because of this, I refuse to watch Top Gun, and because Tom Cruise is in Top Gun, I refuse to watch any movies with him in it.

Re:K in KDE

[Grishnakh]

This is just plain idiotic. Qt uses less memory than Gtk+, and is a far superior and more complete toolkit as well. Qt is commonly used in low-resource embedded systems; Gtk+ is not.

Re:K in KDE

[Kjella]

Just move to the US and knickers won't be knickers anymore solving this conundrum. Also eating lots of snickers will be a great way to blend in and fill out.

Re:K in KDE

[fnj]

Christ, the whole point of KDE was that it used an excellently architected C++ core library instead of a clunky crude C core library trying to imitate OO on a flat procedural programming environment. A long time ago, before Qt went straight full free software, the whiners had a point about shying away. As it is now, why would KDE ever switch away from the best?

UI retrogression abandoning use standards is a universal hipster problem. It has nothing whatever to do with KDE. Microsoft started it, Firefox copied it, and Gnome took it up with a vengeance. KDE to this day is still a rational GUI. Windows are properly decorated, with proper controls in the proper places, no hidden now-you-see-it, now-you-don't scrollbars, and no idiotic bullshit abortions like only-the-one "current" window having a title bar, with the title bar at the top of the display.

As for "slow app loading", what piece of shit hardware are you running on? I use a mix of KDE, GTK, and other apps, and they all load instantaneously on my decidedly trailing-edge boxes. The absolute nauseatingly worst offenders for RAM bloat are Firefox and Thunderbird, which are both GTK-based.

If you've got absolute lightweight religion for whatever reason, I won't knock it. I will just point out that all the usual DEs are pigs for RAM use, and that disk space use has been a complete non-factor for at least 15 years. Even Xfce has caught the pigginess. With LXDE pretty much withering and Razor-Qt developing at a glacially-slow pace, I personally think Lumina has a lot of promise.

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

My first name begins with K and I lived in Argentina for a time. No wonder I had such a difficult time!

Oh, hell. My last name starts with U, I guess everyone who hates U-boats avoided me too. Dammit, only 24 decent letters left to use... er, I mean, utilize... no... uhh... write with?

Re:K in KDE

[bluefoxlucid]

This was true back when Gnome 2 was using 400MB and KDE was using over a gigabyte, and when KDE applications required 10-15 seconds to start up while equivalent or more feature-complete GTK applications loaded in 2-3 seconds? I recall Galleon working much better with my 512MB RAM machine than Konqueror, thanks to not pushing me into swap hell with its ludicrous belief in a multi-hundred-megabyte RSS; to be fair, Opera would run a dozen tabs with a resident set size of 50MB, which I found astounding.

Re:K in KDE

[bluefoxlucid]

I don't use Firefox anymore. Thunderbird is shitty; I've tried switching to Evolution, but it chokes on gmail.

I've been enjoying Gnome 3 for years. Its local menu bars are a refreshing alternative to Ubuntu's stupid global desktop menu thing. I wrote a complete explanation of why top-of-screen menus are stupid--both from a spatial location sense (the menu's position relative to the working space changes when the working space moves on the desktop) and from a multi-window interface sense (you only need one click to activate a window and access its menu bar, versus two and a lot more mouse movement to activate a window and access the global menu bar). I do dislike its alt-tab behavior.

Even the KDE developers noticed my coverage of Michael Meeks's work in speeding up the loading of slow, bloated, clunky C++ applications. The C++ ABI is a horrible mess.

Re:K in KDE

[Nadir]

I don't use Firefox anymore. Thunderbird is shitty; I've tried switching to Evolution, but it chokes on gmail.
</p></quote>

That's more to do with GMail's IMAP implementation being shitty, rather that MUAs...

Re:K in KDE

[bluefoxlucid]

It starts, but it dies when it gets 70% through downloading my mailbox.

Re:K in KDE

[Eunuchswear]

UI retrogression abandoning use standards is a universal hipster problem.

You said "hipster". The rest of your post can be ignored.

Re:K in KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

You used it too, quick everyone disregard the rest of this post too!

Kudos

[varag]

It's come a long way and the current incarnation is robust, intuitive and quite pleasing on the eye.

Older KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

I 'm glad they're doing well and this screenie has me missing a standard looking desktop like nobodies business:

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/the-kool-desktop-environment-kde-turns-19-happy-birthday-494577-2.jpg

I know things have to move forward but I really miss that 9x look and feel in my desktops. Especially with the Windows boxes I have to use that are past 7.

Re:Older KDE

[armanox]

Oh how I remember that KDE 1.x....

A Linux GUI for the end user who wants to do stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

A Linux GUI for the end user who wants to do things?

Mein gott.

I like that in the initial announcement that they were already comparing/cribbing their features against Win95.

Almost like Win95 was popular because its interface was useful...

I Didn't Realize

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize it, until I saw this article, that I've been using KDE as my exclusive desktop since 1999.

I've got to say that upon realizing how long it has been, I'm rather disappointed in KDE's progress. There's no doubt that there have been a lot of advances and improvements, but at the same time, it has regressed or devolved into spaghetti a fair bit.

Re:I Didn't Realize

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately, part of this is a byproduct of lack of developer resources, because there's too much competition in the Linux DE space, and like most Linux projects, there aren't that many developers to begin with. Projects with high corporate interest like the kernel get lots of developer time (thanks to companies paying their employees to work on it); the kernel is used in countless embedded devices plus servers, so there's a lot of corporate backing. There isn't much corporate backing for desktop work, so we get the garbage that Red Hat shovels to us (Gnome3). Why RH doesn't want to push a DE that would work extremely well in a corporate desktop environment as a Windows replacement, I have no idea; my guess is that their management is buddy-buddy with the top Gnome devs (who also work there, and have built themselves a little empire within the company) and refuses to change course even though years and years and years of Gnome hasn't helped Red Hat penetrate the business desktop market at all.

Anyway, add that to some lackluster leadership within KDE wherein they've pushed for new features (akonadi, nepomuk, desktop search, activities, etc.) over improving existing code, which is also a big Achilles' heel for FOSS software in general: devs prefer to work on new shiny stuff instead of making things reliable and fixing bugs, and most of these devs are unpaid so the effect is much worse. Proprietary software isn't immune to this (new features sell software, bug-fixes and reliability improvements do not), but it can be worse in FOSS depending on who's involved in the project.

Re:I Didn't Realize

[careysub]

No mod points, but: "Hear! Hear!"

Re:I Didn't Realize

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: lack of developer resources. It might just be that KDE's scope is way too big.

I'm quite happy running no desktop environment. The idea that you need one is silly.

It needs something like two developers to do the essentials: a window manager, and a file manager.

I'm sure KDE provides more than that, but does it need to provide more?

captcha: maverick

Re:I Didn't Realize

[Grishnakh]

That's a good point; one of the big criticisms of the KDE project is that they're too ambitious, esp. with things like desktop search which were big projects that involved a lot of machine resources (to do all the indexing in the background), and this took away from getting all the basics just right.

The idea that you need a DE, however, is not "silly". I don't know about you, but I like having a cohesive DE that includes things like a task tray, a wifi manager, etc. Maybe you like running command-line scripts to manage wifi when you're on-the-go, but I sure as hell don't want to go back to that.

KHTML!

[Anonymous Coward]

While we celebrate, add to this that KDE extended its reach to a huge fraction of the online world with the KHTML rendering engine.

Re:KHTML!

[mccalli]

For those that don't know, KHTML formed the basis of Webkit, and so then formed Safari on the Mac/iOS and for a long time powered Chrome as well. It caused a minor storm when Apple picked that over Gecko, which had been what people assumed would have been picked.

Yes, I agree with the AC above - KHTML has had huge impact, probably wider impact than the KDE project itself, purely because it dominated mobile browsing for so long.

Re:KHTML!

[Grishnakh]

For those who don't know, KHTML was used and modified by Apple, and became "WebKit", which is the rendering engine used in Safari, iOS, and all the Chrome-related browsers.

Re:KHTML!

[Anonymous Coward]

KHTML was chosen instead of Gecko because Gecko suffered from second-system effect. Both KHTML and Gecko were C++.

KDE is hampered by the brain-damaged nature of C++.

Quick question. Class B is a subclass of class A. A has methods M1, M2, and M3; B overloads M1 and M3. Object b is of type B.

When B.M1 is called, which calls B.M2, which calls B.M3, is A::M3 called, or B::M3?

The correct answer is A::M3, since it would be weird to have a method from namespace A calling a method from namespace B.

Declaring these methods virtual will override this behavior. However, template classes are not allowed to have virtual methods.

Re:KHTML!

[Anonymous Coward]

> KDE is hampered by the brain-damaged nature of C++.

Being a C++ ignorant, I'll take what you say pretty much at face value.

> Class B is a subclass of class A. A has methods M1, M2, and M3; B overloads M1 and M3. Object b is of type B.
OK.
> When b.M1 is called, which calls b.M2, which calls b.M3, is A::M3 called, or B::M3? (FTFY, as corectly as I can)
Hmm...
> The correct answer is A::M3, since it would be weird to have a method from namespace A calling a method from namespace B.
Not IMHO. I realize you're describing a flaw in C++, but to me it seems obvious B::M3 should be called. And why?

Because IMHO (and I'm most probably wrong, since I'm C++-ignorant) this is not like a railroad, on which sense is wagon that keeps routed to a meaning previously defined.

Instead, the way I understand it, b.M1 is found to be pertinent to B; it calls b.M2 (which B doesn't have) and that is a B method, too! B didn't overload M2, and so A::M2 should be used, but when instantiation occurs A::M2 becomes B::M2. I see not a single slice of a problem with that. B::M2 (not overloaded) then calls B::M3 (or b.M3 in another notation).

Isn't it that the way that C++ works? If not, what does work like that? Objective-C?

I used it!

[Anna Merikin]

My first permanent Linux installation (permanent in the sense that I wound up keeping and using it instead of Windows) was Caldera Open Linux 1.0. which shipped with KDE-1.0. Finding its limitations quickly, I moved to Red Hat 6.2 (KDE 1.1) and compiled each new KDE release from source until v. 3. I then switched to Knoppix and Mepis (Debian), still using KDE. I now use 4.x on Mint-14.04-3. For a short time, I tried XFCE, but returned to the integration of KDE.

KDE still looks and acts pretty much the same now as it used to, just moreso.

Re:I used it!

[gilboad]

My story is quite similar:
Started using Linux on my backup box (Debian and then RH) in ~95/96. Never took it seriously.
In mid 2000, my main OS was Windows 2K and XP (beta) and I began to lose faith in the MS-way. At the same time, RH 6.2 was released and for the first time, it really looked like a real OS and I suddenly found myself spending less time using my main Windows 2K/XP box and more time using my backup RH 6.2 box.

When RH 7 was released, I deleted the XP beta partition, moved Windows 2K to backup box and installed RH 7.0 on my main box and never looked back.

15 years later, all my coworkers and I use KDE (5.4 ,Fedora 22) as the main DE.

- Gilboa

kMeh

[Anonymous Coward]

kI'll ktake kmy kWindows kdesktop kany kday.

When you have a hammer

[Grand Facade]

Everything looks like a nail.

No one feature is going to jack Linux into mainstream.

What has propelled Linux to it's current position is price point and versatility.

The ability to fold spindle and mutilate an OS as desired.

I fear elevation to mainstream would be its demise.

More is better is marketspeak for more money, I think Linux is pretty great right now.

Re:When you have a hammer

[Grishnakh]

I disagree. Currently, Linux desktop share (in reality, not just looking at sales numbers which of course is idiotic since most people install Linux themselves rather than buying a PC with it pre-installed) is tiny, and has very little visibility. It's hard to say exactly how small it is, but it's not likely to be have more users than MacOSX. Anyway, as a consequence the availability of applications is rather poor, which prevents more people, who would like to switch, from adopting it because they rely on certain proprietary apps (usually business-related).

It'd be nice to have better marketshare, maybe around 25%, because then there'd be much better support.

Also, mainstream adoption wouldn't kill it; why do you think that? The big strength of Linux is its open-source nature and lack of centralized control. Even if, say, Ubuntu became the new Microsoft and all Windows users suddenly installed Ubuntu (not likely, but let's suppose), most of the software is open-source: the kernel, main libraries, etc. All those other distros will still be around, and doing things differently than Ubuntu: different DEs, maybe even different init systems, etc. You'll still be able to use a distro that suits you better.

Re:When you have a hammer

[Guy Harris]

I disagree. Currently, Linux desktop share (in reality, not just looking at sales numbers which of course is idiotic since most people install Linux themselves rather than buying a PC with it pre-installed) is tiny, and has very little visibility. It's hard to say exactly how small it is, but it's not likely to be have more users than MacOSX.

If NetMarketShare is to be believed, and if measuring based on Web access is good enough, Linux has about a 1.74% share and OS X has about 7.72%.

Anyway, as a consequence the availability of applications is rather poor, which prevents more people, who would like to switch, from adopting it because they rely on certain proprietary apps (usually business-related).

It'd be nice to have better marketshare, maybe around 25%, because then there'd be much better support.

Well, just 7.72% might get you the level of support OS X has (which, from a desktop point of view, includes Microsoft Office and Quicken, for example), although Linux might need a bit more to encourage developers to add it as a platform. My pure worth-every-cent-you-paid-for-it guess would be that something in the range of 10-to-15% would be sufficient, but 25% would definitely make people take notice. (And don't count the money you paid for your computer, its OS, its browser, and its Internet connection when measuring my guess's worth. :-))

Also, mainstream adoption wouldn't kill it; why do you think that? The big strength of Linux is its open-source nature and lack of centralized control. Even if, say, Ubuntu became the new Microsoft and all Windows users suddenly installed Ubuntu (not likely, but let's suppose), most of the software is open-source: the kernel, main libraries, etc. All those other distros will still be around, and doing things differently than Ubuntu: different DEs, maybe even different init systems, etc. You'll still be able to use a distro that suits you better.

Although without some level of binary compatibility between distributions, the other distributions might not get to run the proprietary apps in question. (Some might consider the lack of proprietary apps a feature, but, well, if you have a lack of centralized control, you may end up with distributions that do run a number of proprietary apps; the "no centralized control" knife cuts both ways, it doesn't necessarily favor free software fans in all cases. Pick your distribution based on, among other things, whether you want the proprietary apps or reject proprietary apps.)

Re:When you have a hammer

[Grand Facade]

A real Linux user will not download an app.

They will just write a script!

Re:When you have a hammer

[Guy Harris]

A real Linux user will not download an app.

They will just write a script!

:-)

Re:When you have a hammer

[Grishnakh]

Binary compatibility shouldn't be a problem on Linux, assuming you're using the same architecture as was built for (e.g., 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86, etc.). The problem is libraries: open-source stuff always links to a lot of libraries which are included with the distros, so you can't easily just take a binary from one distro and run it on another, because the libs won't match up.

For proprietary stuff, this shouldn't be a problem: they just need to statically link everything. I'm pretty sure that's how actual proprietary software on Linux is distributed (there is some out there, you know; most of it is really high-end stuff).

Re:When you have a hammer

[Guy Harris]

Binary compatibility shouldn't be a problem on Linux, assuming you're using the same architecture as was built for (e.g., 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86, etc.). The problem is libraries: open-source stuff always links to a lot of libraries which are included with the distros, so you can't easily just take a binary from one distro and run it on another, because the libs won't match up.

Yes, by "Linux" I meant "full Linux distribution", not just "Linux kernel".

For proprietary stuff, this shouldn't be a problem: they just need to statically link everything. I'm pretty sure that's how actual proprietary software on Linux is distributed (there is some out there, you know; most of it is really high-end stuff).

Probably because all they can count on being binary-compatible between distributions is the kernel. Some might prefer not to have to statically link everything, but that's not the way it works in Linuxland.

(That is the way it works in OS X and, as far as I know, Solaris; for SunOS, all the way back to SunOS 4.0, the idea was that the ABI was expressed in terms of calls to dynamically-linked library routines, not system calls, and the system call interface was not guaranteed to remain binary compatible from OS release to OS release, and that was pushed even further in SunOS 5.0/SVR4/ELF by not requiring the C startup code to load the run-time linker using direct system calls. OS X is similar, although with Mach-O rather than ELF. You have to dynamically link with, at minimum, libc/libSystem on those platforms; at least in OS X, you're probably forced to dynamically link with all Apple-developed libraries.)

Why do you like KDE?

[LichtSpektren]

I'm curious to hear from some KDE fans. In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?), and I have found Plasma to be gaudy and bloated compared to MATE and Xfce. But that's just me. Any reasons why KDE is so great, beyond its vast customizability?

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[ArchieBunker]

I like the look and functionality. I could give two shits about the rest of the other programs that are all poor copies of one another.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Customizability is one of the important things to me about KDE, which has been my only regular desktop since 2007.
I like things to look my way, and I like to be able to change them. I'm still on 4; 5 doesn't have enough customization ready yet.
I love Konqueror; it's my primary web browser and my only file manager. They haven't monkeyed with its UI like Firefox and Chromium; it still looks like a browser. It has built-in adblocking and user agent switching. I also adore Kate, which is my only answer in the text editor holy war. It's so extensible, and I use other tools built on it, like KDevelop and Kile.
I'm a big fan of KTorrent, Clementine, Okular, Tellico, K3b, and I do use some of the Calligra tools.
Every once in a while I'll be running a program that brings up the ugly ugly GNOME/Gtk file chooser dialog box, and I'll wonder why anyone is not using KDE.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh god, I cant even where to start...

konsole is perfect
much more options (customization as you call it)
klipper FTW!
amarok!
k3b
file manager is also perfect
its dense environment if you know what i mean (no meaningless white space around everything on desktop)

as of browser, I use chrome

I use kde from version 2.0 and yes, it was shit then (slow as hell). But version 3.0 forward was really great. I periodicaly tried xfce and gnome, but just dont like it.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Peter H.S.]

I have it the exact opposite way. I find KDE apps superior to any other alternatives in most respects.

Krusader and Dolphin for file-management are better than anything else I know. Superb integration like packing or unpacking files or encrypt them or enque them in Amarok etc.

Kmail, and the entire PIM suite with calendars and contact management is better than anything else I have tried.

Konqueror isn't bad at all, and much faster and lightweight than Firefox. The absolute main reason why I use Firefox as my main browser is because of the many great add-ons. For many other things like file-management, bookmarks and passwords, Konqueror is actually better.

System wide password management with kwallet is much, much better than each and every program implementing similar systems.

DigiKam for photos and Okular for pdf's, Kid3 for audio-tagging, K3b for disc-burning and ripping, KRename for advanced mass renaming, Kstars for astronomy, are better than anything else I have tried.

Konsole, Kate (editor), Okteta (hex editor), Amarok (music player) are also favorites of mine.

In short, KDE, including Plasma really works well for me and my work-flow. Personally I don't really like XFCE; almost no desktop integration and no apps, inferior file-management and a UI metaphor that reminds me too much of Win 3.11. IMHO Plasma beats in every aspect when it comes to virtual desktops, shifting between programs, program services and app integration.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare gedit (shudder) to kedit or kate, for example. (Of course, developers probably use editors with more features. But that's not an even comparison).
Compare Konsole with Gnome's Terminal. Yikes.
Okular vs evince.

Gnome interfaces just suck. Heck, even the save/open file dialog in Gnome programs sucks so bad, it's incredible.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Dragonslicer]

In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?)

I guess that might be true if by "universally" you mean only Calliga and Konqueror and ignore the rest of KDE's applications. As others have mentioned, Kate, Konsole, Dolphin, KMail, KTorrent, KWallet, etc. are among the best applications of their kinds.

I'm also a big fan of the fact that nearly every KDE application (as well as Plasma) has a keyboard shortcuts screen in the settings. You can assign any keyboard shortcut you want to pretty much any action that you can do in the application.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

At work I'm still on 3.5.
It's rock solid and has so much functionality and customizability no other DE has.
Too bad it's not very modern anymore.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Blaskowicz]

Will they throw away KDE 5 (that they say you can't call KDE 5) when it's done and replace it with KDE 6?
That puts me off :)
Gnome 2 has stayed the same (with a rename to Mate) whereas KDE had two transitions during that time.

A desktop should last 10 years, or even 15 years.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[fnj]

I'm curious to hear from some KDE fans. In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?)

News flash. Who doesn't use the premier standalone apps in preference to bundled apps? WTH is your point? It applies equally to KDE and GNOME, except GNOME doesn't have anywhere near the richness of bundled apps.

One exception is Kate. Kate is far superior to any other general purpose GUI editor.

I have found Plasma to be gaudy

Can't speak to a meaningless thought from the blue.

and bloated compared to MATE and Xfce

"Bloated" is a word that can mean almost anything. If you can specifically describe exactly what you object to, I might be able to evaluate it. If you're talking about disk usage, I would categorically snort, seeing it as a complete so-what non factor. If you're talking about RAM use, can you present specific comparisons? If you're talking about features, I give up. The concept of "too many features" is completely irrational. If what you really mean is that a wealth of features get in the way by making the app too hard to use, then in principle that could at least be a rational objection.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Grishnakh]

My main reason is KWin (the window manager). It's not about the apps to me, it's about the overall system, including the window manager, the configuration tools, etc. I can configure my desktop to my liking, without having to jump through hoops or do it all over again every time the DE gets a version number bump (unlike Gnome).

Almost no one actually uses Konqueror any more, we all use Firefox or Chromium. Same with LibreOffice. KDE doesn't prevent you from running non-KDE apps. However, you cherry-picked the worst examples. Krita is a really good image editor (better than GIMP in many ways, but its focus is a little different), K3B is a nice CD/DVD burner, Kcalc works well for me, etc. For a lot of the smaller stuff, the KDE apps are good. Okular (for PDFs) and KTorrent are great too. I even like Amarok though a lot of people prefer Clementine.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amarok used to be awesome. Clementine still is.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[present_arms]

You'd love Trinity then :)

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[bvimo]

A few years ago Gnome 2 became Gnome 3 which sparked a fork and KDE3 still exists today it's called Trinity Desktop. I guess there will be a KDE4 fork. I can't be bothered with the KDE Software Compilation or whatever it's called, it's just KDE to me.

/me is a happy Trinity user

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[myrdos2]

I'm a KDE fan because I believe that the desktop should let me run programs and switch between them. That means I want a real start menu, a task bar, and windowed programs that can be resized or closed. I should also be able to fully configure the computer, including networking, sound, wireless, screen brightness, add users, etc. Also it shouldn't crash and corrupt its own configuration files.

I can get all of that with KDE, so I use it. Most other desktops, including Windows and Unity, make the basic tasks of a desktop more tedious. There's more visual search, more mouse movements, more clicking, and no benefit that I can see. They're less 'discoverable', which means that when they make their next pointless change it will be harder to puzzle out.

XFCE is reasonable, but it lacks some basic configuration and crashes on a monthly basis on the machines I've tried it on. Sometimes you have to delete a bunch of .hidden files in your home folder before it will start up again.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[joetainment]

... Any reasons why KDE is so great, beyond its vast customizability?...

KDE is my favorite UI on any OS I've used, and that includes Windows, OSX, Android, etc.

I don't always use the additional KDE applications, and yes, I usually use the more mainstream ones like LibreOffice and Firefox. However many of those KDE apps are actually pretty good, and they provide reasonable alternatives which are nice to have.

It doesn't really matter though, because I use KDE primarily for the actual desktop environment itself. In additional to a really excellent desktop UI (launcher, taskbar, etc) it has so many minor utility applications that improve a Linux computer so much.

The fact that it offers lots of configuration options is really important for me as well.

I should mention that generally speaking, I install most of the other desktop environments as well, since many of them have useful utilities etc. In addition, it's also nice to have other ones in case you need to run with low resource usage or in the event that you break KDE somehow. (KDE doesn't easily break, but I hack around so much that I've often broken it by playing with experimental settings etc.)

So yeah, I love KDE. Thanks so much KDE developers!

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[StormReaver]

I can understand your confusion, since you're conflating applications with the desktop. I started out on GNOME, but moved to KDE back when it was at version 1.44. I found the desktop look and feel to be vastly more pleasing than GNOME, Konqueror to be tremendously more functional and polished than whatever GNOME was using at the time, and KDE's customizability to be worlds more advanced than GNOME.

I absolutely love all of Plasma's bells and whistles, and get quite annoyed when they crash. One of my favorite little plasmoids is the calculator in krunner. It's so handy to have a line-based calculator a simple Alt-F2 away. And KWin's desktop effects are so well integrated into the desktop that it's painful to sit down at any desktop that doesn't have them.

As far as applications, I run Konqueror for my file manager but not as a Web browser; as a Web browser, it is far behind Firefox and Chrome. But as a file manager, it's top-notch. It's castrated cousin, Dolphin, is an abomination that should have been stillborn.

I run LibreOffice, as it is the crown jewel of office suites for Linux, obviously.

K9 was the best, simplest DVD copying utility I've ever used; it's a shame it was abandoned. I have yet to find anything to fill its shoes.

KTorrent is a fantastic bit torrent client.

I could go on, but I won't. For me, KDE's customizability is a huge plus that puts everything else to shame. And it has many applications that I consider to be best-of-class. It fits my workflow better than any other desktop, bar none.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost no one actually uses Konqueror any more, we all use Firefox or Chromium

That's for its web browser functionality. It's still a great file manager, better then the (newer) Dolphin in my experience.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[rl117]

I tried out the trinity PCLinuxOS livecd last week. What a blast from the past! The unreal bit: it was faster to start up Trinity applications from the *DVD* than it is to start the equivalent current KDE application from an *SSD*. Click on Konsole, *bam, there it is. Do the same with current KDE and there's a noticeable multi-second wait. I'm tempted to install PCLinuxOS or some other system providing Trinity. The only problem I had with PCLinuxOS was the older kernel and X11 couldn't support my GPU (R9 390) or displayport (it turned off the transmitter and the monitor switches off). That's an old bug that's been fixed a while.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[budgenator]

Personally I don't really like XFCE; almost no desktop integration and no apps, inferior file-management and a UI metaphor that reminds me too much of Win 3.11. IMHO Plasma beats in every aspect when it comes to virtual desktops, shifting between programs, program services and app integration.

LOL, I installed Win95 on a Win3.11 and was happy as a clam, then I got a machine with a clean install of Win95 and I was all WTF happened to my beloved file-manager Windows! I could set everything up the way I wanted in file-manager! At the time dual-booting between Win3.11 and Linux with TWM was pretty painless.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Blaskowicz]

These have Mate forks, perhaps unsurprisingly. Gedit becomes pluma, evince is atril, and then mate-terminal.
There is also the evince 2.32 build for Windows, useful as it just works with a clean UI and is really free.

I happen to like these tools but it's simply what I'm used to. I use mate-terminal with the menu bar disabled (really gnome-terminal 2.x), one amongst the family of libvte terminals (xfce4-terminal, lxterminal, roxterm...) that feels very slightly better than the others.
Here a screenshot of pluma. It's mostly a glorified notepad or paste buffer for me. Very fine for that, tabs and a UI not fucked up.
http://pix.toile-libre.org/?im...

Not shown is the low contrast scrollbar without arrow buttons. That sucks sometimes (e.g. on a laptop with touchpad I might want to click the arrow like it's Windows 3.1 times, because the other ways to scroll suck too) but looks out of the way.
Yes the gtk3 file open dialog sucks ball next to the gtk2 one ; my system has both depending on the app. Windows (at least 95 to 7) gets them right for damn's sake. Yep if we had to decide choice of OS or environment on that I would choose Windows, drive letters are easier to use than the flat hierarchy.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I like about KDE is that it looks good and works well. Though it's not as customisable as KDE3 used to be (annoyingly so in some cases), where just about everything could be tweaked. That said, I've got my desktop pretty bloody close to how I'd ideally like it to be (and certainly closer than any other DE would have got, so I'm happy).

But I only use the desktop. I can't say that the KDE applications are up to much; for example Kmail was a great email client in KDE3 but is useless in KDE4 (especially as Kaddressbook, which it depends upon, is a total crock of shit).

Of course you're right that it's much bigger than something like XFCE, but having moved to it from XFCE a couple of years ago, it's much more functional and once you've disabled the useless crap like Akonadi, the difference in resource use (especially with a modern machine) is irrelevant.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm curious to hear from some KDE fans. In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?),

I would say you have it right. I, for instance, though a KDE user, constantly use non-KDE apps like Firefox (a GTK app) and Libreoffice (it has a KDE compatibility mode, it seems, but it's a foreign app, too). I prefer Gimp, but my people in my family asked for something simpler, and Kolourpaint was chosen. Sometimes simpler is better for some...

Some basic apps suck, too, like Kcalc. I like RPN -- that system used in HP calculators: you write "3 [Enter] 2 +" instead of "(3+2)=" -- but qalculate is a complete spaceship, so I opted for the simpler "galculator"...

> and I have found Plasma to be gaudy

I'm not sure I understand your comment. You know colors can be changed to a more subdued tone, right? Oxygen as window decoration is very discreet; overall desktop themes can be changed from light ones to dark ones, transparent or opaque, with vibrant colors or with less contrast. I'm not sure I understand your usega of the word "gaudy".

> and bloated compared to MATE and Xfce. But that's just me.

It's not just you. Mate at least feels clearly more responsive than KDE. Xfce is not bad , though there is less difference.

In some situations, certain thinks work in KDE and unexplainably (to me), they don't in other DE's. Two things come to mind:

1. Rolling a list with the mouse wheel. In Xfce it does not work (can't remember about Mate). In KDE, if you're reading a list, sometimes you don't need the scroll bars, just the wheel will do. You can perceive the lack of this feature better than its presence. You try to scroll a list in Xfce and then bam!: nothing moves.

2. Rubber band selection. This is about selecting multiple items with the mouse, by involving them in a box/rectangle made with the mouse. This works in Windows IIRC. This affects file managers like Thunar, Dolphin etc. I don't remember about Caja. In Dolphin it works very well, but not in Thunar when files in a folder are seen in list. This is fundamental when one uses sloppy or focus-follow-mouse instead of click-to-select.

> Any reasons why KDE is so great, beyond its vast customizability?

It's not the customization de per se. It's the possibility of having a comfortable and coherent way that is adapted to one's needs.

For instance, once you get used to it, single-clicking on things to activate them is way more comfortable than double-clicking.

Those wobbly windows are kinda gaudy, really, and don't serve a practical purpose (me thinks). Some other effects are really nice _and_ useful, like:
- slide back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gK03G-hqFcI
- grid view of workareas: see at 1:00 min in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVvs6LmO_38

Some of these things can also be obtained with Compiz. Some have doubtful convenience, though they look great (like that cube view, for instance).

For me, KDE is about obtaining things which are not so easy with other DEs, like:

- having windows arranged in a particular useful disposition and selecting then without disturbing the chosen order (like pieces of paper on a physical desktop);
- the above feature eases copy-pasting the Linux way (select-copy, middle-click-paste);
- the ability to roll up (shadow) a window by using the mousewheel;
- the ability to move windows back and forth with the mouse;
- single-clicking and rubber selection that work;
- mouse fine adjustment (hint: use 0 as a threshold to use a non-linear movement function);
- little details like a good system to mount/remove usb drives, etc.
- font installation: you can install 25 fonts at once... with Xfce, for instance, one needs to install one by one;

That's what I remember for the moment...

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing can beat Amarok 1.4. The best software ever written.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some corrections:

"usega" is really "usage"

> - the ability to roll up (shadow) a window by using the mousewheel;

Actually the name is "shade" not shadow

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[allo]

1) KIO
Use sftp://yourserver/yourfile EVERYWHERE. kwrite, kate, calligra, kolourpaint ... the programmer does not need to know about the cool kio-slaves, he just loads an input stream. kdelibs do the rest
2) KParts
reusable components. KDEs PIM-Suite is just a wrapper about the kparts of kmail, korganizer, ...
3) Everything's integrated. Everything works with each other inside the ecosystem, not like other desktops, which choose programs from a lot of environments. This starts at the same look everywhere, goes over universal copy&paste (good luck copy&pasting more than text between different toolkits. Today better than some time ago), to stuff like kio, mentioned above.
4) scriptable. Nowadays dbus, but before with dcop already fully scriptable applications. want to change the volume, the wallpaper or just quit an application? send a dcop/dbus signal.

This list goes on, but it boils down to: Some people really thought about things and built a framework to do the things properly. Then they built a big base of programs using these frameworks.

Re:Why do you like KDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is important...

Some people over here complaining about KDE being unstable are probably talking about KDE (also called Plasma) version 5. This is too new!

Last time we went thru a lot of trouble because people started to use a new version before it was 100% ready...

It's great to use a new, more modern software if you can stand finding a bug now and then; if you use your computer for some serious uses where crashes have to be avoided, go with KDE4 (also called Plasma 4). It is rock-solid in my own experience.

While not as obnoxious as Gnome...

[Anonymous Coward]

...KDE, at its core, harbors the same philosophy: I am the star of the show, and you'll do things my way or not at all. Both Gnome and KDE stopped being for me years ago - I like my desktop environment to be small, efficient and just waiting back there, inconspicuously, unnoticed, to do as I tell it to do.

KDE unprofessional..

[pigsycyberbully]

I used to use KDE a long time ago with TurboLinux, and then with a French distribution called MandrakeSoft powerpack. Both versions used to be paid for versions. MandrakeSoft was excellent for multiple languages. And then I stop using KDE altogether when it changed and started putting U.S. flags on regional control for icons and you had to edit "trash" and change it into its proper name. Trash to me means something totally different it is nothing to do with recycle/bin/rubbish/ and so on. They become unprofessional and it showed. They didn't know how to cope with people they didn't want to fix things they didn't want other people to fix things. They started acting like U.S. children. We always looked upon it as a Deutschland European project but then something happened and it turned into a U.S. product.. And then we had the East Asian problem with the flag again. That one really cause problems it entered into politics. I used to run downloads to fix the problems. After a while I began to hate KDE. They have no respect. I have tried but I cannot forgive them.

Re:KDE unprofessional..

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this some kind of stealth anti-German propaganda? Or hip satire that I am missing? Or are you really as tone-deaf about racism as you seem?

I like KDE on KUbuntu... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject: I've said it before even though I am practically the "poster child" for Windows (7/2000/XP/Server 2003/2008 only)!

I liked it best in version 2.2 iirc as to how it looked best imo @ least (it's from way, Way, WAY back as to when it was in general circulation for lack of a better expression).

I haven't used it since KUbuntu 10.10 iirc in the year 2010 though (spent an entire summer in Europe using it on a laptop to "see how the other 1/2 lives" & it wasn't too shabby!).

* So, in any event? "Happy B-day" KDE!

APK

P.S.=> It's the BEST desktop for "former Windows users" imo & probably WHY I gravitated towards it vs. say, GNOME or xfce etc. - et al... apk

And it still is like it was in 1996

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure KDE has improved, but overall it is not a sleek desktop like many of today's OS's. One thing which Windows and Mac have done, is to distill the desktop experience, so it was far less imposing. From what I can tell of KDE, a large percentage of time is still spent in the configuration system, and the start menu, searching for things.
Not sure if Chrome OS came from any part of KDE, but wherever it derived from, the GUI experience it provides, is very much on par with what users expect today.

KDE Konqueror ..

[nickweller]

I was most impressed with Konqueror, did everything you wanted to do (with plugins), unlike Microsoft Active Desktop ..

Kraptastic!

[maestroX]

I vividly remember my Klamath choking and Fireball trashing all over the place when the library dependencies pulled in
as konsole was trying to start (I was wary of loading a whole window system, this was C++ you know).

I wept many tears and bled my eyes on the bulky pixel-fear-inducing window that appeared
and burnt into my 15" aquarium after minutes seeming hours.

The experience reminded me of the furious Emacs vs. VI battles, yet Emacs seemed to fly on the machine.

Obviously, I was reminded at some newsgroup or other to use better compile options, as gcc 2.7.2 was *really*
not up to par with other c++ compilers or standards these days, how could I expect anything else?

So I spent days figuring out how to tune and compile the latest PGCC with the greatest options ever. Really.
I made sure anything binary that would come out of the compiler would be stripped, framepointer-ommitted,
loop-unwinded, MMX-enabled, -ftry-harder and optimized with -O9999 (if unfamiliar, just imagine the
greatest bbq sauce recipe in existence).

After this excruciating and cumbersome process, if fed the compiler source to the newly built compiler until
I was satisfied and sure *nothing* unoptimized was escaping my toolchain. Then I repeated this process to
assure my conscience; you know, these nights punch holes in your confidence.

And again. I was relentless and unforgiving, no 386 opcode would be left in favor of 586 optimization.
After that, I spent nearly the same time on LFS'ing and kernel-tuning my system on another partition with this übertoolchain.

I can honestly say the system booted and flied -- it flied like a rocket.
Rodney McKay would agonize in self-pity at the sight of it.

Were any Stampede or Gentoo developer to see this, it would wet their pants
and send them home crying for mommy. I'm pretty sure one of my fellow CS students
quit shortly afterwards and took up a job at the local grocery store.

I could pipe /dev/hda to X11 emacs and have responsive parenthesis matching at the same time!

Then, confident but modest, started konsole on a prompt:

% konsole
Segmentation fault (signal 11)

After that I dumped the computer only to discover some time after the kid next door used it to play Hind on Windows98.
I'm sure there's some point in this story but I'm sure as hell not touching KDE to unbury it out of my brain.

Is KDE still relevant?

[Jailbrekr]

At work, we finally transitioned away from KDE when we upgraded to RHEL6, due to the poor implementation of KDE4. Gnome, for all its warts, works and works well. Hell, even on RHEL7 if you run gnome in classic mode it retains its simplicity and most importantly a lack of support issues which KDE was notorious for.

We can't be the only ones who had challenges with KDE, so how is it still even relevant?

Still Young

[KDE]

And still the coolest of the GUI's

I miss KDE 1.1

[pecosdave]

It was great - I've considered attempting to compile it on a modern system. I've stayed up with modern KDE but 1.x worked exactly as it should have, didn't have a lot of overhead, and was incredibly usable.

Re:A Linux GUI for the end user who wants to do st

[Anonymous Coward]

Was your Win95 useful for praying in german?

% pray -r --language=de
maria gottes heilige im himmel mutter