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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.
It's come a long way and the current incarnation is robust, intuitive and quite pleasing on the eye.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.