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KDE Turns 19

Posted by samzenpus on from the age-is-just-a-number dept.

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.

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. 1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop by tomhath · · Score: 5, Funny

    Dang, I missed it.

  2. Re:K in KDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Kudos by varag · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  4. KHTML! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  5. Re:Why do you like KDE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.