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KDE Turns 20, Happy Birthday! (softpedia.com)
prisoninmate writes from Softpedia: Can you believe it's been 20 years since the KDE (Kool Desktop Environment) was announced on the 14th of October, 1996, by project founder Matthias Ettrich? Well, it has, and today we'd like to say a happy 20th birthday to KDE! "On October 14, KDE celebrates its 20th birthday. The project that started as a desktop environment for Unix systems, today is a community that incubates ideas and projects which go far beyond desktop technologies. Your support is very important for our community to remain active and strong," reads the timeline page prepared by the KDE project for this event. Feel free to share your KDE experiences in a comment below! You can read the announcement "that started the revolution of the modern Linux desktop," as well as view the timeline "prepared by the KDE team for this unique occasion."
RIP KDE. It died for me with 4.0. The 3 series were awesome though.
20th birthday or not, but Plasma 5 is unstable POS. Even transition from KDE3 to KDE4 was better.
Great to see KDE and its improvements over the years. If you want to give KDE a go then I suggest trying KDE neon. You get the latest KDE on top of the stability of Ubuntu LTS. https://neon.kde.org/
I remember trying KDE out in 1998, when I was a linux n00b.
It was an horrible experience. Almost on par with CDE.
Perhaps it is time to give it another shot now?
Submit a story. Otherwise, fuck off.
I used to like KDE 3.5 but when 4.0 dropped and showed that the developers were more interested in UI-fads and flashy wiz-bangery, I went to GNOME. Then it turned to sh*t, so I switched to Mac over 3 years ago, and I've mostly been pretty happy. I like a UI that's functional and doesn't change to keep up with the latest (unproven or poorly tested) fashions.
Has anyone tried it?
of all the difference it never made.
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
Submit a story. Otherwise, fuck off.
I second that!
I remember compiling KDE 2.0 on a Sparcstation 5 when I was an intern. Solaris came with CDE, which is a POS. Took several days to compile and resulted in a poorly performing DE, but no longer suffering from the ugly unfriendly CDE :)
Been using KDE since before 1.0 came out on x86 though. Man, what an upgrade over things like fvwm it was.
Now the developers seem to have lost their way a bit. Currently I'm on some frankenstein mixup of kde4 and kde5 with bits and pieces missing or inaccessible. And still barely different from KDE3.x. Sure, they created a lot of stuff like "activities". Still don't know what those are though...
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
And if it is still around for another 20 years, I will ignore it for those too. It has nothing to recommend it, and it is frankly not necessary or beneficial for anything. My fwvm configuration from 25 years back (initially on SunOS) works just fine, with half a day spend porting it to fvwm2 during the whole time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Happy birthday KDE. I know we haven't seen each other much the last few years, sorry about that, but when you went all "pretty" with KDE4 it was like you were snubbing people like me who just wanted a functional desktop and had found that in you. I am mostly with OS X these days, I know she is a primadona and we don't have what I had with you back in the KDE 3 days, so I'll always reminisce those times...
Best wishes.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I've never heard anyone else say that the "K" in KDE was for "Kool". In fact in a previous install I had of KDE there was a splash screen that rotated through that claimed the K did not stand for anything.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I've been a kde fan almost since its beginning, been using Linux as my desktop for 20 years now. It always had a couple little features that I really liked that made me prefer it over gnome (focus follows mouse, different backgrounds for each virtual desktop).
But now kde5 has taken away the different backgrounds on each virtual desktop feature (it's kind of supported through some other feature, but the new way is confusing and way overkill), and more importantly they took away session restore! So if you shutdown/reboot/crash, none of your existing items will come back. So my multiple gvim windows, my sometimes dozens of shell windows, all gone. And they don't plan to fix that, because they say noone wants it. Well I do.
So I switched to xfce. It's not perfect, but it has all the features I really need. And it's noticeably faster. So it's been a good 20 years kde, but you lost me with kde5. Good luck in the future, maybe I'll come back if you add those items back.
after over a year of KDE5's unstable, buggy, crashing mess i switched to xfce - why did they ruin KDE4 which was a useful, productive desktop environment?
Congratulation KDE!! still alive!!!.. and still slow. heavy. bloated. whatever you want to call it.
Maybe its Qt...
It no longer looks quite like a widget set exploded. Now it looks more like someone just knocked the box over.
GNOME 2 was pretty much perfect from the user's standpoint. Barring that, the best thing ever was compiz+emerald; it was beautiful and it was powerful. But now emerald is dead, or might as well be.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was using fvwm95 back in the day. It got the job done but wasn't something you wanted to mess with. I remember spending one night downloading the source on dialup and the next day and a half compiling it. But it was worth it! It was easy to manage your desktop and came with some awesome built in programs to boot!
I was always sniffy about KDE from way back when it was built using a non-free version of Qt. Recently I have found myself getting so annoyed by GNOME Shell that I decided to give it a try.
What do you know? I really like it. It looks great and can be configured to work more or less how I like it. I think it might be a keeper.
This is whatever version of KDE comes with Debian Jessie.
As a Qt developer, I've used(and developed for) KDE extensively. Although my primary DE is fluxbox, I always recommend KDE for a beginner and IMO it is the best Linux DE. Sucks that it too is following Gnome wrt eye-candy something fluxbox can't and won't do.
KDE has always been awful.
KDE created KHTML.
Webkit was forked from KHTML.
Blink was forked from Webkit.
Therefore everyone reading this on a browser other than Firefox or IE/Edge owes their browsing experience to KDE.
KDE didn't get paid a thing for helping Apple and then Google dominate web browsing. Imagine what they could have achieved if they had been paid even a tiny fraction of the wealth that their code has generated.
Through the teenage years and on to having improper relationships with other desktops and O/Ss. It's already having kids. Maybe in a few more years it'll settle down and be reasonable to be around again.
For those who knew the real thing, it's up and running on Fedora 25b, with compliments of KDE Restoration Team.
19 years since the stable 1.0 dropped! I can't wait for it to finish compiling so I can try it out!
Until the KDE developers decided to reinvent the wheel, and make KDE the star of the show, determining what is best for you, what it is that you can and can't do, while consuming preposterous amounts of memory in the process. Happy birthday indeed.
I was a KDE 2 and 3 user. Then, when the 4 craziness started, I waited until 4.5, something like that. But the "everything is a widget" idea is really weird. With the plus of several bugs, kdm bugs, app launcher bugs, systray bugs, sound mixer eating memory, and, at every minor upgrade, I had to clean up my configurations to get the new version working. If not enough, they announced KDE 5, and all started again.
I never liked Gnome shell. Not to mention all the removing-features-coolaid since 3.
So, I started to use Unity, from Canonical. Smart defaults: launcher at left; when you click in a launcher icon last used window is selected (click again to see all app instances); HUD; the simple notifications; very stable and polished; getting faster every new iteration without major drawbacks (16.04 is really awesome).
Now I can understand why Canonical sometimes follow their own way. They really provide polished and professional UX. Sometimes I disagree with some decisions (I really wish they keep working with Wayland), but in general, I really enjoy their products.
Maybe it would be better if we could run applications(gimp, blender, libreoffice, inkscape, vlc,etc...) in cli mode under Linux. I would welcome this in Windows 10(powershell) as well. It seems that a full DE is too much trouble for the developers and users. Hasn't anybody thought about a HTML5 type gui for Linux running under a stripped(limit attacks) down apache server?
Windows 95 UI is better.
Get the very latest KDE 1 neon LTS edition with 20 years of support though the newest Dockerised container continuous integration system for devops deployment
http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14...
I remember dabbling in Linux about RedHat 5 times. I think my first home install was 5.1. Back then the default desktop for RH was FVWM, which in hindsight was pretty good. But coming from Windows 95, it was pretty bewildering and somewhat disjointed and not well integrated. I think it was about this time I started reading slashdot and heard about this new KDE desktop. KDE 1.0. Somehow there were packages for RH 5.1 or 5.2, so I downloaded them and installed. I was stunned. Except for the one-click nonsense I finally had a workable desktop with an integrated file manager, start menu, removable disk management and it looked kind of like Windows 95. Combine that with the release of WordPerfect 8 for Linux, and suddenly I had everything I needed to stay in Linux for my everyday work as a student. I quickly moved on to Gnome 1.x, although I can't for the life of me remember why as the first Gnome releases were horrible--maybe it was because gnome used proper double clicks. But I remember KDE 1.0 with fondness.
A few years later another couple of landmark applications (at the time anyway) to come out of the KDE world that changed my life as a neophyte Linux programmer were the releases in the 2.0 days of kdevelop and kdbg. Especially the latter, as I found command-line debugging difficult, and I found ddd to be too complicated at the time. kdbg did the job and was easy to use. And Kdevelop helped introduce me to the world of Linux programming in C and C++. Now I just use vim and the command line, but Kdevelop, like KDE 1.0 before it, offered me a familiar environment to ease the learning curve of moving to Linux. I know it did the same for many of our students at university too after I deployed it along with the full KDE 2.0 (and also Gnome) suite in our labs.
An oldie but a goodie
Similarity between the early 1.x builds and the OS/2 WES convinced a lot of OS/2 users who felt abandoned by IBM to come over to Linux. I was one of them.
I purchased a HP Workstation Z840 Xeon's E5-2620V3 2.4 GH and a large graphics tablet that looks like a large monitor.
I installed KDE, on it and it has so many fonts when browsing it switches to Japanese, when I'm reading English websites I am in England,
and I've selected English for web browsing. Slashdot crashes the KDE web browser.
No icons you can add icons with "unlock widgets" but the icons do not look natural. Accidentally deleted the start bar twice with the graphic pen because you have to lock widgets. Locking and unlocking locking unlocking blah blah blah.
The GIMP is missing all the plug-ins so most of the menus are faded out.
I have thousands of pounds worth of computer and graphic tablet and I'm finding it very frustrating. My HP come with a DVD of HP's version of Windows 7 and I'm beginning to get really tempted to try Windows.
Programs in KDE are now called "Apps" or is that a Mint, thing?
It gives me a feeling of being held back.
I agree. Although for me the downfall wasn't going 'pretty', it was in instability. For almost a year I struggled with a bug where something would cause dbus to inexplicably eat 100% of the CPU and the only way to get out of it was to reboot. I could just restart KDE, but then it would come back. I had my machine on 24/7, and about once a week I would wake up to the cpu having been pegged all night. Sometimes it would happen while I was using it. It was maddening. I posted and searched, and nobody had an answer. I was running Kubuntu at the time, so I tried other things. I fell in love with the simplicity of XFCE and haven't looked back.
OK, I did look back once, but for me the magic was gone.
It was like I went to a bar to meet an ex-girlfriend. I could recall past memories, but it was uncomfortable. She never really supported me, we always had to do things her way. I realized we had just grown apart. I was happy for her, but I too was happier now.
And she wore WAY too much makeup.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Is this the year of Linux on the desktop? (I suspect we'll ask the same question at KDEs 50 anniversary).
I remember KDE in the 90's. it was good stuff.
KDE 3.5.x was peak KDE
Nevertheless, I still use it.
but I also use XFCE and LXDE and occasionally Gnome.
I'm not bigoted. I like having choices.
US$0.02++
First of all, thank you KDE Team for your great contribution to the FOSS community. However, I stopped using KDE after the version 4 fiasco. Now I bounce between XFCE/Openbox and TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment). If you used to be a KDE fan, consider supporting the latter. TDE is the default desktop in Q4OS, another very interesting project.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
Any article about KDE seems to bring out the haters, but I have used it since version 1 on Corel Linux (remeber Corel?). I've tried most other desktops over the years, and particularly tried really hard to like Enlightenment, but have always stuck with KDE. Even through the dodgy early years of KDE4. I just love how well all KDE apps integrate together, and I actually like that I can customise everything if I want.
The KDE and Gnome developers are doing what they are doing in a misguided effort to stay relevant. The truth is that the desktop environment problem with the current interfaces (screen, keyboard and mouse) was solved long ago. They just keep remodeling it, adding things, removing things, but it is pretty much more of the same - more baroque, with more bells and whistles, more resource hungry, but with the same essentials disguised in many different, more or less creative, ways. It is no wonder that, with these two wretched flagships, Linux is getting nowhere in the desktop. With them, Linux would probably be getting nowhere in the desktop even absent Microsoft's stranglehold.
Many thanks to the original, once posted (circa 2002) on http://www.illusionary.com/GNO...
KDE
A big room somewhere in Europe with lots of chrome and glass and a great big whiteboard in the front with lots of tiny, neat writing on it. There are about 50 desks, each with headphones and pristine workstations, also with a lot of chrome and glass. The faint sound of classical music permeates the room, accompanying the clicky-click of 50 programmers typing or quietly talking in one of the appropriately assigned meeting areas. (Which of course consist of elegant contemporary white pine coffee tables surrounded by contemporary white pine and fine leather meeting chairs.) Coffee, tea, mineral water and fruit juices are available in the break area.
At the end of the day, *everyone* checks in their code and the project leader does a "make" just to make sure it all compiles cleanly, but it's mostly only done from tradition anymore since it always compiles cleanly and works flawlessly. When all milestones have been met, and everything has been QA'd, (usually within a day or two of the roadmap that was written up 18 months previous) a new KDE release is packaged up and released to the mirror sites with the appropriate 24-hour delay for distribution before being announced.
KDE developers are generally between the ages of 16 and 25, like art made of lines and squares and the colors white and black. When/if they finally stop taking government subsidies and get around to getting "real jobs," most of their salary will be taken in taxes so the socialist government can subsidize the care and feeding of the next generation of KDE developers, just like it did for them. A high percentage of KDE developers, during their mandatory 5 years of government military service, crack from their years of cultural dullness and flee Europe to become terrorists for the sheer joy to be found in killing random strangers for no discernible reason.
GNOME
An abandoned warehouse in San Francisco, kitted up as for a rave, electronica playing at 15db louder than "my ears are bleeding and I'm developing an aneurism" volumes and the windows all painted over black so that the strobe and spotlights and lasers can be seen better. Computers, mainly made of whatever stuff has been exchanged for crack or scavenged from dumpsters behind dot-bombs, are scattered around on whatever furniture is available, which also consists of whatever stuff has been exchanged for crack or scavenged from dumpsters behind dot-bombs. There's no break area, but you may be able to bum a beer (or more likely something harder) off of one of the developers hanging around, and they will probably be too jacked up on X, coke, acid, heroin, ether or all of the above to notice that you've taken anything.
Development strategies are generally determined by whatever light show happens to be going on at the moment, when one of the developers will leap up and scream "I WANT IT TO LOOK JUST LIKE THAT" and then straight-arm his laptop against the wall in an hallucinogenic frenzy before vomiting copiously, passing out and falling face-down in the middle of the dance floor. There's no whiteboard, so developers diagram things out in the puddles of spilt beer, urine and vomit on the floor.
At the end of the day - whenever that is since an equal number of programmers will be passed out at any given time - or really whenever someone happens to think of it (which is rarely), someone might type "make" on some machine somewhere, with mixed results. Generally nothing happens, so he/she shrugs his/her shoulders and wanders off to look for someone who might have more pink/black-striped pills. Once in a great while, generally in the unpleasant time between the come-down from the last thing they took and before whatever it was they took just now comes on fully, someone will tar up a bunch of random files and post it on a website someplace it as the next GNOME release, usually with a reference to
KDEis my first desktop experience beyond fvwm95, from the old slackware 3.4 install image (boot root and about 13 thousand floppy disk rewrites from a windows box), will always hold a "butterflies" memory for me, similar to the first time i managed to compile enlightenment!
That's WPS (WorkPlaceShell), not WES...
And it's still around:
https://www.arcanoae.com