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KDE Turns 20, Happy Birthday! (softpedia.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the socially-awkward-birthday-parties dept.

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."

13 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Wow 20 years! by uvarvu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/

    1. Re:Wow 20 years! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Neon is horrible. Copying the bloody awful flat icon crap that (cr)Apple instigated and then Windows 10 slavishly copied.

      I honestly Windows 98 looked better than all these new desktops. Flat icons are simply ugly. maybe ok on a small phone screen but they have no place on the desktop, As for the colour schemes they all look like washed out uninspring crap.

      Really desktops were pretty much usable and done decades ago. Now all we get is continual reinvention of the wheel with new hipster crap and the removal of anything resembling a useful feature because 2% of the morons who use computers can't cope with any sort of configuration.

      The only slightly sane window manager left is XFCE. God forbid the go down the flat icon, crap colour scheme, hipster crap route. If they do I'll be back to using the command line exclusively.

      Ho hum.

  2. Yep. 4.0 signalled its death knell by mfearby · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Yep. 4.0 signalled its death knell by ContextSwitch · · Score: 4, Funny

      Darn developers always changing things. I DON'T LIKE IT! Personally KDE lost me when they got rid of Kandalf, $DEITY I loved that guy, it's never been the same since. After that I moved to my own desktop environment made from the left over bits of emacs with a touch of vim which will work together provided you interface via a remote proxy. I also whip myself with nettles every month as it helps me to remember the 386 instruction codes in hexadecimal (I have a system).

    2. Re:Yep. 4.0 signalled its death knell by maynard · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The problem is investment in old software and hardware drivers is often obsoleted by Apple without consideration. Have an old copy of Adobe? On Windows, it'll probably run forever. On Mac, you're fucked. It won't run on Linux (properly), but at least supporting open source alternatives indefinitely is possible. How about old hardware? I have an ancient Creative EMU 0404 USB audio interface with two XLR inputs. After El Capitan, forget about that old (64bit intel!) driver still working. On Linux or Windows? No problem. It'll probably run as long as the thing still works.

      From a hardware standpoint on the Mac line, Apple is flailing. Mac Pros are generations behind. The iMacs and Macbook Pros are supposed to be for film editors and photography / design creatives, but don't even ship with 10bit color HDR LCD panels. They lock you into hardware configurations that are next to impossible to upgrade out of. And give no flexibility to support common pro applications. It's Apple's way or the highway. I mean, why not buy Final Cut Pro X and Logic? Who needs that stuff the whole rest of the world has standardized on already.

      I like MacOS. It's pretty good. There's bash and python and what I don't get out of the box I can add with homebrew. And there are some commercial apps I'm absolutely dependent on still, which I wouldn't have with Linux. In particular, Scrivener, MS Office, and Adobe. But if I have to buy these things again - particularly Adobe, Linux and Windows here I come. Lack of Adobe plugin availability on Mac is a real downer.

      Apple is so focused on selling iPhones and iPads, they simply don't care about customer needs any more. It can be a damn nightmare to get real work done.
       

  3. Compiling KDE 2.0 on Sparc by Erik+Hensema · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Happy birthday. by Ecuador · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  5. K for what, now? by damn_registrars · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:K for what, now? by Tukz · · Score: 4, Informative

      According to Wikipedia, you are correct.
      It was suggested to stand for "kool" but was decided it shouldn't stand for anything.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      - Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
  6. Recently switched to KDE. by Stephen+Chadfield · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. KDE and QT by trojjan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:long time kde fan, just switched to xfce by marsu_k · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    I'll give you different backgrounds on virtual desktops (although you can emulate this with "activities" - but they're personally a feature I never use), but what on earth are you on about WRT session restore? Running KDE on Arch, so pretty much the latest version; System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Session, there's the "On Login" part that offers "Restore previous session", "Restore manually saved session" or "Start with an empty session", and also a selection for "Applications to be excluded from sessions". What more do you want?

  9. Re:Still waiting for it to become clean and pro by KozmoStevnNaut · · Score: 3, Informative

    Cinnamon mostly hits the right spots for me.

    99% of the configurability I needed/used in KDE, without the wonky stuff like Akonadi.

    --
    Eat the rich.