I will donate my entire pension if they make it so I can have a Windows 2000 theme that actually works and doesnt require me to hack a dozen files each time they push and update.
It's impressive for the project to have come so far. Between the oversimplified, hyper-opinionated GNOME, the rock-solid but dull and minimal XFCE, the nostalgic MATE, and whatever Enlightenment is doing these days, it’s nice to have a continually polished, modern, well-integrated yet customisable experience like KDE, even today. And save for Akonadi (which just never seems to work reliably, rendering software like KMail useless), it’s been a pretty stable one for me, too. Here’s to another 30 years!
One of the most impressive and useful free software projects. My first experience was being totally confused by KDE 1 during my first attempts to use Linux, and I'm writing this from my KDE desktop.
Other than the really bad KDE 4 release, the project has consistently been great for me. I've submitted a few smaller patches over the years and that experience was also low friction for a project of this size. KDE is highly customizable, full of power user features but also really simple with its current defaults (looks pretty much like Windows) and generally robust.
Shoutout to some KDE applications like Okular (great document viewer), Kate (solid tech editor), Krusader (double pane file manager) and KolourPaint (a simple image editor even I can use).
Konsole and Spectacle deserve a shoutout as well. Konsole for its flexibility and feature set while remaining really performant, and Snapshot for being just so darn handy for both screenshots and screen captures.
I don't really use Plasma itself (and soon i wont even be able to if the rumors of them dropping X11 support are to be believed) but i do use various KDE apps, like Krita (which i use for most painting stuff), Kate (my main programming editor, coupled with clangd for C/C++ programming), KolourPaint, Spectacle, Ghostwriter, etc and in general i find KDE/Qt apps to be more to my liking in their UX than anything based on Gtk (or at least Gtk3-or-later, Gtk2 stuff is for the most part fine).
I have long held a bias of KDE being the clunky and slow option from trial in the ~early-oughts. Within the past month or so I installed it to give it a spin and haven't switched back to XFCE since. It strikes a good balance of customization / speed / taste / and just working out of the box. Thanks KDE team!
It feels to me that a lot of the bigger ideas in KDE fell away over the years. In the 2000s I would log in every morning, open a KWord doc in one Konqueror tab, a KSpread sheet in another, and some browser tabs alongside them, then I'd launch Kate and open some files over SSH or FTP and get to work. It felt like someone had really embraced OO and applied it to every part of the desktop, and I assume something like KParts and KIOSlaves still exist. But for the most part, I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works. I am grateful that it hasn't been dumbed down quite as much as GNOME over the years, but I hope they have a few bold experiments left in them (and would love to hear what I'm missing if it's already there!)
I feel the same. A lot of big projects fell by way side over time for various reasons. Goes with the nature of experiments, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
k3b - died with the cd-rom
calligra office - creation of LibreOffice stole the thunder
konqueror - maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of chrome is a tall ask these days
amarok / kmail - rewrite lost features, introduced bugs, and many existing alternatives filled the gap
That said there are still a lot of good ones still there that continue to improve every day. Kate, dolphin, KDE connect, etc.
KDE4 killed too much momentum; many promising features and apps disappeared for whatever reason or slowly faded out into irrelevance. Stuff like KIOSlaves is still around, but never really evolved beyond what it was 20 years ago.
And in case this comes off too negative, I don’t think anyone has mentioned KStars, my favourite KDE app for many years. All my early Linux experiences were eye opening and mind expanding about what computers could be, but somehow none more than that.
I hope someone comes along with a better recollection than I have. When KDE 1 came out there were some bitter licensing discussions on /. and elsewhere, largely regarding Qt. I had high hopes for Enlightenment and later Gnome but they mostly seemed to fail.
It's been a long time since I've used KDE but I have fond memories of it. When I first started using Linux I was impressed by how integrated and polished it was. A lot of the KDE-branded software was high quality, too (I remember Akregator and Kate in particular). It seemed to me, at the time, the best introduction to Linux for someone coming from Windows. That must have been about 20 years ago(!). I've since come to prefer a more lightweight and minimalist setup but it's great to see KDE still going strong.
Truthfully, I like the more opinionated visual design of GNOME, but I moved to KDE long ago for VRR and better fractional scaling support. They just got it right and working. Huge props to the team, I know that's very difficult.
EDIT: On a side note, is anyone informed about the state of VRR + fractional scaling + general gaming on GNOME? Has it gotten better?
I recently installed Fedora Kinoite [1] and I have been very pleasantly surprised by how stable and performant it is. I am afraid I cannot say the same for their new KDE Linux distribution [2] which in my opinion was a bit unpolished at the time. Both are immutable desktop distributions.
The good news, I guess, is Kinoite stands to benefit from KDE Linux development because it mostly depends on Flatpak to install programs which means all of the KDE ecosystem will eventually be available at Flathub [3] as first-class citizens with reasonable maturity.
I also went fedora-based and installed kinoite and then rebased on Aurora. I am extremely happy. I fell in love with Immutable linux with aeon, but I had so many weird issues with gnome that I ended up having to switch back to KDE.
I dislike their use of some gnome apps (I like to have my window buttons to the left and double click means close. Old habit from solaris), but I can force them to have proper window decorations.
I still get angry when thinking about all the weird issues I had with gnome though. Alt+ tab stopping drag and drop. Gtk context menus stealing focus and rendering all other windows unlockable until I close the menu (like nautilus file transfer dialogue). My 60hz monitor running at not-60-hz wrt mouse pointer movement. Like constants small micro stuttering.
And of course, breakages on every update since gnome is only usable with extensions.
A bit tangential, but can you recommend any GUI applications for monitoring the system? The KDE's defualt system monitor is a bit heavy and does not provide much insights. I switched to Linux some time ago as my main system, but I miss a tool such as System Informer [1].
KDE is the ultimate "lost the battle won the war" story.
KDE didn't replace Windows as the most popular desktop OS, but 99% chance you're looking at this in a browser that's derived from KDE (Konqueror begat webkit begat Blink) and it's open source because KDE's license made it that way.
Does anyone else miss KWrite? I had it configured as a very slightly more advanced Notepad.exe clone. I really enjoyed opening it for quickly writing out thoughts that crowd my ADHD brain, and I feel like the full Kate takes much longer to open up and looks much much heavier and emotionally oppressive for what I want to do.
I tried KDE 5 years ago and frankly I was a bit lost. Too many options and too many papercuts. Still better that the dumbed down GNOME experience but I went for Cinnamon instead.
I tried it again today and it really felt quite polished, no papercuts, no feeling of being overwhelmed, no bugs, good newcomer experience... I think this is it. They made it.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 84.7 ms ] threadedit: I appreciate the quality of discussion below, so far.
Other than the really bad KDE 4 release, the project has consistently been great for me. I've submitted a few smaller patches over the years and that experience was also low friction for a project of this size. KDE is highly customizable, full of power user features but also really simple with its current defaults (looks pretty much like Windows) and generally robust.
Shoutout to some KDE applications like Okular (great document viewer), Kate (solid tech editor), Krusader (double pane file manager) and KolourPaint (a simple image editor even I can use).
KDE: 30 years of the Linux desktop
https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-691-kde-30-years-of-the-linux-d...
k3b - died with the cd-rom
calligra office - creation of LibreOffice stole the thunder
konqueror - maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of chrome is a tall ask these days
amarok / kmail - rewrite lost features, introduced bugs, and many existing alternatives filled the gap
That said there are still a lot of good ones still there that continue to improve every day. Kate, dolphin, KDE connect, etc.
"bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works" is a low key major achievement - I love it !
https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
EDIT: On a side note, is anyone informed about the state of VRR + fractional scaling + general gaming on GNOME? Has it gotten better?
Are you using an Nvidia GPU?
The good news, I guess, is Kinoite stands to benefit from KDE Linux development because it mostly depends on Flatpak to install programs which means all of the KDE ecosystem will eventually be available at Flathub [3] as first-class citizens with reasonable maturity.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/
[2] https://linux.kde.org/
[3] https://flathub.org/en/apps/collection/developer/KDE/1
I dislike their use of some gnome apps (I like to have my window buttons to the left and double click means close. Old habit from solaris), but I can force them to have proper window decorations.
I still get angry when thinking about all the weird issues I had with gnome though. Alt+ tab stopping drag and drop. Gtk context menus stealing focus and rendering all other windows unlockable until I close the menu (like nautilus file transfer dialogue). My 60hz monitor running at not-60-hz wrt mouse pointer movement. Like constants small micro stuttering.
And of course, breakages on every update since gnome is only usable with extensions.
[1] https://www.systeminformer.com/
KDE didn't replace Windows as the most popular desktop OS, but 99% chance you're looking at this in a browser that's derived from KDE (Konqueror begat webkit begat Blink) and it's open source because KDE's license made it that way.
Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn't. Blink, WebKit, and for that matter KHTML, are available under permissive licences.
I tried it again today and it really felt quite polished, no papercuts, no feeling of being overwhelmed, no bugs, good newcomer experience... I think this is it. They made it.