HISTORY OF KDE - Discovering KDE part 3
9801 - Why KDE ?
KDE used to stand for the "K" Desktop Environment. Why K ? No reason, at some point, it stood for "Kool", but that meaning has been dropped since. It also looks like CDE, which was a popular desktop environment on Unix systems back in the 90's. These days, KDE is more than just a desktop environment, so it's just KDE? no real meaning behind that !
2 - KDE's origins
Started in 96 by Matthias Ettrich, KDE has one goal: unifying Unix's desktop environments which looked and acted a lot differently back in the day. It was created using the Qt library, and the C++ language.
Nowadays, Qt is free software, but back then, it wasn't, so some developers decided to create their own DE from a free toolkit, and that's how GNOME was born. So, in a way, KDE actually led to the creation of GNOME.
3 - KDE 1.0
1.0 was the first real release of KDE. It looked like the motif library, which was the most used toolkit at the time. KDE 1.0 supported Linux and FreeBSD. This first version was little more than an application developing framework, and the premices of a few applications, with a panel, a task manager and an application launcher, a desktop where you could store some icons, a file manager called KFM, and a few other utilities.
4 - KDE 2.0
About 2 years later, KDE 2.0 was released. It was almost completely re-written, and introduced Konqueror, which was a nice concept at the time: file manager AND web browser in one application. Koffice, the KDE office suite, was also part of the release. KDE 2.0 shipped with 14 different themes to show off the theming capabilities of the QT library, and could import GNOME themes as well !
5 - KDE 3.0
In 2002, KDE 3.0 was released. It was a mature, complete release, and it showed. It's also the first one I used on a distro, It shipped with Konqueror for web browsing and file management, Kmail for personal email, Koffice, Korganizer for calendar, as well as Noatun for music playback, and Aktion as a video player. KDE 3.0 went to receive updates until 6 years later, in August of 2008, with KDE 3.5.10, which was as stable as could be, and was used by a wide variety of distributions, such as SUSE or Kubuntu. I was a regular user of KDE 3.5 on Kubuntu, and it was a marvel to tweak. I remember fondly a nice tool called BAGHIRA which allowed you to skin everything to look like any version of Mac OS X, included the brushed metal look, a dock, and a global menu bar.
6 - KDE 4.0
In january of 2008 was released KDE 4.0. It looked stunning at the time, and was in many ways a whole new desktop environment. The panel, widget system called SuperKaramba, and the desktop were fused into one application called Plasma, using Plasmoids - basically widgets. THis concept persists to this day ! KDE 4.0 shipped with dolphin, a whole new file manager, Konqueror for web browsing, as well as Okular for PDF viewing. The theme was called Oxygen, and at the time, it was one of the most beautiful icon and widget themes I'd ever seen. The blue higlights, the scrollbars, the icons, everything looked incredibly polished, next to the potato brown look of my GNOME ubuntu desktop at the time. I still think it's one of the best looking desktops to this day.
KDE 4.0 was not that well received at the time, if memory serves, since it was far from being as stable and full featured as KDE 3.5, with frequent plasma crashes. The subsequent version ranging from 4.1 in July 2008 to 4.14 in august 2014 improved the desktop greatly and made it truly shine.
7 - KDE 5.0
In 2014, KDE divided its core components into 3 blocks: the plasma desktop, the KDE applications, which are the complete suite of KDE compatible programs, and the KDE framework, which are the libraries and components to integrate all this system into a coherent whole.
Plasma 5.0 was released in july of 2014, bringing a whole new look called "Breeze", which is still the default these days. Plasma now used openGL for animations and rendering, using the GPU for what's it's good at, and leaving the CPU for compute intensive tasks. The kickoff menu had been redesigned, and plasma now supported Hi DPI displays. Plasma 5 lacked some of plasma 4 features, which returned in subsequent updates.
KDE kept advancing up until today, with plasma version 5.13 being the currently released version. Nowadays, KDE is a very feature full and nice looking desktop environment and application suite, and is still shipped by plenty of distributions, even though its star has waned a little bit since the KDE 3.5 days, where it was basically ubiquitous.
Follow me on Twitter : http://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP
-~-~~-~~~-~~-~-
Also Watch my Experience with Manjaro Budgie on a Full AMD Linux Build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZdj4Q08fBg
-~-~~-~~~-~~-~-