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 still find a decent amount of the integration, like KIO, is still there and works well - it puts MacOS and Windows to shame in terms of how I can just interact with files anywhere as if they're native within KDE apps.
It's kind of a shame that Konqueror fell to the wayside, but modern browsers are so complicated I cannot fault them for focusing elsewhere.
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.
Isn't Trinity just maintenance and small improvements of KDE3? I don't remember to have heard about any revolutionary changes, or even just significant evolutionary improvements.
Definitely not revolutionary. Plenty of evolutionary changes - because linux itself has changed. the last major release brought
- LUKS encrypted disk support desktop-wide,
- storage device hot plug/unplug
- new Bluetooth GUI (tdebluez)
- new media player (kplayer),
- PulseAudio support
- window tiling
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.
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 used Konsole for years and it's great but since switching to Neovim as a primary editor I also switched to Kitty terminal which is in its own league. Kitty is the only one that I substituted the core KDE app for.
I've been using KDE for the last 30 years I guess but somehow never used KolourPaint until to 2 weeks go. That's the first "pain" program that is usable to do simple things. Gimp is waaaaay to complex for simple tasks (especially the selection which I've never understood). Congrats KolourPaint team for KISS.
I have zero artistic inclination so 90% of image manipulation I do is simple resize/scale/draw line operations, with the remaining 10% being some sort of select+move operation to show mockups, adding transparency or something on that level of complexity. I have GIMP installed and respect it, but as any "real" editor it's too complex for me. KolourPaint does the simple operations I need, with fundamentally the same UI as Win 3.1 pbrush.exe had.
KolourPaint fills a small niche but does it very well.
I agree it's really impressive, it brings a lot of things together into a cohesive package and experience. I'm a huge evangelist, I think it's the best desktop experience.
I remember when it first came out. Very impressive at the time. I was never a fan though personally, I always hated the look of KDE. I used it recently on CachyOS for fun and it worked great, just not for me visually. I'm glad it exists, I just wish there was something visually appealing with less settings bloat. It feels like going to a diner with 300 items on the menu and they're all sorta half baked.
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!
If you are someone that mostly likes the Windows 7/10 experience, KDE out of the box is basically that. It's more customizable. It's (IMO) less clunky and less burdened by legacy components. But it really just feels like windows used to feel like.
But also just fast and low memory. You can run KDE on ancient hardware. If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine.
I must be doing something wrong. On my old i5 6200u Laptop with 8 gigs of RAM fedora kde takes ages to boot and system operation is definitely more sluggish than Windows 10 used to be.
Are you using an SSD? That does make a pretty big difference.
Also, make sure you are setup to use proprietary firmware. IDK if fedora does that by default. For my laptop I was running without it for a bit and things were definitely a bit sluggish. I had to add some modprobe settings for the i915 (intel video card) driver.
>If you have something like 512MB of ram, you can do KDE just fine
The past is a foreign land. Minimum memory requirement for Windows 95 was something like 4MB. I ran OS/2 on 8MB of memory (with a Cyrix 40Mhz 486 clone).
At least part of this is going to be the resolutions at play. In windows 95 era you were dealing with 640x480 resolutions. Maybe 1024x768. Modern displays are doing a lot more than that. 1920x1080 at a minimum.
Beyond that, in windows 95 in the extreme you could be looking at only 16 colors. 256 colors was also not uncommon. 16bit colors became common in the windows 98 era.
1024x768 was super common place. 800x600 next in line. I would say that 640x480 was uncommon for Windows 95. I had been running 24-bit graphics with Windows 3.1. No way that 16 bit color only became popular with Windows98. Even SVGA 1027x768x8 was limited to 256 distinct color on the screen at a time, but the palette was dynamic, and the lookup table was into 18-bit RGB space.
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!
Window Maker is still really cool! Not a full desktop environment, though. I tried using it with GNUstep for a while, but while the base libraries are apparently still actively developed and maintained, a lot of the applications are antiquated, and they’re very hard to make blend in with EFL/GTK/Tk/Qt apps.
Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)
Oh, it’s still alive! Development stalled a while back, so I was worried something may have happened to the author, with their land being invaded and all.
It seems more focused on the retro aesthetic, which I personally don’t love, but it’s still really nice to see.
> Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)
It's derived from GNUStep which was from NeXstep who Apple bought. OSX and now macOS are descendants of that design. That's where the macOS dock comes from. Not a 1 to 1 design obviously but a marriage between the operating systems thanks to Steve Jobs.
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).
> Outside of rare special cases, yes, they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer. It does a great job of providing compatibility for most X11 applications
Not on my 4 year old PC. Wayland performs poorly and usually in wonky ways. I tried it for several weeks. Could not stand the odd behaviors and poor performance and went back to X11. And this is an AlienWare PC, cost me $2000 US, the most I've ever paid for a PC. Can't imagine how bad Wayland would be on the lesser PC's/laptops in our home.
I have a 6 years old PC (around 1000€ at the time). The only problems I can think of were caused by Nvidia drivers. It's true there can be still some rough edges in Wayland, but at least for me, nothing that I can notice in my day to day.
> Can't imagine how bad Wayland would be on the lesser PC's/laptops in our home.
Thousands of users use daily distros based on Wayland without problems. Maybe you had bad luck and something on your system is not fully compatible. But for the majority of people Wayland works fine. Have you tried different distros?
Before I upgraded to my new PC (managed to get it just before AI sent prices into the stratosphere), I was using an older PC (2016~ish) without discrete GPU. It ran Plasma Wayland without any problems. My new PC (has an RX 7600) also runs it without any problems. I don't know what's wrong with your PC (I mean, AlienWare does make atrocious garbage, so it could be anything), but I expect it to run better on your lesser PC's/laptops.
Xwayland != Wayland. Xwayland is an X server and a Wayland client. I have a feeling that whatever performed poorly in wonky ways was due to whatever you were attempting to run rather than Wayland itself.
If you see this comment and ever decide to give the wayland session and whatever you were trying to run another go, I'd be more than happy to try and help you fix it.
I'm not a Wayland evangelist but as someone with an old(custom built) desktop myself who has used the Wayland session since it became an option, your comment reads to me as:
"Xwayland(and by extension Wayland on KDE) is bad, I'm not going to list any specific programs I had issues with or any of the troubleshooting I tried in the several weeks I attempted to use it but for me it ran poorly and/or strangely.
I have an AlienWare PC, which should prevent any of these issues from happening(?)"
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.
Have an agent do it and have it write out what it did to an md file as guidance for each update. To be fair though if you configure things correctly it should never break. Mine hasn't been broken in years.
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.
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.
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].
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.
I use KDE and really have no complaints, but I'm a bit surprised it's still being actively developed (or is it really?). All the C++ programmers I've known have moved on to other languages. I'm surprised there is a large enough group of people willing to write old OO code in their spare time (and this is a weird mix of QT/KDE, so even more icky boiler plate than usual)
Just adding my respect for the team behind KDE. I left KDE for more resource friendly desktops and window managers around the KDE 4 transition. Then in the last couple of years came back. It's definitely the most feature complete and sane option for Linux desktops.
When they transition to Wayland I'll probably have to move away again as my hardware won't support it but I'll still likely use dolphin as it's a better file manager than all the others.
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.
I wonder how that parallel universe would have looked like where the gnome part of Xamarin inside Novell would have partied with the kde guys at SUSE towards shared components.
the only reason kde wasn't dead right there was the solid kde market share in corporate linux gui deployments at the time. and then came the Novell Microsoft (Balmer days) deal, "look, Linux desktop doesn't make any sense...".
Linux desktops were doing amazingly well in "kiosk" deployments, hundreds and thousands of very similar centrally managed workplaces. think selling tickets, showing time tables, atms, think sears or the likes (it was those days)
but I get astray
how would a universe look like where Xamarin and SUSE had had the phantasy to see gnome and kde synergize instead of cage fight?
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 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.
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.
I lament the times when open source projects were open source software projects instead of political platforms for people who arrogantly think that their private political opinion is important enough to overshadow the project they participate in.
This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?
Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.
The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.
Your comparison is dishonest and wrong. printer drivers are a piece of software, sexual orientation is completely disconnected from software or technology.
This implies that the difference actually matters. In both cases there is a political goal behind the actions. Yes, printer driver software itself is very different from sexual and gender orientation, but wanting for the printer drivers to be free is a political statement and principle, and so is the uplift of LGBTQ+ people and celebrations of PRIDE month. Both are political despite being about distinct subject matters.
You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!
Yes, it matters. You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?
Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).
So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?
> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!
It's Pride Month and the organization is doing Pride things, its not that complicated.
> This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
"undoubtedly" is absurd here. Does KDE really have a stable of consistent transphobes donating? Do they outweigh additional donations from supporting the LGBTQ community?
Regardless, if the only point of KDE were to make money it wouldn't be a non-profit. Extremely passionate people are often passionate about a lot of things beyond just what you want from them. KDE is a community project and that community loves and accepts non-binary people.
With all due respect: it is just a picture of a cute lizard.
Thinking practically, having a male and female lizard is sort of inconvenient for a mascot, since leaving one out is a message in itself. Having a genderless mascot with art assets ready to go makes practical sense to me.
Side question: why would having a male or female mascot be "a message in itself"? Why do people want to see a message, and especially a $currentDayPolitics one, in every single thing? A mascot can be a cute mascot without having to represent anything more than exactly that.
Just as a random example: Let's say some OG founder of a project had a cute dog named Laila, and the project makes this dog its mascot. Why should that be a problem, AT ALL?
And what's even worse, if you think this "everything has a message and we have to be super careful what the message is" thing through, the conclusion is: No project ever again can have a solely male or female mascot. Which is of course absurd.
And this whole "we need to send the RIGHT message" thing falls apart with time anyway, because what the right message is, WILL change over time. You're not at the end of all human enlightenment.
I mean it's not a HUGE issue by any means, just sort of inconvenient.
Like, most mascots aren't in gendered pairs normally (like your dog example!), you just have 1 option to represent the thing. People see Laila the dog and think "oh yeah, LailaOS".
But given you have 2 mascots, with 1 being pretty ambiguous, but the other being dressed in a pink dress with bows, it does mean you probably want to use both when presenting KDE, just so you're not accidentally saying "this is the KDE event for men" or "this is the KDE event for women". If you made your mascot the AIGA bathroom symbols, you'd have the same issue.
My thinking about the "right" message is just that... I don't think that's what they want to tell people right now, in our current time. Everyone can use KDE. It's not a historical impact sort of thing.
Again, not a huge issue really. Just seems practical. Hopefully I'm getting that across. Sorry if I'm not.
They could have hung a Star of David pendant around its neck and it would still have been “just” a cute lizard, and surely only an anti-Semite would object to such neutral, normalizing messaging?
No it is not just a picture, it is also a descriptive text and specific emojis attached. I don't think anyone would have raised an eye if it was just for the picture.
I admit I might roll my eyes a bit if the first thing I ever learned about KDE were its mascot's pronouns. But...
* That's not what's happening. The pronouns are mentioned in a social media post (presumably targeted at people already way into KDE) during pride month. This kind of wink to the LGBT community was in not that long ago even for the stodgiest corporate brands. You can easily ignore it if you don't care. In contrast, the website's landing page is primarily about the software. There's a (presumably temporary) banner at the top about the anniversary with the mascot; if you click through, it still doesn't mention pronouns AFAICT. It's not as if you have to go through a whole pronoun discovery cosplay to download the software.
* Open source projects' priority is often building a community of contributors over seeking (often small by comparison) financial donations. I commend efforts to establish a welcoming community. To me this seems like a very gentle way of saying this is a community where LGBT folks are welcome and homophobic/transphobic behavior is not. And I'm a believer in the "paradox of tolerance"—you can't tolerate intolerant behavior and expect a tolerant (much less welcoming) community.
* To the folks this is appealing to, and who perhaps are behind this decision, the current (US) political climate of intolerance feels almost inescapable. Even looking at this at in the most Machiavellian "how do I maximize the contributions I get without actually caring about humans" way, aligning with this community of folks who don't feel welcome in many other places, including a lot of excellent software developers, makes a lot of sense.
But yes, the free software movement is political, and the FSF is by all intents a political organization with a specific political goal and message.
Politics is multifaceted, it doesn't purely relate to government either. Politics is how humans decide who gets what, when and how. You can't run a community or organization without politics.
That's a minor nitpick that probably worth making in this context. People often casually use free and open interchangeably, like the the person I responded to did. There are times when it does have a real semantic difference in meaning... but here? Not really. The thread is even about a free software project.
I agree with the rest of what you say. Politics, governance and identity are unavoidable in any kind of community. It's just part of it and unavoidable. It's about dealing with it fairly, clearly and with respect.
I used to think this way but with the rise of fascism pretty much everywhere I think it's important to know what I am consuming and what they support now.
Is it perfect? No. Does it piss some people off? Probably, and I don't care.
I think it’s a little different to simply have the mascot than it is to make their introduction an officially endorsed celebration of ‘pride month’ and have them ‘presiding over KDE’s 30th anniversary celebrations’. If something has a greater chance to ‘create tensions’, it’s probably the latter, for better or worse.
My tolerance for donation begging is directly proportional to how A) non-evil the thing is asking for the donations and B) how much utility I get out of said thing. KDE, personally, falls squarely into the "By all means, beg" category. I use their stuff every day for free, and their hard work deserves recompense.
I used to feel that way about prominent banners / cards. Then I tried to get donations on my own site and until I became hyper-aggressive I never received even a dollar. It was frankly disheartening. Now, it is not yet sustainable but at least moving in the right direction. In other words, they really have no choice.
I want to see KDE still improving and keeping up in another 30 years. To me it's no different from a telethon for PBS or a poster for Friends of the Library. Intrusive? From a certain point of view, but it pays the bills.
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