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.
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).
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 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 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 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 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 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.
32 comments:
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.
> 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.
KHTML became webkit (Safari) and then blink (Chrome) so they created the foundation for quite many browsers ...
All the development action went to the web. Dolphin's still pretty awesome.
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).
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 think it's the best desktop experience.
Not just in the Linux world, it's also far better than Windows and macOS.
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 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 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).
They aren't dropping X11, they are only dropping it in their new login manager. Change the login manager and it will continue to work fine for now.
They do plan to remove X11 from Plasma Desktop as well: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
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.
I think you will be able to achieve that when Union is released. I hate SVG theming in Plasma so much that I root for Union to be successful
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 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!
My first love was WindowMaker :)
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. :-)
You should then give NEXTSPACE a try: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
I think it’s the closest thing to that dream today.
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.
Love KDE, I think plasma is really great. KDE connect is a program I think people sleep on, I use it all the time.
It's embarrassing how much better kdeconnect is on windows than the official microsoft offering.
Quick, clean and easy to use. I've only been using it for a year but I'm definitely not going back.
Talk from Grazer Linuxtage conf earlier this year:
KDE: 30 years of the Linux desktop
https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-691-kde-30-years-of-the-linux-d...
KDE beta2 was my first.
I feel quite repulsed by the fact that the first thing you see when opening the post is a huge donation card.
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.
How much do you donate?
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.