The History of KDE

For KDE’s history, we begin at the beginning, a little before it’s true inception in 1996, and take you up to the RC1 of Plasma 6 in late January of 2024.

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The email on October 14, 1996 to start it all
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.linux.misc/c/SDbiV3Iat_s/m/zv_D_2ctS8sJ
KDE ONE
https://web.archive.org/web/20180613130417/http://community.kde.org/KDE_Project_History/KDE_One_(Developer_Meeting)
K Desktop Environment first real beta release
https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/1.0-beta1/
Beta 1 Screenshots
https://web.archive.org/web/19980129135932/http://www.kde.org/kscreenshots.html
KDE 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998
https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/1.0/
1998 Interview of Matthias Ettrich
https://linux-center.org/articles/9809/interview.html
KFM turned into Konqueror
https://web.archive.org/web/20080723193818/http://konqueror.kde.org/faq#WheredoesthenameiKonqueroricomefrom
Konqi
https://community.kde.org/Konqi
KDE 2.0
https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/2.0/
KDE 2.1
https://web.archive.org/web/20180613130417/https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-2.1.php
In April of 2002, KDE 3.0 was released
https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/3.0/
2003 Interview of Matthias Ettrich
https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6834
2004 Interview of Matthias Ettrich
https://behindkde.org/matthias-ettrich-1
KDE Community World Summit 2004 “aKademy”
https://conference2004.kde.org/
2005 Interview of Matthias Ettrich
https://archive.fosdem.org/2005/2005/index/interviews/interviews_ettrich.html
April 8, 2005 Kubuntu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuntu#/media/File:Kubuntu.5.04.KDE.png
KDE 3.5
https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/3.5/
KDE Four Core Meeting
https://dot.kde.org/2006/06/26/kde-libs-hackers-meet-kde-four-core
KDE 4
https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.0/
Oxygen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_Project
2008 Interview of Matthias Ettrich

Matthias Ettrich: Creator Of KDE

KDE hit the 1,000,000 commit
https://dot.kde.org/2009/07/20/kde-reaches-1000000-commits-its-subversion-repository
Starting from 4.3.4, is a “software compilation”
https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.3.4.php
November 2009, K Desktop Environment is just KDE, now
https://dot.kde.org/2009/11/24/repositioning-kde-brand
Fork of KDE 3.5 becomes Trinity Desktop Environment
https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
KDE SC 4.5
https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.5/
October 2010, an official split from KOffice
https://lwn.net/Articles/419822/
Plasma Active
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-active-one/
KDE Manifesto
https://manifesto.kde.org/index.html
December 2012, a redesigned Konqi
http://tysontan.deviantart.com/art/Konqi-ver-2-494267237
KDE release structure changed
https://dot.kde.org/2013/09/04/kde-release-structure-evolves
KDE SC 4.14 the last in the series
https://kde.org/announcements/4/4.14.0/
Plasma 5 and Frameworks 5
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/
2015 Wayland enters the room
https://dot.kde.org/2015/12/18/first-plasma-wayland-live-image

… More history at https://linuxuserspace.show/412

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#KDE #Linux #History #Plasma #Debian #Ubuntu #Kubuntu #KDENeon

To have used Linux in the late ’90s was to be in a state of constant flux not because the crop of software available on Linux was ever changing though it certainly was but because developers of all Stripes much as they do today had immense potential to create change to

Disrupt what some were sure was an untapped market and they tried many many times the common desktop environment had been around since 1993 but only on Unix boxes until CDE was ported to Red Hat in 1997 overall time would not be kind to CDE nor would other Linux distributions

As the original proprietary desktop was never properly ported to anything else in the Linux world not for lack of trying but because proprietary software especially desktops had a hard time earning mind share from the early Linux distal Pioneers the Adam rter Owen leblancs Patrick vings and Ian

Murdock this remains true today with one exception it was a Monday one like many Mondays before it in 1996 except that this Monday a new news group post pinned by Matias rri could be downloaded titled new project cool desktop environment KDE programmers wanted it started Unix popularity grows thanks to the free

Variants mostly Linux but still a consistent Nic looking free desktop environment is missing and this was true most of the options that Linux users had were really window managers unless you looked to the proprietary Solutions like CDE and looking glass and more than that even defining what a graphic iCal user

Interface even was in the open source world would prove to be difficult but mathas took the leap anyway the idea is not to create a guey for the complete Unix system or the system administrator for that purpose the Unix CLI with thousands of tools and scripting

Languages is much better the idea is to create a GUI for an end user somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux write some letters and play some nice games there was also a push to create a common look and feel to the entire thing leaving behind the hodgepodge of styles of

CDE at the time this was unheard of in the open source world at least as it pertains to getting code into a compiler of the toolkits and libraries out there mathas chose troll teex cute they were a company solely focused on development of cute so they put up the money and

Developer time in managing and testing the widget libraries and better still it was portable to Windows the downside though was one of Licensing at the time it was free to run personally and you even got the source code under the cute free edition license but on the other end was the cute

Commercial license and because the free edition did not allow modifying cute itself most in the free software movement didn’t want to touch it in spite of this KD continued but not after getting a little less cool Matias said in an interview with Linux Journal originally we thought about

Giving the k a meaning other than KD but we gave up that idea before the first line of code was written much like xfce ever so slightly before it the K desktop environment would soon become a looser collection of pieces with the panel file manager terminal and other bits being developed and released

Independently almost a year later KDE development was in full swing but efforts could be done much faster in person so a meeting of about 15 developers dubbed kd1 was scheduled for August 15th 1997 in arburg Germany where among other things internationalization and documentation was prioritized and

Progress was made on the very first file manager in KDE named kfm or k file manager with all that work behind them the K desktop environment would see its first real Beta release one year and 6 days after the inaugural announcement it became clear quite quickly that KDE

Wasn’t just some Pet Project even in the early stages KDE was functional fast and came with almost everything one might need to get right to work however some wondered if the look and feel of the desktop wasn’t lifted from other projects could you blame them the ions and task tray and clock resembled

Windows 95 the workspace switcher and launchers resembled CDE and there were even some warp elements in there however in response the core team wrote KDE is not a CD Windows or os2 clone while some ideas may have originated from those systems KDE is unique and we have no intentions of cloning another

System later in ’97 KDE EV was founded in tubingen Germany the same city the desktop was announced in to represent KDE financially and legally after two more beta releases one in November of 97 and another in February of 98 the proper release of KDE 1.0 was released to everyone on July 12th

1998 the idea that the software should integrate and have a consistent look wasn’t just an idea anymore parts of the KD Office application Suite much of which was still an alpha like K presenter were being shipped with KD itself it was a presentation software that had already been used live at the

Fifth International Linux congress with great success the next iteration of KDE 1.1 was released in February of 999 improving kfm which would soon become conqueror it also included a short-lived kmail 2 and introduced the iconic letter k on top of a gear this icon though changed a bit is still in use

Today but new additions and improvements didn’t stop there later in April of 99 because kte can’t be outdone by clippy an animated mascot con named after the Conqueror browser was announced while not officially the KDE mascot yet coni was very popular and would overtake kandolf the original KD mascot soon

Enough though there were more releases of KD 1.1 they were mostly bugfix releases as earlier in 99 cute had announced version 2.0 so efforts were focused on a port to it which would eventually turn into kd2 o to match this also signaled a change within

Cute as they released cute 2 Under The Q public license the biggest change here was that cute licensing could never be more restrictive than the qpl itself however this was still not enough for the free software Foundation KDE 1.1.1 and 1.1.2 were released later in the year and shortly after in December 1

189 crash with a K of course was released to developers based on cute 2.o after the Y2K scare settled down five betas 1.90 to 1. 194 were released between May and September with a 2.0 release candidate on October 10th 2000 the official 2.0 release came shortly

After on the 23rd and in this release aside from the fact that most of the KD code had been entirely re written for the new cute conqueror officially replaced kfm and the full K office suite made its debut conqueror did it all browsed the web could handle all the user facing

File management on the system and show all the documents you threw at it it stood tall against its competition Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator khtml the engine at the heart of conqueror would eventually be used in projects like Apple’s web kit for use in Safari and Google’s blink for

Use in Chrome and chromium conqueror truly is the grandfa of the modern web as for the K office suite K spread for spreadsheets K illustrator for Vector drawing k word for word processing K presenter for presentations and K charts for diagrams were all included all while maintaining the

Customizability that KD has always been known for KD could be easily installed in Caldera Debian mandre Red Hat Susa and true 64 for months later in 2001 KD 2.1 is released with and I’m guessing here no aune a media player and K develop KD’s own development environment 6 months after that KD 2.2

This release was able to make 50% gains in startup times for some applications and improve approved conqueror khtml and K JavaScript quite a bit the final release of the kd2 series was on November 21st 2001 with the 2.2.2 maintenance release Katie con’s nextdoor neighbor girlfriend little sister it depends on

Who you ask was announced along with a new group KDE women the group was meant to Foster inclusivity and bring more women into free software communities in April of 2002 KD 3.0 was released as a bit of a surprise to Casual onlookers no beta announcements here but that didn’t stop

The team from developing a lock down kiosk mode KDE print which would be the front end for things like cups and LPR which was accessible to all applications on KDE and brought the popular vCard compatibility to kmail it’s still looked a lot like KDE 2.2.2 but Whispers of a

New default window and icon theme were there if one cared to look and at the beginning of 2003 KD 3.1 debuted with caramic a new window theme and Crystal a new icon theme these assets set the visual tone for KD for the rest of the next few releases tabbed

Browsing was also introduced in conqueror as well as ldap support for content act in zign also made its debut as a multiformat media player plug-in KDE 3.2 followed in the next year and marked the fastest KDE ever up to that point lots of applications that are still being developed today are

Included like Juke a jukebox Style music player and kwallet a password and web data manager later in the year in August KDE 3.3 brought Integrations between applications with conqueror able to send IMS kmail able to view online users and eventually just gobbling up coped all together and Juke could now burn CDs with

K3b and just a few days later the very first KDE Community World Summit 2004 named Academy was held bringing together developers power users and the general public to get an idea of what happens behind the scenes and to influence the direction of KDE at the end of 2004 in December Andreas

Mueller of naix Chris Halls of open office and Jonathan Rell of KD worked together to create kbuntu a new Ubuntu blessed version using KDE instead of gnome in March KD 3.4 was released with a renewed focus on accessibility with a new text to speech system that supported the most popular K

Applications shortly after the release of kd3 J for and after 4 months of development work on April 8th kbuntu is officially born and toward the end of the year KD 3.5 was released with super kamba introducing the things we know today as widgets conqueror was for a short time

One of the fastest and most feature complete browsers on the market outshining even Internet Explorer and Firefox no wonder Apple wanted a piece of that action there had been two additional meetings since kd1 aptly named kd2 in 99 and kde3 in 2000 but it had been a while

Since a developer meeting like those had happened until the kde4 core meeting in 2006 where KD devs gathered to hash out what kd4 was going to be there were also other meetings like kd4 multimedia for their respective Focus this would all come to a head at Academy September 200

Six hacking sessions to glue it all together after a few months more of hacking kd4 alpha 1 Saw The Light of Day on May 11th 2007 KD E4 went through two alpha stages four beta releases and two released candidates throughout the year but it wasn’t until January 11th 2008

That kd4 was officially released to the world it was the first stable release to replace conqueror as the file manager with the solution we have today dolphin up until then conqueror had the reputation of being too complicated to use as a simple file manager but like Internet Explorer and the file explorer

Conqueror and dolphin still shared an immense amount of code between them and ocular the current document viewer in place today was introduced to replace K pdf and K ghost view finally the style was changed again oxygen gave a visual refresh to everything and the general look and feel may have been the most

Stable thing about 4.0 as it turns out though giving it the0 version will get people to believe it’s nice and ready fresh out of the oven however the devs didn’t actually intend it to be so it was meant to be a slow migration from KDE 3.5 to kde4 when

Things were ready for each individual those that knew this were accepting of that fact but those that didn’t were quick to criticize lonus tals in an interview with Computer World said I used to be a KDE user I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to G know I hate the

Fact that my right button doesn’t do what I want it to do but the whole break everything model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else I realized the reason for the 4.0 release but I think they did it badly they did so many changes it was half a

Half Baked release it may turn out to be the right decision in the end and I will retry KDE but I suspect I’m not the only person they lost Aaron SEO a KDE developer had heard quite a few of these arguments before so he addressed some

With one being KDE 4.0 isn’t what a business would do he responded by asking KD e to behave like a proprietary company these people are asking KD e to abandon what has worked for us all these years they are asking us to abandon our identity to cease doing what resulted in

The free software desktop going from non-existent in the mid90s to parody in just over 10 years remembering that we started 15 years and multi-billions of dollars behind our competition that’s a pretty impressive success story the development of KDE 3.5 continued on throughout 2008 with maintenance and Bug

Fixes and the last version 3510 was released in August after that it was Full Speed Ahead on kd4 with the release of KD e4.1 in July some improvements were delivered but not enough to win over those that felt like kd4 left them behind about a year after the initial 4.0 release KDE

4.2 is released it was at this point that Aaron Sego gave his Blessing for those still on 3.5 to make the switch to KD E4 with thousands of bug fixes and improvements under its belt it was true too theming improvements new plasma applets multiscreen support and even krunner getting lots of love and

Morphing more into what we know it it know it as today it was a great release and really served to convince some to return to k e again a couple of months before 4.3 was to be released KD hit the 1 million commit Milestone it was a fix for akona

A personal information manager framework and in August KDE 4.3 was released and focused on polish now that the big hurdles were behind them more than 10,000 bugs were squashed and 2,000 feature requests were implemented policy kit network manager and krunner were at the Forefront this time later in the 4.3

Cycle all of KDE starting from 4.3.4 is a software compilation now abbreviated as KDC in February of 2010 KDC 4.4 was released with a new animation framework named kinetic that came with cute making for nicer transitions between applications and workspaces as a result of the perception

Of kde4 and 4.1 a fork of KDE 3.5 was eventually announced in April it was named the Trinity desktop environment and released a maintenance release at 3.5.1 and continued development until the next major version which was was changed to version 14 to avoid confusion with

KDE later in the year in August KDC 4.5 was released and as they each had their own team and personality separate releases were announced for the platform application and plasma workspaces webkit was now integrated and will be worked on alongside khtml in the work since mid 2010 an

Official split from K office as a result of unresolved differences on one side you had K presenter C carbon and kexi on the other the K office name but only k word as software headed up by Thomas Xander those differences LED eventually to the ultimate demise of K office as it

Never made it past version 2.4 though cigra the new group took up what was left of the mantle and continued in January of 2011 4.6 was released with an allnew activities system which allowed anyone to group tasks together to speed up workflows dolphin got faceted browsing to make

File searching easier and the KDE platform slimmed down in preparation for a mobile device release for 4.7 in July activities takes a bigger role in in the desktop and finally the work started in 4.6 paid off with the release of plasma active for tablet devices a mobile device should be more

Than a collection of applications it should reflect who you are plasma active infuses your tablet with the smarts to support what you are doing when you are doing it with the allnew touchbase activities you user experience it really was the usual plasma but with a huge focus on the

Activities workflow found on the desktop in November K desktop environment is just KDE now kde’s identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably Rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere KDE is no longer software

Created by people but people who create software KD e saw two releases in 2012 4.8 and 4.9 together they brought adaptive power management to save on electricity and battery life better file management touch friendly components and lots of application and workspace improvements in October KDE put into words what the

Developers community and users already knew they penned a Manifesto that reaffirmed their commitment to open governance free software inclusivity Innovation common ownership and enduser focus and finally in December a redesigned Cony mascot that’s cuter than ever 4.10 4.11 and 4.12 were all released in 2013 focusing on performance

User experience and stability but in the middle of all that Improvement the way KD released software changed what was once a structured release of application platform and workspaces would now be broken apart as of 411 the idea was to allow users and developers to pick releases as it fit them best rather than

To force users to follow along with the development as work on version five of Frameworks version two of workspaces and application porting cute 5 had already begun to heat up workspaces now known as plasma made its deew at the end of the year in a technology

Preview a few months later on July 15th 2014 KD plasma 5.0 was released to all as a stable update for those that didn’t want to wait neon 5 was available an echo of what was to come plasma 5 focused on krunner customizable panel layouts with multiple desktops a multi-line clipboard and Central media

Control not to mention the previously worked on activities and session management all while sporting an entirely new theme and icon set all dubbed Breeze complete with dark mode in August KD ESC 4.14 was released and would be the last in the series but didn’t shy away from improvements however Focus was squarely

On plasma 5 and Frameworks 5 after this last release KY e quietly moved away from calling things software compilations because of the plasma framework and application split 5.1 in October focused on porting over anything that was left out of the original release when moving over from Plasma in

Kd4 5.2 2 3 4 and five were all released in 2015 bringing with them better bluetooth support a gtk 2 and three style configurator initial and then improved wh support and better power management during the long list of releases a wild plasma mobile appeared in July replacing the previously

Released plasma active and shifted slightly to phones as well as tablets with the first prototype available for the Nexus five a notoriously tinkery device Pine 64 followed at the end of the year lesser known but still important plasma big screen was announced as a smart TV ecosystem in January of 2016 the first

Big announcement from KDE was KDE neon KDE neon is the intersection of these needs using a stable auntu long-term release as its core packaging the hottest software fresh from the KDE Community ovens compute knowing you have a solid foundation and enjoy the features you experience in the world’s most customizable

Desktop in the rest of 2016 5.6 7 and 8 were released with a focus on security much more whand and a long-term support version in 5.8 also in 5.8 phone integration with KDE connect and better desktop searching in krunner on October 14th KD e turned 20 there are only a couple of other

Desktops that can claim to have lived so long and to have had such a storied history in the beginning of 2017 the first slim book a laptop by a manufacturer of the same name is announced as KDE slim book and it ships with KDE neon so customers always get the latest and greatest

Plasma later in the year plasma 5.9 10 and 11 were all released with more of the usual performance improvements and whand work but also a system settings redesign and notification history was added in 2018 the first release 5.12 was an LTS that brought more of the same but

In a long-term flavor this was followed by 5.13 and 14 later in the year that introduced the plasma browser integration so things like notifications and downloads could be monitored right from plasma itself something that other os’s have had for a while they also brought a better First Connect multim

Monitor dialogue to help with the ease of setup in 2019 5.15 16 and 17 were released with you guessed it better wh and support with a focus on Nvidia in fractional scaling but also a do not disturb feature integrated wire guard VPN Support log login and logout screen

Redesigns in 2020 5.18 marked another long-term support release followed by 5.19 and 20 improvements continued as they always do better disc monitoring a simplified system setting better gtk app integration and a global animation speed setting on Wayland Island support for screencasting a shared clipboard Windows thumbnails and scrolling speed adjustments were

Added in 2021 5.21 22 and 23 were all released with a new theme the new plasma system monitor app a firewall settings page and power saving modes now show up in the panel to match work being done over on The Gnome side behind the scenes but as a huge win

KDE plasma is chosen for the steam deck when in desktop mode this allows anyone to have full access to a real Linux desktop when they’re not playing games A Real Testament to the quality of the plasma session this year also marked more changes for KDE they moved development

And chat platforms to gitlab and Matrix another triplet of releases in 2022 5.24 and LTS 25 and 26 brought an overview manager to make desktop switching easier a breeze theme overhaul fingerprint authentication support trackpad gesture support and better support for scaled X whand applications to remove blurry apps in most

Cases in 2023 there was only one release 5.27 it has a new welcome wizard a new window tiling system and flat pack permission support and discovered to mimic what’s available in flat seal work has already begun on the not yet relas released as of now plasma 6 which

Explains the lack of new versions and if you’re adventurous enough you’ve been able to get a hold of plasma 6 since November 8th 2023 with the first alpha beta 1 released on November 29th and beta 2 on December 20th plasma 6’s release date is planned for February 28th of

2024 the but we already have on January 10th 2024 the first release candidate the developers warn it’s not quite production ready but it’s time to look that direction bug reports are wanted as things are firming up for the official release you can catch all the great topics and news stories as they unfold

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