Total KDE fan and that's all I run at home. It's an interesting study also in desktop environment and software written in C++ and just how hard it is to get something that works for most people. Mistakes, corrections, building the basic blocks like Qt in the early days and keeping a bunch of people with differing cultures / tastes / backgrounds/needs motivated to make it better every day - fascinating achievement.
Thank you KDE folks - I contribute in terms of bug reports and attempts at fixes sometimes but this time I am signing up for a monthly donation - I encourage people to do what they can to keep a good thing going! https://kde.org/donate/
Yeah, additionally anyone at Microsoft that keeps throwing out half usable COM frameworks for C++ should spend some time with KParts, KIO and Qt D-Bus bindings, maybe they would finally learn how to properly design one.
I am a bit prod of having seen the original post looking for volunteers to build a Kool Desktop Environment. I was obsessively reading Usenet groups at the time. And I remember there were quite early betas published, I did not run them at first, but I remember much enthusiasm about it. So I feel familiar with the beginnings although I never participated in the project development-wise. All the way up to KDE 4 I was quite close to the project as a user. But since KDE 4 was so unstable and buggy, I left it around that time. This is also around the time when the documentary makes a big jump ahead chronologically.
I feel the documentary explains less what happened the last 10-15 years. I recall Trolltech and Qt underwent a series of acquisitions. How is KDE and Qt developed now? Who are the main contributors and sponsors? Any big backers? This information I felt missing.
I joined as a user at one point during the kde3 days, powerful apps like Amarok 1.4, k3b and konqueror with all kinds of crazy kio-slaves were the ones that really gave me pause on the boot screen and kept tipping me over towards mandrake instead of WinXP ("why can't it be that simple and as well integrated, why do I need so many ad-hoc shareware to do every basic thing like burning/ripping CDs, mounting ISOs, transcoding audio, sending it to my MP3 player").
The KDE4 days were rough, by then I had jumped over to fedora, and that one didn't shy away from shipping very early and unstable versions of it. That had me hopping for alternative DEs, I seriously tried several (and stuck for a while with some) of the minimalistic ones (enlightenment, XFCE, ...) and quickly ended up depending on either KWin, and/or some battery/networking/disks applet from plasma, or configuring something via systemsettings. The plasma desktop itself is fine (I don't mind it so much, I'm not crazy about shell theming and customisations, I do love my global menu on top, though), but what sells KDE for me is all the clever ancillary stuff that makes it "smart and usable" (dealing with Bluetooth, network setup, local and remote drives, audio output, ...), that's where the "environment" metaphor kicks in and elevates the experience above that of a "desktop shell".
I also left Kde at the 4.0 time, and for a while was on Mac OS X, but nowadays I've given up on desktop environments - I just use xmonad and dmenu, and a mishmash of apps that serve my needs. I got tired of getting used to new/different affordances every few months/years.
Wow, great job everyone. Love seeing all the faces being the scenes, and the humble beginnings.
I remember the switch to KDE4, and it was indeed brutal. I feel bad that they took as much flak as they did for that.
Plasma has come such a long way, y'all deserve so much for the perseverance and vision.
Thank you for sharing the story!
Their story is inspirational; if this were a commercial project, they would surely have taken over the market. Hearing about the challenges they faced with Qt, and how their HTML engine was adopted by Apple, is so interesting.
KDE deserves a lot more.
Been using for over 20 years now. KDE is really the best. Consistent between releases, stable, infinitely customizable, but works great out of the box with features you'd expect and often years ahead of the commercial competition in terms of new features. Every moment I spend in macos or windows for work is pure torture.
I used the betas, KDE 1-3, skipped 4 an 5, and I'm now back on the 6 train. It's really nice, and I try to use something else every now and then and I'm back in KDE a few weeks after.
I don't remember the earliest version I used, but I vividly remember kde 3.5 and 4 because the transition was really rough. Major regressions and highly disruptive at first, but it laid the groundwork for modern kde and haven't had anything like that since. I jumped ship to gnome out of spite but was back to kde in short order.
5 was a bit rough at the start, but really was pretty nice by the time 6 came around.
6 has been great. If you are a windows or mac user, it's very close to that experience and very familiar.
What I really like right now with 6 is the updates: you kind of don't even notice. Things just work better and faster. Your system works the same as yesterday, updates are not a biggie at all.
Can't say the same of Windows or Mac OS.
Really great documentary, very much suggested to watch it.
I had no idea Gnome was started without ever talking to the Qt and KDE people. If there was discussion and a solution about the license, the present would be very different I assume. Still, there would be many WMs and DE's, but KDE would be somewhat of a centerpoint.
Also, Aaron Seigo took the criticism of KDE 4 quite hard I would guess. It might be why he is not involved in the project anymore.
Wonderful quality documentary, just like KDE itself. Really nice to see people behind my favorite software.
I'm so glad KDE exists to take a stand for the power user and customizability, while GNOME sinks ever more into androidification. Like come on, it's a desktop pc with a mouse and keyboard, not a fucking tablet where every icon needs to be 2 miles wide. Without KDE, linux would not be usable as a daily driver for me.
Its very annoying that some very loud people can not handle the fact that people different have needs. I like to use GNOME. Its fitting me better and dont insult of KDE developers because some people prefer it. The UI systems just have different assumptions and this is just fine.
I will take the counter point. I think gnomes stance on minimal configuration and a proscribed workflow is commendable. Iām a dev, I see everyday that customization imposes costs.
What I see with gnomes though is that shedding the customization doesnāt actually make for a more solid project. The fact Wayland fractional scale took as long as it did to stabilize despite mostly working tells me gnome didnāt care about the real hardware that makes up the bulk of what exists in the world.
Similarly, it seems like plasma has a massive technical edge just in handling things like pipewire capture, etc. I find KDE is typically smoother and the gnome overview animation almost always stutters regardless of the computer I use it on from discrete gpu desktops down to mobile things.
So I can say that it seems from my experience the gnome project has naval gazed and built a model of the computing landscape they target that is divorced from reality.
I think your defense gets at the difference between a power user and a ricer. They are orthogonal. Gnome rejects ricing. There is one way. Thatās fine. I configure stock KDE by changing 2 settings, 1 of which exists in gnome. But I do need to actually do things with my computers which is why the androidification dig hits.
What I will praise unreservedly is the gnome circle apps and broader which are typically polished focused and attractive.
So to me gnome fails at a desktop but has managed to foster a culture around themselves that leads to solid app development.
There is some irony in this statement given that GNOME is built on not letting people chose anything and also happens to be the default on Ubuntu, so it's literally force fed down new adopter's throats. It just rubs me the wrong way ideologically so I have to flame them whenever I get the chance.
I've been using gnome for the past 10 years. Every time I try to use KDE it feels like a wannabe Windows DE, in it's default configuration anyway.
The ancient Windows desktops were quite good so if something tried to emulate them that would be a reasonable goal.
I have no idea how modern KDE is, because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster. Nonetheless, KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows XP, even if its default configuration was somewhat similar.
Actually I consider KDE 3.5 the best desktop environment that I have ever seen, much better not only than the contemporaneous Windows XP, but also than the contemporaneous Mac OS X. The reason was that KDE 3.5 had an extreme customizability, so everyone could reconfigure it according to their tastes, so it no longer resembled any other desktop environment. Unfortunately, almost everything that I liked in KDE 3.5 was removed in KDE 4 and replaced with rigid choices that I disliked.
After KDE 4, I never had the courage to try KDE again (I fled to the refuge of XFCE), but I hope that it has recovered and now it is at least at the level of its past glory, if not better.
Yeah KDE mimics Windows, Cinnamon mimics MacOS, and GNOME mimics Android. That's sort of the intention, so you can keep your workflow.
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