KDE 2 Screenshots (2000-2002) | Hacker News Reader

KDE 2 Screenshots (2000-2002)

digibarn.com

72 pointswalrus0190 comments

Is it wrong that I really like the look of some of these? Some are garish, sure, but others like http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd... and http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd... have a professional feel that is missing in modern desktop environments. Even http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd... has a certain appeal to it. I miss the days when UI toolkits drew everything as grey boxes with a 3D edge. I miss Windows 9x/2000 and Mac OS 8/9 too.

I think one of the best things about early 2000-era desktop environments was that it was hard for programs to look out-of-place. In a modern desktop environment, you can easily tell the difference between programs written with different toolkits, like GTK+ and Qt. Even though each toolkit can imitate the other (there's a Adwaita theme for Qt and a Breeze theme for GTK3,) due to the complexity of modern UI themes, it's impossible to get things right and the lack of drop-shadows or animations or hover effects will leave some programs looking sub-standard. On the other hand, every developer can draw a 3D-bevelled grey box. Both GTK+ and Qt apps were made of grey boxes and they both represented each kind of widget in a pretty similar way.

People cared about consistent look and feel back then, everyone was hating on java because it got it wrong. Now everything seems to have it's own style and behavior.

True that. Of the three programs I can see on my desktop right now (Chrome, WebStorm and Outlook,) none of them are even remotely trying to look consistent with the rest of the operating system. On the other hand, Office 2000 looks right at home on Windows 2000. Even though some controls were technically non-native, they still fit in because the 3D bevel was universal.

I secretly enjoy the ridicule I get from other web developers for refusing to use Chrome (except for late stage cross browser testing) because it does not even try to fit in.

> People cared about consistent look and feel back then, everyone was hating on java because it got it wrong

That does not jive with my memories - and I remember WinAmp, MusicMatch Jukebox and Nero Burning ROM vividly.

I remember that too, I never said people were consistent. Get the order of menus wrong and you were the devil incarnate, write your own gui toolkit and everyone fondly remember you twenty years on (in the case of winamp, music match and nero were reviled).

> in the case of winamp, music match and nero were reviled

Heresy! WinAmp was much-loved. This is the first time I'm hearing anything but love for WinAmp - it was the best music player/organizer at the time, and they added Milkdrop as bonus

I think he's actually saying that it got winamp loved, but music match and nero reviled.

You should probably mention that the vendors at least make an attempt at a 'standard' for their platforms. Whether or not developers follow it, is up for debate.

https://developer.apple.com/design/ https://material.google.com/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/design

There was a period where there was major demand for form widgets in the browser to have a "native look and feel" to decrease the learning curb for people coming from native apps (while meaningful at the time, is less of an issue when most things are web-deployed), and then like the next month there were demands for CSS styling of form widgets and browsers were being shat on because they only supported it in a limited fashion, only color changes, and not actual shape and text styling.

Now you can make text on a button bold italic, but who knows what that means when you see it in relation to a button that isn't bold italic or is just bold or just italic (other than that the designer has bad taste). I once worked with a designer who wanted control over the focus-caret styling (the dotted line in Firefox/highlighting in Chrome that indicates where keyboard input is destined, which changing has potentially huge impacts for accessibility). Having a UI/UX that grossly visually distinct negatively impacts usability, discoverability, and accessibility, IMO, for very little gain in branding (unless your branding is purposely meant to be "confusingly different from everyone else").

I agree with you in that. They look functional and utilitarian. The icons have dark, bold colors. The 3D depth is clear and meaningful. There is no platform-wide 'theme' that makes the icons similar to each other, instead allowing the symbol to speak its intention more loudly, and designers to create their own vocabulary within the app. Instead, most icons are outlined in black, making them clear and easily distinguishable.

If you're wrong, we're in it together. I very strongly dislike the modern trend towards flat, unrecognizable widgets and non-descript icons.

I keep hoping it's just a phase, but the economical advantages this trend is bringing looks like something that's going to make it stay with us for a while.

The images you linked to feel very much BeOS to me.

But maybe its just the color palette...

Not that strange, the linked image (http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd...) does indeed show something like a BeOS theme (https://regmedia.co.uk/2007/01/30/beos_1.jpg).

Really miss BeOS. Loved the way the desktop worked.

Yeah. On second thought, i think they _are_ using KDE with a BeOS theme

This was before the UX people took over the web and desktop. I blame the introduction of smartphones, which was when the public at large finally came online. To appeal to this group, a lot of interfaces and websites got redesigned, losing a lot of functionality and efficiency. KDE is thankfully still rather usable.

> This was before the UX people took over the web and desktop. I blame the introduction of smartphones, which was when the public at large finally came online.

I doubt the plausibility of that timeline - the original iPhone was announced in January 2007, KDE 4.0Alpha1 was released in May 2007[1].

KDE 4.0 was a terrible release (missing functionality, lots of regressions). IMO, they should have kept it as a develop branch and only released 4.1 as 4.0.

1. https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-alpha1.php

No, they should have kept it a development branch until 4.3 or 4.4. It wasn't until then that it was really usable.

What's really funny and sad is that the GNOME team made the exact same mistake with Gnome3.

With the additional issue of too much Gnome-isms creeping into GTK3. The one benefit Qt has is that it is being maintained by a independent entity from KDE. One that intends for Qt to be its own product, and properly cross platform.

4.0 was meant to be a development branch, various distros pushed it out anyway.

(Actual) HCI experts didn't join the computer industry when smartphones popped up. They did when GUIs became a serious research subject for the industry, back in the 1980s, and a lot of their expertise and effort went into computer interaction throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Frankly, I cynically suspect that the flat, semi-functional design became widespread when the revenue model of many computer and phone vendors started overwhelmingly relying on super-revolutionary "apps" being churned out on minimal budgets.

Today, you can get a complete design for the kind of money (and time) that got you a really good icon for an OS X application back in 2005. It's a major step back in terms of interaction model, not only looks, but the consumer industry runs on money, not quality.

The problem is that UX became a buzzword, and now unqualified graphics designers are 'practising' it. It's hard to find an actual UX designer, and as a UX designer it's hard to find an actual UX job (as opposed to a job that labels itself as UX but is just graphic design)...

Indeed. That's why I said it's a step back in terms of interaction model, too, not just graphic design. The applications sure look awful, but the interaction is increasingly bad, too (just look at the hordes of UX "experts" who religiously follow the Cult of the Hamburger Menu).

I feel similar. I still can't say if it's nostalgia, these were the things that equated technology, and newness for a computer / visual fan. At the time I hated the distinction UI / content, and was quickly fascinated by CSS like technology, almost lispish through DHTML. Todays interfaces are either boring, tiring or useless to my eyes today. Even though I applauded every steps. Maybe it's a questoin of age, maybe it is useless. I tend to think that too much energy is directed at aesthetics rather than function, and even when it's aiming at function, it's at the cost of simplicity. I feel very happy in text mode with emacs, or in GUI mode with 90s day UIs (be it Mac, Windows 3 - NT5, or mid Gnome / KDE), special mention to the UX of SGI OS, and some multimedia tools such as Discreet compositing tools, Houdini, Maya, Lightwave, Modo who had a bit of both: cute and blocky.

Ah back in the early 2000s life was exciting on the Linux desktop with weird and unconventional artistic window decorators that would make plants twine around your borders or have short beOS-style tabs or put the close buttons bottom right and so on! Customizing the desktop was a major time-sink for the students at my collage. :D

In fact, by comparison with how I recall Linux desktops in 2000, these KDE 2 screenshots seem to be ushering in a new era of boring conforming window decorators :(

Where have all the crazy interesting rebelling different decorators gone? I did a quick flick through gnome-look.org and found nothing very different.. :(

Not just Linux, I had a really nice freebsd + KDE desktop setup from 2001-2004... Took hours to get xfree86 working right.

Not just *NIX! When I was forced to use Windows at some employer I had a blast tweaking 'litestep'.

Gnome and KDE have both embraced flat designs but the Enlightenment community seems to still do some rather "original" decorations [1]. They do look rather retro these days though.

https://exchange.enlightenment.org/themeGroup/show/24

Is enlightenment still active and still the most hackable?

I cannot comment on hackability since I've only used it for a few months several years ago but it looks to be under active development [1].

https://git.enlightenment.org/core/enlightenment.git

It's under active development, yes. It has seen a major rewrite of a lot of foundation libraries after 0.16.

The artwork is not of the same quality, I guess, probably because a lot of artists have moved on, but it's a very solid environment, and the libraries that have been developed as part of the project are great. They're used in Tizen: https://www.tizen.org/events/presentations/tizen-native-disp... ; Carsten Haitzler (rasterman) has been working at Samsung for a few years now.

(Or at least he had been working for a few years when I read the presentation; I think he still does, but I'm not sure)

For a guy that has in the past railed against the Red Hat/Gnome people, Rasterman seems to have become very corporate in recent years...

Note that KDE still ships at least 4 desktop themes on any reasonable distro, including "MS Windows 9x" that still has a similar look to these screenshots.

You can still use the KDE 3 and 4 themes (Plastik and Oxygen) throughout Plasma 5.

They're not exactly bug-free though. For example, when I enabled the Oxygen theme and adjusted the taskbar height to roughly where I had it in KDE 4, all the text became about three pixels high for no reason. I think there were other problems too.

LXDE has some really "interesting" window borders. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

> students at my collage

In the arts program, I hope.

Forget glossy - fuzzy is the next big thing! http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UqUwVPikChs/SebDLPegtvI/AAAAAAAAI0...

What a nightmare that world was. Totally customizable everything, unreasonable defaults, window managers swapped out with widget sets and competing graphics libraries.

I cant remember a better reason to have gotten super good at the command line.

> Totally customizable everything, unreasonable defaults

Well, if you remove the latter the former actually becomes a positive thing.

Or you could go the GNOME route and do the reverse.

I really liked KDE up to version 3. KDE 4 seemed like a big departure from version 3 and focused too much on the shell and libraries and not a lot on the applications themselves.

I think the legacy of KDE is the open sourcing of Qt and the creation of the KHTML that then was forked to create WebKit.

In its prime, Konqueror (khtml) was excellent.

True. I still miss that I could search via toolbar, and then search through the resulting pages with the buttons for each word I entered... Pure genius.

I also preferred Konqueror to Dolphin as the file manager.

Konqueror can do everything! The only all-in-one application I actually like (maybe excepts Emacs).

God how I miss konqueror from kde3.

Dolphin is... Utter crap.

KDE3 had this crazy thing, Kioslaves. You open a remote host via SSH using konqueror, open a remote file as if it was locally available, and KDE would somehow juggle sync-on-save. It was super awesome when editing files on remote ftp servers (you know, phone and stuff).

KDE still has Kioslaves.

For each their own, I suppose. I love Dolphin, and think it's one of the better graphical apps in the whole Linux landscape, so your "utter crap" comment comes across just as sad and bitter.

Didn't dolphin work with kio slaves too?

It goes great length towards not having address bar or anything to type them in.

I miss the text of the tabs turning blue, letting you know the page is completely loaded, although this was probably more important on dial up. These day chrome does even render until you switch to the tab, causing a noticeable delay.

It's still the best browser going. Things like integrated wikipedia lookup - so simple but no other browser has ever added it.

have you try KDE 4 recently? There is a lot of hate around KDE 4 thanks to the initial versions, but actually is the best DE for GNU/Linux

"Best" in everything? or best in specific aspects? Have you tried Pantheon? (elementary OS)

That can be customized a lot (instead of the Gnome mindset of "Do on my way or fuck your self"), and run fast even without 2d/3d acceleration (aka the old good X11 SVGA driver ) ?

PD: Add that anything based on Qt can handle faulty graphics drivers far better that Gtk3.

And KDE 4 wasn't realized exactly with the mindset you describe with so much candor? Now Plasma 5 can be more flexible, sure. But when you don't give users a usable alternative for years people tend to look for alternatives.

At some point (after years!) it became OK and I went back to it, but it was never as good as KDE 3.5 was for me. I realized it was not just nostalgia, when a friend showed me a laptop with KDE 3.5 and used it for some minutes.

While the whole DE got worse, there's two pieces that got better and better, Kate and KWin.

And desktop applets. KDE 4 is the only environment I ever used where these were stable and reliable.

> stable and reliable

They were not, for a few years.

They were for me, even on 4.0. Nothing else worked, but the plasma widgets did.

KDE 4 is not updated any more, is it? I switched to KDE 5 well over a year ago, and found it better already back then. It's very solid these days I think.

In fact KDE (Plasma) 5.8 will be an LTR. https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.7.95.php

KDE 4 was pretty decent by the time they abandoned it in favour of the still-immature KDE 5 (or Plasma 5 or whatever they're calling it now). The CADT approach to software development is really annoying.

Have a look at this project: https://www.trinitydesktop.org .

I'm trying to build it on my Slackware just for nostalgia.

I like the persistence at Trinity project. They are doing the project despite the initial backlash from upstream (like: it's nice that you're doing it but why would you???).

I still think KDE 3.5 was awesome and we really didn't need KDE 4.

This. I switched to Gnome 2 as soon as Mandriva switched to KDE4, and then ran the last version of Ubuntu with Gnome 2 until I had to upgrade.

Those were the days.

MATE is maintained and based on Gnome 2.

I remember doing the same thing. I loved KDE until KDE 4. Then I used Ubuntu with Gnome 2 for a while and really liked it, but then Ubuntu decided to switch to Unity which I found to be pure rubbish. About that time, Gnome decided to go against all reason and foisted Gnome 3 abomination on us ... so I checked out KDE 4 again and they'd fixed most of the bugs and made it reasonable again :-)

And through all the migrations, I still liked KDE 3.5 the best.

> I still think KDE 3.5 was awesome and we really didn't need KDE 4.

http://trinitydesktop.org/ does kde-3.5, and it is not too bad.

KDE 3.5 is still the best desktop environment I've ever used. I pretty much stopped listening to music on my local computer once it became too hard to use Amarok 1.4 (Clementine is not an adequate substitute), and more generally I basically gave up on local applications once I couldn't run KDE3 (e.g. I started using webmail instead of KMail, google docs instead of KWord, ...)

Not much different from my current Xfce desktop. We now have antialiased fonts and window shadows provided by compositing WMs though.

I look at these screenshots and think to myself, this desktop is feature complete, or awfully close to it. What have we been doing since then? That's a little facetious of course, and we've made desktops more usable in countless ways since then. But still, back in 2000, KDE2 was a perfectly usable desktop that would have enabled me to do my work.

Maybe it's nostalgia though: I first came to Linux in 2001 (SuSE Linux 7.1) on KDE2, Gnome1, Windowmaker, and Blackbox, and I've had fun ever since then. Yes you could make it garish or ungainly, but the very fact that you could customize it any way you want was an instantaneous appeal for me. Sadly, in chasing mainstream users we've gone the route of homogeneity. So now we've got gorgeous, modern desktops like Mint Cinnamon, which is in my opinion every bit as gorgeous as Mac OSX - maybe even more so! But it was Linux's ability to change its GUI interface totally that instantly drew me in. That appeal drives me away from some GUIs to this day, as should be obvious.

Nice to see this. Some of these, including this one[1] are from my desktop. I miss KDE now I'm on Windows all the time.

[1] http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd...

I've realised what I really miss: Being able to change my own desktop, including its entire behaviour, was incredible. I first found this enjoyment when running TkDesk[1]

[1] http://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/

This is what I imagine it feels like looking at photos of yourself with a perm or a leisure suit. The washed out colors. The complete obliviousness to how embarrassing it was. The sheer joy of experiencing it at the time. The quiet nostalgia.

Edit: the pride, because it was so much better than what came before. At least you felt like it was.

Edit 2: seriously, the nostalgia. I miss jamming whatever nonsense together on that poor Debian install I had on whatever weird box of discarded parts where I kind of started learning to loonix. And I miss the infinite configurability of KDE, even though everything I came up with felt like hammer pants.

How long do we think until colorful and glossy icons are in again?

at least until after all the designers who remember from a decade ago it have retired or died

I remember it well. I was a heavy KDE user through most of the aughts until I got an iBook. It was awesome. Very tweakable. Thoughtful apps, if a little instable in a few places.

It's still bewilders me how KDE turned into... this Plasma thing. Did the entire team behind KDE just walk out at some point?

Best i can tell, ux designers took the helm. And then the "community managers" followed...

For what it's worth, I think the current KDE Plasma is quite evenly competing for the nicest desktop environment around (including the proprietary ones in functionality and looks -- polish is behind due to obvious mismatch in development manpower).

The whole "desktop widget / workspace" thing in KDE4 was a complete waste of time, like the "tabletization" that followed. It felt like they were chasing fashion, cranking out slow and half-broken me-too implementations of very debatable concepts. That's when they lost any hope of ever challenging in the mainstream market.

They're also cursed by the typical open-source churn, where they replace battle-tested programs with unstable "new shiny" just because nobody wants to maintain old code.

I left when I didn't like the direction any more, somewhere after 3. Nothing against the team, almost everyone was absolutely brilliant, it just wasn't going where I wanted it to.

Great times! I remember Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Not RHEL-7.2) with KDE installed circa 2001.

Brings me back to my days of studying. I remember KDE as making a huge impression on me, it struck me as having such high quality and feature rich applications. Coming from Windows and things like Notepad, seeing KWrite and stuff. Jaw dropping.

Coming to think of it, it wasn't just that. It was also that the application devs seemed to _intentionally_ seek a balance between features and remaining straightforward and simple. That gave off an aura of quality in my opinion.

Oh man. I remember trolling Linux forums back then about how shitty the Linux desktop was compared to BeOS. Surprisingly still true.

I feel so old. I remember KDE beta, before 1.0. At the time, a graphical file manager under Linux was revolutionary. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1

I've been happy with i3wm for quite a while now, a good balance of power user features and ease of use.

I never was a big user of KDE, because it was considered non-free back then and it wasn't included in Debian, but I have to admit it looked good — better than Gnome. GTK version 1 was so awful looking!

I prefer KDE 2.0 style.

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