Happy Birthday to us KDE is 28 years old today | Hacker News Reader

Happy Birthday to us KDE is 28 years old today

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Join us and hold a KDE birthday party in your city. Fill in the wiki, meet up with your friends and celebrate 28 years of collaboration, free software and altruism!

https://community.kde.org/28th_birthday

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KDE 2 was the desktop environment I started using with Mandrake 8.0 in 2001. I absolutely loved KDE 3, it was my favorite desktop environment. When KDE 4 was released, I even designed a few Plasma themes, one of which aimed to bring back the quartz design of KDE 3. Currently, I am using macOS, but I often find myself reminiscing about the systems from the early 2000s. Those were truly special times in the world of desktop environments. Everything was free of bloatware back then, and we didn't need a ton of ad blockers for browsing the internet. We could use Kopete for chatting, or we were on IRC with Konversation. It was a different world altogether. In memory of those times, I’m going to download Kubuntu today and see where they stand currently. It will be interesting to explore the advancements and changes in the KDE environment since those early days!

KDE was my first linux DE when I first switched from Windows around 2005, but I moved away from it during the early KDE4 debacle. Switched back to KDE a few years ago and cannot be happier, feels so good to be at home again. Happy birthday!

I was the same, except I never went back. However I just got a Steamdeck, and the desktop mode runs KDE, and it's very very nice. I'm probably gonna try it out as my daily driver on my desktop.

GNOME was never too popular among "true hackers" because compared to KDE, it is seen as less flexible, less configurable and hence more "nannying". But to me, I always found KDE too cluttered and all over the place.

Now, I just pulled up the KDE home page and was presently surprised by the very sleak looking screenshots of a KDE desktop. Looks much more polished compared to the KDE of 20 years ago.

Congratulations and Happy Birthday, KDE!

Gnome 1.4 with Sawfish it was, even more than KWM thanks to Lisp.

Then RedHat/Helix dumbed it down with 2.2 and beyond and with the 3/4.x releases we are still with a hog mixing C, Rust and Javascript.

If it only used Guile instead of JS...

You're talking development, but I'm thinking purely from an end-user perspective.

Gnome 1.4's panels had far more settings and applets that current Gnome ones. Nautilus wasn't crippled.

Also, on XFCE3, the GTK version was even faster than Gnome 2.x and XFFM wasn't as bad as it looked.

That was fun, you could make any window have it's own theme.

Hell, having to install an extension to disable the corner actions killed my desire to use Gnome forever! In KDE things like this are plainly available in Settings, as it should be.

I really disliked old KDE (1-3?) but since Plasma I'm a completely happy user, although I still use i3/sway.

I used to love GNOME, but I've switched to KDE after GNOME 3 came out (can't stand it!). Long live KDE!

Same here, but gnome 3 was a long time ago:2011! Gnome 2 had a serious bug for my usage, but they weren't going to fix it because version 3 was coming out soon.

I use KDE because the GNOME UI is unbearably bad, but KDE is way more buggy in my experience.

The KDE file explorer often touches my files (updates the "most recently accessed" timestamp") for no apparent reason.

The KDE screen recorder eats up infinite RAM and takes only a few seconds to consume all of 64GB of RAM and crashes my PC.

KDE often has a bug where I cannot click inside application windows. I have to restart plasma in order to be able to click inside windows again.

Sleep often fails in that my PC will go to sleep and then wake up, but there is a black screen and even unplugging and re-plugging the display cable doesn't do anything. Even REISUO doesn't do anything, seems like the kernel is crashed.

And lots and lots of other bugs.

> The KDE file explorer often touches my files (updates the "most recently accessed" timestamp") for no apparent reason.

Are you sure that's not Baloo building a search index in the background?

I don't know exactly what it is, but the timestamps coincide with when I visit the directory - they don't get updated until I visit the directory in Dolphin.

Huh. Maybe reading metadata from the files triggers the atime update? I've got `noatime` for all my mounts, so I'd never see this and it doesn't seem to modify files.

And remember, the KDE project was the source of both safari and chrome (khtml was the base for safari, which google later used for chrome).

Why does the link meant for https://community.kde.org/28th_birthday link in a circular fashion to this very ycombinator submission? Could a moderator please fix this?

Happy birthday and thanks to all the KDE hackers for the gift of the best desktop environment on GNU/Linux and on computers in general. Light years ahead of anything else. Also so many very nice applications. Often winder how you can even manage to do it all.

Nice ! Hopefully KDE will have a true multi-monitor support one day :)

Could you elaborate? I've been using it with multiple monitors for over a decade, and I don't know what I should be missing.

Support for synced panels on multiple monitors is still not there. It was present on Windows 17 years ago.

Even duplicating a panel on multiple monitors is not possible, at least for me this is basic multi monitor functionality.

Configure your panels as you like, change one monitor and the panels are gone. There's an issue open since 2021 about this problem : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446654

I've been using Windows for more than 17 years and I have no clue what you're talking about; the term “panel” is not an established term in Windows’ desktop environment.

It is in KDE. KDE panel -> Windows Taskbar.

I wrongly applied KDE terminology when talking about Windows.

That's not a "problem",the bug report says it's a feature you want to be implemented.

I guess you could replicate your panel in the other monitor "by hand", or just duplicating the relevant entries and setting them up for the other monitor at plasmarc.

At least to me it's a major issue, and I'm not the only one who thinks this. As I said before Microsoft implemented it 17 years ago.

This works only temporarily, when connecting another monitor then the settings are not propagated.

I found this PR [1] yesterday which should implement a copy function for panels. But it's anyone's guess whether we'll get this functionality in Plasma or a QT6 port of Latte dock [2]

[1] https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/merge_reque...

[2] https://invent.kde.org/plasma/latte-dock/-/tree/work/plasma6...

I see. Not something I'm reliant on, but I can definitely see how it's a problem if your workflow depends upon panels and you often change monitors.

Odd, the fact that I couldn't have separate "panels" in Windows seemed like the bug/missing feature to me :).

Did you try plugging the monitors in?

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