KDE at 30
kde.org
kde.org
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 ...
k3b - died with the cd-rom
calligra office - creation of LibreOffice stole the thunder
konqueror - maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of chrome is a tall ask these days
amarok / kmail - rewrite lost features, introduced bugs, and many existing alternatives filled the gap
That said there are still a lot of good ones still there that continue to improve every day. Kate, dolphin, KDE connect, etc.
> maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of konqueror is a tall ask these days
FTFY
- LUKS encrypted disk support desktop-wide, - storage device hot plug/unplug - new Bluetooth GUI (tdebluez) - new media player (kplayer), - PulseAudio support - window tiling
"bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works" is a low key major achievement - I love it !
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).
Not just in the Linux world, it's also far better than Windows and macOS.
KolourPaint fills a small niche but does it very well.
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.
The past is a foreign land. Minimum memory requirement for Windows 95 was something like 4MB. I ran OS/2 on 8MB of memory (with a Cyrix 40Mhz 486 clone).
Beyond that, in windows 95 in the extreme you could be looking at only 16 colors. 256 colors was also not uncommon. 16bit colors became common in the windows 98 era.
Also, make sure you are setup to use proprietary firmware. IDK if fedora does that by default. For my laptop I was running without it for a bit and things were definitely a bit sluggish. I had to add some modprobe settings for the i915 (intel video card) driver.
For your CPU it'd look something like this
# /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
options i915 enable_guc=2 enable_fbc=1
You'll need to make sure you have the linux-firmware package installed.
(Some googling suggest fedora isn't doing this for you).
Here's an arch wiki entry about it with a bunch of extra diagnostics commands.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics
Here's a gist that also covers fedora
https://gist.github.com/Brainiarc7/aa43570f512906e882ad6cdd8...
In my experience it's fast and low memory right up until you go to edit a panel or add a widget. The editor runs like molasses on my desktop.
Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)
I think it’s the closest thing to that dream today.
It seems more focused on the retro aesthetic, which I personally don’t love, but it’s still really nice to see.
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.
Not on my 4 year old PC. Wayland performs poorly and usually in wonky ways. I tried it for several weeks. Could not stand the odd behaviors and poor performance and went back to X11. And this is an AlienWare PC, cost me $2000 US, the most I've ever paid for a PC. Can't imagine how bad Wayland would be on the lesser PC's/laptops in our home.
If you see this comment and ever decide to give the wayland session and whatever you were trying to run another go, I'd be more than happy to try and help you fix it.
I'm not a Wayland evangelist but as someone with an old(custom built) desktop myself who has used the Wayland session since it became an option, your comment reads to me as:
"Xwayland(and by extension Wayland on KDE) is bad, I'm not going to list any specific programs I had issues with or any of the troubleshooting I tried in the several weeks I attempted to use it but for me it ran poorly and/or strangely.
I have an AlienWare PC, which should prevent any of these issues from happening(?)"
> Can't imagine how bad Wayland would be on the lesser PC's/laptops in our home.
Thousands of users use daily distros based on Wayland without problems. Maybe you had bad luck and something on your system is not fully compatible. But for the majority of people Wayland works fine. Have you tried different distros?
The good news, I guess, is Kinoite stands to benefit from KDE Linux development because it mostly depends on Flatpak to install programs which means all of the KDE ecosystem will eventually be available at Flathub [3] as first-class citizens with reasonable maturity.
I dislike their use of some gnome apps (I like to have my window buttons to the left and double click means close. Old habit from solaris), but I can force them to have proper window decorations.
I still get angry when thinking about all the weird issues I had with gnome though. Alt+ tab stopping drag and drop. Gtk context menus stealing focus and rendering all other windows unlockable until I close the menu (like nautilus file transfer dialogue). My 60hz monitor running at not-60-hz wrt mouse pointer movement. Like constants small micro stuttering.
And of course, breakages on every update since gnome is only usable with extensions.
KDE didn't replace Windows as the most popular desktop OS, but 99% chance you're looking at this in a browser that's derived from KDE (Konqueror begat webkit begat Blink) and it's open source because KDE's license made it that way.
Chromium is open source, but Chrome isn't. Blink, WebKit, and for that matter KHTML, are available under permissive licences.
When they transition to Wayland I'll probably have to move away again as my hardware won't support it but I'll still likely use dolphin as it's a better file manager than all the others.
https://github.com/benapetr/TuxManager
It's fairly new but is under active development. I haven't had a chance to try it out myself yet.
EDIT: On a side note, is anyone informed about the state of VRR + fractional scaling + general gaming on GNOME? Has it gotten better?
KDE: 30 years of the Linux desktop
https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-691-kde-30-years-of-the-linux-d...
I tried it again today and it really felt quite polished, no papercuts, no feeling of being overwhelmed, no bugs, good newcomer experience... I think this is it. They made it.
edit: I appreciate the quality of discussion below, so far.
This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.
The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.
You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!
Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
Does it actually matter? And if so, why?
> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?
Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).
So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?
> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!
> This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
Stallman was trying to better the software, what is this going to accomplish other than polarize people?
> This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.
"undoubtedly" is absurd here. Does KDE really have a stable of consistent transphobes donating? Do they outweigh additional donations from supporting the LGBTQ community?
Regardless, if the only point of KDE were to make money it wouldn't be a non-profit. Extremely passionate people are often passionate about a lot of things beyond just what you want from them. KDE is a community project and that community loves and accepts non-binary people.
OSS and FOSS movements themselves were political platforms, so this has never been true. Your problem is that you just have some issue with this one
Thinking practically, having a male and female lizard is sort of inconvenient for a mascot, since leaving one out is a message in itself. Having a genderless mascot with art assets ready to go makes practical sense to me.
Side question: why would having a male or female mascot be "a message in itself"? Why do people want to see a message, and especially a $currentDayPolitics one, in every single thing? A mascot can be a cute mascot without having to represent anything more than exactly that.
Just as a random example: Let's say some OG founder of a project had a cute dog named Laila, and the project makes this dog its mascot. Why should that be a problem, AT ALL?
And what's even worse, if you think this "everything has a message and we have to be super careful what the message is" thing through, the conclusion is: No project ever again can have a solely male or female mascot. Which is of course absurd.
And this whole "we need to send the RIGHT message" thing falls apart with time anyway, because what the right message is, WILL change over time. You're not at the end of all human enlightenment.
Like, most mascots aren't in gendered pairs normally (like your dog example!), you just have 1 option to represent the thing. People see Laila the dog and think "oh yeah, LailaOS".
But given you have 2 mascots, with 1 being pretty ambiguous, but the other being dressed in a pink dress with bows, it does mean you probably want to use both when presenting KDE, just so you're not accidentally saying "this is the KDE event for men" or "this is the KDE event for women". If you made your mascot the AIGA bathroom symbols, you'd have the same issue.
My thinking about the "right" message is just that... I don't think that's what they want to tell people right now, in our current time. Everyone can use KDE. It's not a historical impact sort of thing.
Again, not a huge issue really. Just seems practical. Hopefully I'm getting that across. Sorry if I'm not.
* That's not what's happening. The pronouns are mentioned in a social media post (presumably targeted at people already way into KDE) during pride month. This kind of wink to the LGBT community was in not that long ago even for the stodgiest corporate brands. You can easily ignore it if you don't care. In contrast, the website's landing page is primarily about the software. There's a (presumably temporary) banner at the top about the anniversary with the mascot; if you click through, it still doesn't mention pronouns AFAICT. It's not as if you have to go through a whole pronoun discovery cosplay to download the software.
* Open source projects' priority is often building a community of contributors over seeking (often small by comparison) financial donations. I commend efforts to establish a welcoming community. To me this seems like a very gentle way of saying this is a community where LGBT folks are welcome and homophobic/transphobic behavior is not. And I'm a believer in the "paradox of tolerance"—you can't tolerate intolerant behavior and expect a tolerant (much less welcoming) community.
* To the folks this is appealing to, and who perhaps are behind this decision, the current (US) political climate of intolerance feels almost inescapable. Even looking at this at in the most Machiavellian "how do I maximize the contributions I get without actually caring about humans" way, aligning with this community of folks who don't feel welcome in many other places, including a lot of excellent software developers, makes a lot of sense.
But yes, the free software movement is political, and the FSF is by all intents a political organization with a specific political goal and message.
Politics is multifaceted, it doesn't purely relate to government either. Politics is how humans decide who gets what, when and how. You can't run a community or organization without politics.
I agree with the rest of what you say. Politics, governance and identity are unavoidable in any kind of community. It's just part of it and unavoidable. It's about dealing with it fairly, clearly and with respect.
Is it perfect? No. Does it piss some people off? Probably, and I don't care.
Also it's a cute fucking lizard.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...
Are you using an Nvidia GPU?
the only reason kde wasn't dead right there was the solid kde market share in corporate linux gui deployments at the time. and then came the Novell Microsoft (Balmer days) deal, "look, Linux desktop doesn't make any sense...".
Linux desktops were doing amazingly well in "kiosk" deployments, hundreds and thousands of very similar centrally managed workplaces. think selling tickets, showing time tables, atms, think sears or the likes (it was those days)
but I get astray
how would a universe look like where Xamarin and SUSE had had the phantasy to see gnome and kde synergize instead of cage fight?
sigh, a woman may dram...
I want free software. Don't ask for donations, just give me free software.