Comment by 8ig8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8ig8 | Hacker News Reader

I haven't thought about KDE in a while. When I first installed RH Linux (5.1?), Gnome was the dominant windows manager (I think, that's what I initially ended up with). Gnome was okay, but when I found and switched to KDE, I felt like Linux could really take on Windows 95. KDE was so _clean_ compared to Gnome. It was beautiful.

If I recall, KDE seemed odd because it was developed by a commercial entity. Gnome was developed by individual _hackers_. Funny, though, since RH was commercializing Linux at the time. I was happy to buy the box since downloading over dial up seemed impossible.

I'm sure my history is off, but KDE is a good memory.

My favorite memory from that era was the bumper sticker I got at the Raleigh Linux convention:

"In a world without fences, who needs Gates?"

The problem at that time was that Qt wasn't free nor open sourc software (you could see the code but could not redistribute modifications). Both GTK and Gnome were started as truly free alternatives to Qt and KDE. If only Qt had implemented a dual licensed model like they do now, the history of Linux's DEs would be very different.

The fact that Qt is C++ also played a role.

I have always sided with C++ in the usual C vs C++ wars, since I know the language (1993).

My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0 back in 1995, before GNOME or KDE existed and many used twm as their window manager.

Having been part of the gtkmm mailing list for a while, mainly due to my dislike on those days of Qt using moc, I can tell there were quite some heated discussions in the usual C vs C++ style.

So C guys would side with GTK, C++ with Qt and not many in the GTK world cared about us in gtkmm.

For the record, KDE was always developed by individual hackers, not a commercial entity. This continues to this day and among open source projects, KDE is still one of those most free from commercial 'interference'. GNOME, on the other hand, has been largely guided by RedHat for a long time with many of the major developers being employed by that company.

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