KDE at 30

https://kde.org/anniversaries/30/

by Kye • 2 months ago

247 121 2 months ago

kde.org

Kye3• 2 months ago

The master of ceremonies is a proper creature: https://floss.social/@kde/116673618808097094

edit: I appreciate the quality of discussion below, so far.

chekibreki3• 2 months ago

I lament the times when open source projects were open source software projects instead of political platforms for people who arrogantly think that their private political opinion is important enough to overshadow the project they participate in.

This will undoubtedly create tensions and will lead to fewer donations, thus having a negative impact on KDE.

graypegg2• 2 months ago

With all due respect: it is just a picture of a cute lizard.

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.

stusmall2• 2 months ago

Honestly, when was open source not political? Look at early GNU writing. The topics have change but it being political absolutely have not.

voidfunc• 2 months ago

I used to think this way but with the rise of fascism pretty much everywhere I think it's important to know what I am consuming and what they support now.

Is it perfect? No. Does it piss some people off? Probably, and I don't care.

Also it's a cute fucking lizard.

steve1977• 2 months ago

For many people open source is political.

mhurron• 2 months ago

open source software projects instead of political platforms

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

enragedcacti• 2 months ago

It's Pride Month and the organization is doing Pride things, its not that complicated.

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.

sham13• 2 months ago

The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?

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.

basisword• 2 months ago

Since when was someone's gender or sexuality a "political opinion"?

scottlamb• 2 months ago

I admit I might roll my eyes a bit if the first thing I ever learned about KDE were its mascot's pronouns. But...

* 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.

pelagicAustral• 2 months ago

I will donate my entire pension if they make it so I can have a Windows 2000 theme that actually works and doesnt require me to hack a dozen files each time they push and update.

Gualdrapo• 2 months ago

I think you will be able to achieve that when Union is released. I hate SVG theming in Plasma so much that I root for Union to be successful

hparadiz• 2 months ago

Have an agent do it and have it write out what it did to an md file as guidance for each update. To be fair though if you configure things correctly it should never break. Mine hasn't been broken in years.

iLoveOncall• 2 months ago

I feel quite repulsed by the fact that the first thing you see when opening the post is a huge donation card.

Kye3• 2 months ago

I want to see KDE still improving and keeping up in another 30 years. To me it's no different from a telethon for PBS or a poster for Friends of the Library. Intrusive? From a certain point of view, but it pays the bills.

sgc• 2 months ago

I used to feel that way about prominent banners / cards. Then I tried to get donations on my own site and until I became hyper-aggressive I never received even a dollar. It was frankly disheartening. Now, it is not yet sustainable but at least moving in the right direction. In other words, they really have no choice.

0x1ceb00da2• 2 months ago

How much do you donate?

Rooster61• 2 months ago

My tolerance for donation begging is directly proportional to how A) non-evil the thing is asking for the donations and B) how much utility I get out of said thing. KDE, personally, falls squarely into the "By all means, beg" category. I use their stuff every day for free, and their hard work deserves recompense.

sph• 2 months ago

This comment is like that 'no take, only throw' meme.

I want free software. Don't ask for donations, just give me free software.

F3nd04• 2 months ago

It's impressive for the project to have come so far. Between the oversimplified, hyper-opinionated GNOME, the rock-solid but dull and minimal XFCE, the nostalgic MATE, and whatever Enlightenment is doing these days, it’s nice to have a continually polished, modern, well-integrated yet customisable experience like KDE, even today. And save for Akonadi (which just never seems to work reliably, rendering software like KMail useless), it’s been a pretty stable one for me, too. Here’s to another 30 years!

datakan4• 2 months ago

My first love was WindowMaker :)

F3nd04• 2 months ago

Window Maker is still really cool! Not a full desktop environment, though. I tried using it with GNUstep for a while, but while the base libraries are apparently still actively developed and maintained, a lot of the applications are antiquated, and they’re very hard to make blend in with EFL/GTK/Tk/Qt apps.

Sometimes I wonder what the desktop landscape would look like today if that branch of software gained wider adoption in the free software communities. :-)

ACS_Solver3• 2 months ago

One of the most impressive and useful free software projects. My first experience was being totally confused by KDE 1 during my first attempts to use Linux, and I'm writing this from my KDE desktop.

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).

datakan4• 2 months ago

I remember when it first came out. Very impressive at the time. I was never a fan though personally, I always hated the look of KDE. I used it recently on CachyOS for fun and it worked great, just not for me visually. I'm glad it exists, I just wish there was something visually appealing with less settings bloat. It feels like going to a diner with 300 items on the menu and they're all sorta half baked.

LandoCalrissian2• 2 months ago

I agree it's really impressive, it brings a lot of things together into a cohesive package and experience. I'm a huge evangelist, I think it's the best desktop experience.

kombine3• 2 months ago

I think it's the best desktop experience.

Not just in the Linux world, it's also far better than Windows and macOS.

wiz21c• 2 months ago

I've been using KDE for the last 30 years I guess but somehow never used KolourPaint until to 2 weeks go. That's the first "pain" program that is usable to do simple things. Gimp is waaaaay to complex for simple tasks (especially the selection which I've never understood). Congrats KolourPaint team for KISS.

ACS_Solver3• 2 months ago

I have zero artistic inclination so 90% of image manipulation I do is simple resize/scale/draw line operations, with the remaining 10% being some sort of select+move operation to show mockups, adding transparency or something on that level of complexity. I have GIMP installed and respect it, but as any "real" editor it's too complex for me. KolourPaint does the simple operations I need, with fundamentally the same UI as Win 3.1 pbrush.exe had.

KolourPaint fills a small niche but does it very well.

MegaDeKay• 2 months ago

Konsole and Spectacle deserve a shoutout as well. Konsole for its flexibility and feature set while remaining really performant, and Snapshot for being just so darn handy for both screenshots and screen captures.

ACS_Solver3• 2 months ago

Konsole is so good I forget about it, it's just my usual terminal. Once they added the split feature, it became pretty damn near perfect.

kombine3• 2 months ago

I used Konsole for years and it's great but since switching to Neovim as a primary editor I also switched to Kitty terminal which is in its own league. Kitty is the only one that I substituted the core KDE app for.

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

Talk from Grazer Linuxtage conf earlier this year:

KDE: 30 years of the Linux desktop

https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-691-kde-30-years-of-the-linux-d...

tycoon666• 2 months ago

KDE beta2 was my first.

badsectoracula• 2 months ago

I don't really use Plasma itself (and soon i wont even be able to if the rumors of them dropping X11 support are to be believed) but i do use various KDE apps, like Krita (which i use for most painting stuff), Kate (my main programming editor, coupled with clangd for C/C++ programming), KolourPaint, Spectacle, Ghostwriter, etc and in general i find KDE/Qt apps to be more to my liking in their UX than anything based on Gtk (or at least Gtk3-or-later, Gtk2 stuff is for the most part fine).

datakan4• 2 months ago

They aren't dropping X11, they are only dropping it in their new login manager. Change the login manager and it will continue to work fine for now.

c-hendricks• 2 months ago

They do plan to remove X11 from Plasma Desktop as well: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...

discreteevent• 2 months ago

Quick, clean and easy to use. I've only been using it for a year but I'm definitely not going back.

sqircles• 2 months ago

I have long held a bias of KDE being the clunky and slow option from trial in the ~early-oughts. Within the past month or so I installed it to give it a spin and haven't switched back to XFCE since. It strikes a good balance of customization / speed / taste / and just working out of the box. Thanks KDE team!

cogman103• 2 months ago

If you are someone that mostly likes the Windows 7/10 experience, KDE out of the box is basically that. It's more customizable. It's (IMO) less clunky and less burdened by legacy components. But it really just feels like windows used to feel like.

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.

floxy2• 2 months ago

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).

poolnoodle2• 2 months ago

I must be doing something wrong. On my old i5 6200u Laptop with 8 gigs of RAM fedora kde takes ages to boot and system operation is definitely more sluggish than Windows 10 used to be.

solid_fuel• 2 months ago

But also just fast and low memory.

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.

LandoCalrissian2• 2 months ago

Love KDE, I think plasma is really great. KDE connect is a program I think people sleep on, I use it all the time.

0x1ceb00da2• 2 months ago

It's embarrassing how much better kdeconnect is on windows than the official microsoft offering.

thom2• 2 months ago

It feels to me that a lot of the bigger ideas in KDE fell away over the years. In the 2000s I would log in every morning, open a KWord doc in one Konqueror tab, a KSpread sheet in another, and some browser tabs alongside them, then I'd launch Kate and open some files over SSH or FTP and get to work. It felt like someone had really embraced OO and applied it to every part of the desktop, and I assume something like KParts and KIOSlaves still exist. But for the most part, I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works. I am grateful that it hasn't been dumbed down quite as much as GNOME over the years, but I hope they have a few bold experiments left in them (and would love to hear what I'm missing if it's already there!)

lallysingh• 2 months ago

All the development action went to the web. Dolphin's still pretty awesome.

andrewgodwin• 2 months ago

I still find a decent amount of the integration, like KIO, is still there and works well - it puts MacOS and Windows to shame in terms of how I can just interact with files anywhere as if they're native within KDE apps.

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.

johannes1234321• 2 months ago

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 ...

caycep• 2 months ago

it kind of vaguely reminds me of the OpenDoc concept although tbh I didn't really understand what Apple was describing at the time

fragmede• 2 months ago

KDE-connect is my preferred cross-platform local clipboard/file/whatever sharing program when venture out of a walled garden

handzhiev• 2 months ago

Still using Kate for all of my coding

AhCoonu7• 2 months ago

I feel the same. A lot of big projects fell by way side over time for various reasons. Goes with the nature of experiments, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

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.

xorcist• 2 months ago

maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of chrome is a tall ask these days
maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of konqueror is a tall ask these days

FTFY

The_President• 2 months ago

Kmail worked great for years then one update akondai would no longer sync and that was the end of it.

PurpleRamen2• 2 months ago

KDE4 killed too much momentum; many promising features and apps disappeared for whatever reason or slowly faded out into irrelevance. Stuff like KIOSlaves is still around, but never really evolved beyond what it was 20 years ago.

calvinmorrison2• 2 months ago

Well, Trinity Desktop is alive and kicking and is a fork of the 3.5.12 series. over 16 years of steady releases now.

thom2• 2 months ago

And in case this comes off too negative, I don’t think anyone has mentioned KStars, my favourite KDE app for many years. All my early Linux experiences were eye opening and mind expanding about what computers could be, but somehow none more than that.

liotier2• 2 months ago

I use KDE now as a bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works

"bog standard boring Linux desktop that just works" is a low key major achievement - I love it !

Hugsbox• 2 months ago

Yep, I'm past my days of wanting my OS to be "exciting" :) now boring and functional is king.

gritspants• 2 months ago

I hope someone comes along with a better recollection than I have. When KDE 1 came out there were some bitter licensing discussions on /. and elsewhere, largely regarding Qt. I had high hopes for Enlightenment and later Gnome but they mostly seemed to fail.

foresto• 2 months ago

I'm not sure what you're trying to recall, but regarding Qt licensing, perhaps you'll find this interesting:

https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

NoboruWataya• 2 months ago

It's been a long time since I've used KDE but I have fond memories of it. When I first started using Linux I was impressed by how integrated and polished it was. A lot of the KDE-branded software was high quality, too (I remember Akregator and Kate in particular). It seemed to me, at the time, the best introduction to Linux for someone coming from Windows. That must have been about 20 years ago(!). I've since come to prefer a more lightweight and minimalist setup but it's great to see KDE still going strong.

trostaft2• 2 months ago

Truthfully, I like the more opinionated visual design of GNOME, but I moved to KDE long ago for VRR and better fractional scaling support. They just got it right and working. Huge props to the team, I know that's very difficult.

EDIT: On a side note, is anyone informed about the state of VRR + fractional scaling + general gaming on GNOME? Has it gotten better?

paulbgd• 2 months ago

Yep, I do all of those on gnome without issues now. HDR too!

trostaft2• 2 months ago

Fantastic! It might be time for me to give it a shot again.

newsoftheday3• 2 months ago

Please do not drop X11 in Kubuntu, Wayland performs poorly and weirdly. X11 rocks.

Pooge2• 2 months ago

I really don't understand the complaints about Wayland. When the switch was made I wouldn't even have noticed it if I didn't read the blog.

Are you using an Nvidia GPU?

newsoftheday3• 2 months ago

I am using nVidia yes. I've preferred their GPU's for a long time for gaming.

vitorsr• 2 months ago

I recently installed Fedora Kinoite [1] and I have been very pleasantly surprised by how stable and performant it is. I am afraid I cannot say the same for their new KDE Linux distribution [2] which in my opinion was a bit unpolished at the time. Both are immutable desktop distributions.

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.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

[2] https://linux.kde.org/

[3] https://flathub.org/en/apps/collection/developer/KDE/1

adityamwagh3• 2 months ago

KDE Linux is not supposed to be used as your regular distribution.

bjoli• 2 months ago

I also went fedora-based and installed kinoite and then rebased on Aurora. I am extremely happy. I fell in love with Immutable linux with aeon, but I had so many weird issues with gnome that I ended up having to switch back to KDE.

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.

swordzen• 2 months ago

Apple's Safari was built on top Konqueror / KHTML. KDE deserves a lot of credit. I still use Konsole a lot.

lowleveldesign• 2 months ago

A bit tangential, but can you recommend any GUI applications for monitoring the system? The KDE's defualt system monitor is a bit heavy and does not provide much insights. I switched to Linux some time ago as my main system, but I miss a tool such as System Informer [1].

[1] https://www.systeminformer.com/

canelonesdeverd• 2 months ago

Resources and Mission Center are really good.

adityamwagh3• 2 months ago

Yeah they are great, I love them. But then purists would want a QT app instead of a GTK one :)

oldtimefighter• 2 months ago

Tux Manager

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.

pmkary• 2 months ago

Their design is getting too sterile and grey. I was a bit sad of seeing the screenshots.

nailer• 2 months ago

KDE is the ultimate "lost the battle won the war" story.

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.

MaxBarraclough• 2 months ago

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.

Conscat• 2 months ago

Does anyone else miss KWrite? I had it configured as a very slightly more advanced Notepad.exe clone. I really enjoyed opening it for quickly writing out thoughts that crowd my ADHD brain, and I feel like the full Kate takes much longer to open up and looks much much heavier and emotionally oppressive for what I want to do.

doubled112• 2 months ago

KWrite still exists. Just install it.

cassepipe• 2 months ago

I tried KDE 5 years ago and frankly I was a bit lost. Too many options and too many papercuts. Still better that the dumbed down GNOME experience but I went for Cinnamon instead.

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.

adityamwagh3• 2 months ago

It’s my favourite desktop environment. Simply love it and doesn’t get in my way!

bobajeff• 2 months ago

Just adding my respect for the team behind KDE. I left KDE for more resource friendly desktops and window managers around the KDE 4 transition. Then in the last couple of years came back. It's definitely the most feature complete and sane option for Linux desktops.

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.

geokon• 2 months ago

I use KDE and really have no complaints, but I'm a bit surprised it's still being actively developed (or is it really?). All the C++ programmers I've known have moved on to other languages. I'm surprised there is a large enough group of people willing to write old OO code in their spare time (and this is a weird mix of QT/KDE, so even more icky boiler plate than usual)

Kye3• 2 months ago

C++ is still among the top languages.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...

kombine3• 2 months ago

There is an initiative to bring Rust as an application development language for KDE

zerozerotwo• 2 months ago

It’s still the koolest desktop

froh• 2 months ago

I wonder how that parallel universe would have looked like where the gnome part of Xamarin inside Novell would have partied with the kde guys at SUSE towards shared components.

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...

liotier2• 2 months ago

Early KDE made no sense for me - I went Gnome, then migrated to xfce in disgust... I saw myself using an increasing number of KDE applications (I was impressed by Dolphin and Kate), I thought I might as well go the whole way and setup my Debian with KDE. I was immediately awed by the sane defaults and how everything is a mutable parameter... KDE Plasma is my dream desktop nowadays !

KDE at 30

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