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KDE GUI Open Source BSD Linux

KDE Turns 19 115

Posted by samzenpus from the age-is-just-a-number dept.
prisoninmate writes: Believe it or not, it has been 19 long years since Matthias Ettrich announced his new project, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE). "Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are several nice either free or low-priced applications available so that Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI," wrote the developer back in October 14, 1996.
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KDE Turns 19 More

KDE Turns 19

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  • 1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop (Score:5, Funny)

    by tomhath ( 637240 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @07:46AM (#50734363)
    Dang, I missed it.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      19 years and they are going backwards... Soon they won't have been born, and the classics of UI can fix this mess for them.

      • As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998), nah, we're pretty good. There are some projects that are going in odd directions, but open source is showing its strengths there with people still taking a more traditional approach (ie, the Cinnamon interface in place of regular GNOME3).

        Using Linux back then was a chore - you really had to WANT to use it because the apps were lacking and the UI was downright clunky, not to mention the famed stability of Linux that

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          > As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998)

          Me, too, but in November or December, so I really managed to use Linux in '99.

          > Using Linux back then was a chore

          Not so much because of Linux IMHO. Traditional distributions were somewhat complicated to install (ahem, Slackware), but Red Hat and make everything much nicer.

          > you really had to WANT to use it because the apps were lacking and the UI was downright clunky

          I really wanted because I didn't want to

        • Oh lord yes... and don't get me started on the need to compile half the binaries you wanted/needed, not to mention the dependency chains from Hell that you occasionally stumbled across.

          Today, most binaries install with just a click or two. You don't have to beg a publisher to come out with a Linux version of something (because it's either already there, you run it with WINE, or you just run it in a VM).

          As for Linux on the Desktop? Nowadays, the "desktop" is irrelevant - outside of us geeks, hardcore gamers

        • As someone who lived through the early years of Linux (I started using It back around 1998)

          Those two facts are mutually exclusive. In 1998 you were already standing on someone's lawn.

        • I had a Linux running dual-boot with DOS 6.1/Window 3.1 on my 80486SLC home-brew machine; I later got a store bought machine with a Pentium and a free upgrade voucher for Windows95.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MouseR ( 3264 )

        19 years and it hasn't aged a bit!

    • Re:1996 was the year of Linux on the desktop (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @08:05AM (#50734449)

      The year of the the Linux Desktop will be the same year the Desktop Dies.
      Linux (kernel) actually bypassed it by taking center stage on the mobile market, with Google's ChromeOS, really only competing with Apple, and winning in numbers of units sold.
      The Desktop will stay a windows world, until Microsoft stops making windows for desktops, then people will switch to Linux as their alternative. By that point the desktop wouldn't be a profitable business, so other than being made by a group of hobbyists, the market will be dead.

      However what I don't get, is why the Linux community hasn't been pushing for dominance in the Work Station market. Those who use larger Personal Computers to do real computational work. KDE is one of the closest to offering this type of work environment. But there needs more work in multi-screen display abilities, Being able to scale windows down on the WM level and just shrink or expand the content dynamically. Faster ways to switch windows, perhaps even eye tracking where the content you are looking at is expanded, while the other windows are shrunk. Maximizing your viewing state. There is plenty of room of technology growth in the work station market, focusing less on making it so Grandma can browse the web, but more for expert users to be productive while using the computer for computational needs.

      • People keep misinterpreting the decline of the PC as a fall toward inevitable death. It's simply finding a new niche as a higher-powered computing device among the computing device spectrum. Think of the PC as the pickup trucks and full sized utility vans of the automotive world. Most people don't need them, but there's really no substitute for them with specific types of work. A smartphone, tablet, or netbook is never going to replace laptop and desktop PCs in the office, nor for anyone who actually cr

        • People keep misinterpreting the rapid increase in PC specs and the constant buying of a new $300 eMachine every 6 months as a healthy product market, and the more moderate pace of PC replacement as the death of the PC. They're also misinterpreting the boom of excessive numbers of mobile apps--mostly games--as the end of the PC industry.

          People aren't throwing computers out the window. You don't see people living without a computer in their house, only a smart phone and a Galaxy Tab to do all their comput

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            People keep misinterpreting the rapid increase in PC specs and the constant buying of a new $300 eMachine every 6 months as a healthy product market, and the more moderate pace of PC replacement as the death of the PC. They're also misinterpreting the boom of excessive numbers of mobile apps--mostly games--as the end of the PC industry.

            The rapid rise in specs really occurred in the 90s. The 2000's had increase in specs, but at a far slower pace.

            Though, there was a trend in the early 00's that everyone neede

            • I worked at Best Buy around 2005-2006, when eMachines and Gateways were selling for $300-ish, and people were bringing in 6 month old computers and refusing to pay Geek Squad $500 for repairs, and just buying new $300 eMachines with better hard drives. That jump from 200MHz to 800Mhz to 1.5Ghz to 3GHz happened earlier, but the rest of the industry was still catching up for a decade after the gigahertz wars.
        • The decline in the desktop market is just that, a decline in the market. What we had was 20 years of adoption that has since leveled off, everyone who wants one now has one. We have also reached a point at which CPU performance has so far exceeded the need of the average (non gamer, I want to pay my bills and play this here malware infested flash game, and then look up some porn) user that a Core 2 Duo machine from 6 or 7 years ago is still good enough. Typically we would call it a mature market, similar

        • Microsoft is to blame. People used to get new computers when theirs had an "old" operating system that was crudded up. Now you can install Windows 10 for free and clean out all your old cruft.

          Add to that the people converting to Linux, and you don't need new PCs to surf cat videos. Of course Windows is the main reason people convert to Linux.

      • Windows replaced Unix workstations. What Unix workstations did linux can't do, like running a 10-year-old binary, Windows can.

        Windows now has a disproportionally advanced graphics stack, while linux is still waiting for Wayland coming when, 2017? By then 18-year-olds will be facebooking, touch-wiping idiots that don't know how to use a computer. They'll laugh at you for plugging a USB stick at the computer and using a file manager.
        Weird that Wayland wasn't available in 2012 (as in selectable in the installe

        • Every time someone updates the graphics stack, I see little difference except an upheaval of software rewriting. I was there for X loadable modules, DRI, DRM, and now Wayland; it's a lot of talk for "we can already run OpenGL and have full graphics systems; we just don't have DirectX drivers, but fuck DirectX."
        • Windows is now about to die.. people are really, really going to get pi55ed off with Windows 10...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        However what I don't get, is why the Linux community hasn't been pushing for dominance in the Work Station market. Those who use larger Personal Computers to do real computational work.

        Meh, those probably fit inside the 1% Linux already has. It's the general business desktop you'd like to conquer, the one that consists of Office, Outlook and [very business-specific something]. Where the latter might be cross-platform, web application or some other fairly platform-agnostic business. But it doesn't matter because you all need to run Windows to do the basic collaboration.

      • Most desktop computers now will blow-away what were considered super-computers when KDE first came out, a Cray-1 [wikipedia.org] had 160 MFLOPS and 2MB ram, Cray X-MP [wikipedia.org] peaked at 942 MFLOPS now a reasonably modern computer, 8 Floating point ops per cycle per core * 3.4 Giga cycles per second * 4 cores = 108.8 GFLOPs, a Radeon 6990 can do over 5 TFLOPS!

        Now since most modern supercomputers run Linux, most desktops will run Linux, you can develop and test your software on low cost commodity machine, then run it on your big-iron

  • Kudos (Score:4, Insightful)

    by varag ( 714360 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @08:04AM (#50734445) Homepage

    It's come a long way and the current incarnation is robust, intuitive and quite pleasing on the eye.

  • I Didn't Realize (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I didn't realize it, until I saw this article, that I've been using KDE as my exclusive desktop since 1999.

    I've got to say that upon realizing how long it has been, I'm rather disappointed in KDE's progress. There's no doubt that there have been a lot of advances and improvements, but at the same time, it has regressed or devolved into spaghetti a fair bit.

    • Re:I Didn't Realize (Score:4, Informative)

      by Grishnakh ( 216268 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:02AM (#50735807)

      Unfortunately, part of this is a byproduct of lack of developer resources, because there's too much competition in the Linux DE space, and like most Linux projects, there aren't that many developers to begin with. Projects with high corporate interest like the kernel get lots of developer time (thanks to companies paying their employees to work on it); the kernel is used in countless embedded devices plus servers, so there's a lot of corporate backing. There isn't much corporate backing for desktop work, so we get the garbage that Red Hat shovels to us (Gnome3). Why RH doesn't want to push a DE that would work extremely well in a corporate desktop environment as a Windows replacement, I have no idea; my guess is that their management is buddy-buddy with the top Gnome devs (who also work there, and have built themselves a little empire within the company) and refuses to change course even though years and years and years of Gnome hasn't helped Red Hat penetrate the business desktop market at all.

      Anyway, add that to some lackluster leadership within KDE wherein they've pushed for new features (akonadi, nepomuk, desktop search, activities, etc.) over improving existing code, which is also a big Achilles' heel for FOSS software in general: devs prefer to work on new shiny stuff instead of making things reliable and fixing bugs, and most of these devs are unpaid so the effect is much worse. Proprietary software isn't immune to this (new features sell software, bug-fixes and reliability improvements do not), but it can be worse in FOSS depending on who's involved in the project.

      • No mod points, but: "Hear! Hear!"

  • KHTML! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15, 2015 @08:33AM (#50734565)

    While we celebrate, add to this that KDE extended its reach to a huge fraction of the online world with the KHTML rendering engine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mccalli ( 323026 )
      For those that don't know, KHTML formed the basis of Webkit, and so then formed Safari on the Mac/iOS and for a long time powered Chrome as well. It caused a minor storm when Apple picked that over Gecko, which had been what people assumed would have been picked.

      Yes, I agree with the AC above - KHTML has had huge impact, probably wider impact than the KDE project itself, purely because it dominated mobile browsing for so long.

    • For those who don't know, KHTML was used and modified by Apple, and became "WebKit", which is the rendering engine used in Safari, iOS, and all the Chrome-related browsers.

  • I used it! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anna Merikin ( 529843 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @08:39AM (#50734597) Journal

    My first permanent Linux installation (permanent in the sense that I wound up keeping and using it instead of Windows) was Caldera Open Linux 1.0. which shipped with KDE-1.0. Finding its limitations quickly, I moved to Red Hat 6.2 (KDE 1.1) and compiled each new KDE release from source until v. 3. I then switched to Knoppix and Mepis (Debian), still using KDE. I now use 4.x on Mint-14.04-3. For a short time, I tried XFCE, but returned to the integration of KDE.

    KDE still looks and acts pretty much the same now as it used to, just moreso.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gilboad ( 986599 )

      My story is quite similar:
      Started using Linux on my backup box (Debian and then RH) in ~95/96. Never took it seriously.
      In mid 2000, my main OS was Windows 2K and XP (beta) and I began to lose faith in the MS-way. At the same time, RH 6.2 was released and for the first time, it really looked like a real OS and I suddenly found myself spending less time using my main Windows 2K/XP box and more time using my backup RH 6.2 box.

      When RH 7 was released, I deleted the XP beta partition, moved Windows 2K to backup b

  • When you have a hammer (Score:3)

    by Grand Facade ( 35180 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @09:01AM (#50734691)

    Everything looks like a nail.

    No one feature is going to jack Linux into mainstream.

    What has propelled Linux to it's current position is price point and versatility.

    The ability to fold spindle and mutilate an OS as desired.

    I fear elevation to mainstream would be its demise.

    More is better is marketspeak for more money, I think Linux is pretty great right now.

    • I disagree. Currently, Linux desktop share (in reality, not just looking at sales numbers which of course is idiotic since most people install Linux themselves rather than buying a PC with it pre-installed) is tiny, and has very little visibility. It's hard to say exactly how small it is, but it's not likely to be have more users than MacOSX. Anyway, as a consequence the availability of applications is rather poor, which prevents more people, who would like to switch, from adopting it because they rely o

      • I disagree. Currently, Linux desktop share (in reality, not just looking at sales numbers which of course is idiotic since most people install Linux themselves rather than buying a PC with it pre-installed) is tiny, and has very little visibility. It's hard to say exactly how small it is, but it's not likely to be have more users than MacOSX.

        If NetMarketShare [netmarketshare.com] is to be believed, and if measuring based on Web access is good enough, Linux has about a 1.74% share and OS X has about 7.72%.

        Anyway, as a consequence the availability of applications is rather poor, which prevents more people, who would like to switch, from adopting it because they rely on certain proprietary apps (usually business-related).

        It'd be nice to have better marketshare, maybe around 25%, because then there'd be much better support.

        Well, just 7.72% might get you the level of support OS X has (which, from a desktop point of view, includes Microsoft Office and Quicken, for example), although Linux might need a bit more to encourage developers to add it as a platform. My pure worth-every-cent-you-paid-for-it guess would be that something in the range of 10-to-15% would be sufficient, but 25% wo

        • A real Linux user will not download an app.

          They will just write a script!

        • Binary compatibility shouldn't be a problem on Linux, assuming you're using the same architecture as was built for (e.g., 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86, etc.). The problem is libraries: open-source stuff always links to a lot of libraries which are included with the distros, so you can't easily just take a binary from one distro and run it on another, because the libs won't match up.

          For proprietary stuff, this shouldn't be a problem: they just need to statically link everything. I'm pretty sure that's how actual

          • Binary compatibility shouldn't be a problem on Linux, assuming you're using the same architecture as was built for (e.g., 32-bit x86, 64-bit x86, etc.). The problem is libraries: open-source stuff always links to a lot of libraries which are included with the distros, so you can't easily just take a binary from one distro and run it on another, because the libs won't match up.

            Yes, by "Linux" I meant "full Linux distribution", not just "Linux kernel".

            For proprietary stuff, this shouldn't be a problem: they just need to statically link everything. I'm pretty sure that's how actual proprietary software on Linux is distributed (there is some out there, you know; most of it is really high-end stuff).

            Probably because all they can count on being binary-compatible between distributions is the kernel. Some might prefer not to have to statically link everything, but that's not the way it works in Linuxland.

            (That is the way it works in OS X and, as far as I know, Solaris; for SunOS, all the way back to SunOS 4.0, the idea was that the ABI was expressed in terms of calls to dynamically-linked library routines, not system calls, and t

  • Why do you like KDE? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LichtSpektren ( 4201985 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @09:27AM (#50734867)
    I'm curious to hear from some KDE fans. In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?), and I have found Plasma to be gaudy and bloated compared to MATE and Xfce. But that's just me. Any reasons why KDE is so great, beyond its vast customizability?

    • I like the look and functionality. I could give two shits about the rest of the other programs that are all poor copies of one another.

    • Re:Why do you like KDE? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15, 2015 @09:58AM (#50735139)

      Customizability is one of the important things to me about KDE, which has been my only regular desktop since 2007.
      I like things to look my way, and I like to be able to change them. I'm still on 4; 5 doesn't have enough customization ready yet.
      I love Konqueror; it's my primary web browser and my only file manager. They haven't monkeyed with its UI like Firefox and Chromium; it still looks like a browser. It has built-in adblocking and user agent switching. I also adore Kate, which is my only answer in the text editor holy war. It's so extensible, and I use other tools built on it, like KDevelop and Kile.
      I'm a big fan of KTorrent, Clementine, Okular, Tellico, K3b, and I do use some of the Calligra tools.
      Every once in a while I'll be running a program that brings up the ugly ugly GNOME/Gtk file chooser dialog box, and I'll wonder why anyone is not using KDE.

      • Will they throw away KDE 5 (that they say you can't call KDE 5) when it's done and replace it with KDE 6?
        That puts me off :)
        Gnome 2 has stayed the same (with a rename to Mate) whereas KDE had two transitions during that time.

        A desktop should last 10 years, or even 15 years.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bvimo ( 780026 )
          A few years ago Gnome 2 became Gnome 3 which sparked a fork and KDE3 still exists today it's called Trinity Desktop. I guess there will be a KDE4 fork. I can't be bothered with the KDE Software Compilation or whatever it's called, it's just KDE to me.

          /me is a happy Trinity user

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      oh god, I cant even where to start...

      konsole is perfect
      much more options (customization as you call it)
      klipper FTW!
      amarok!
      k3b
      file manager is also perfect
      its dense environment if you know what i mean (no meaningless white space around everything on desktop)

      as of browser, I use chrome

      I use kde from version 2.0 and yes, it was shit then (slow as hell). But version 3.0 forward was really great. I periodicaly tried xfce and gnome, but just dont like it.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Amarok used to be awesome. Clementine still is.

    • I have it the exact opposite way. I find KDE apps superior to any other alternatives in most respects.

      Krusader and Dolphin for file-management are better than anything else I know. Superb integration like packing or unpacking files or encrypt them or enque them in Amarok etc.

      Kmail, and the entire PIM suite with calendars and contact management is better than anything else I have tried.

      Konqueror isn't bad at all, and much faster and lightweight than Firefox. The absolute main reason why I use Firefox as my m

      • Personally I don't really like XFCE; almost no desktop integration and no apps, inferior file-management and a UI metaphor that reminds me too much of Win 3.11. IMHO Plasma beats in every aspect when it comes to virtual desktops, shifting between programs, program services and app integration.

        LOL, I installed Win95 on a Win3.11 and was happy as a clam, then I got a machine with a clean install of Win95 and I was all WTF happened to my beloved file-manager Windows! I could set everything up the way I wanted in file-manager! At the time dual-booting between Win3.11 and Linux with TWM was pretty painless.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Compare gedit (shudder) to kedit or kate, for example. (Of course, developers probably use editors with more features. But that's not an even comparison).
      Compare Konsole with Gnome's Terminal. Yikes.
      Okular vs evince.

      Gnome interfaces just suck. Heck, even the save/open file dialog in Gnome programs sucks so bad, it's incredible.

      • These have Mate forks, perhaps unsurprisingly. Gedit becomes pluma, evince is atril, and then mate-terminal.
        There is also the evince 2.32 build for Windows, useful as it just works with a clean UI and is really free.

        I happen to like these tools but it's simply what I'm used to. I use mate-terminal with the menu bar disabled (really gnome-terminal 2.x), one amongst the family of libvte terminals (xfce4-terminal, lxterminal, roxterm...) that feels very slightly better than the others.
        Here a screenshot of plum

    • In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?)

      I guess that might be true if by "universally" you mean only Calliga and Konqueror and ignore the rest of KDE's applications. As others have mentioned, Kate, Konsole, Dolphin, KMail, KTorrent, KWallet, etc. are among the best applications of their kinds.

      I'm also a big fan of the fact that nearly every KDE application (as well as Plasma) has a keyboard shortcuts screen in the settings. You can assign any keyboard shortcut you want to pretty much any action that you can do in the application.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fnj ( 64210 )

      I'm curious to hear from some KDE fans. In my experience, the K applications are almost universally inferior to other free counterparts (who uses Calliga Suite over LibreOffice? Konqueror over Firefox/Chromium?)

      News flash. Who doesn't use the premier standalone apps in preference to bundled apps? WTH is your point? It applies equally to KDE and GNOME, except GNOME doesn't have anywhere near the richness of bundled apps.

      One exception is Kate. Kate is far superior to any other general purpose GUI editor.

      I hav

    • My main reason is KWin (the window manager). It's not about the apps to me, it's about the overall system, including the window manager, the configuration tools, etc. I can configure my desktop to my liking, without having to jump through hoops or do it all over again every time the DE gets a version number bump (unlike Gnome).

      Almost no one actually uses Konqueror any more, we all use Firefox or Chromium. Same with LibreOffice. KDE doesn't prevent you from running non-KDE apps. However, you cherry-pick

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by myrdos2 ( 989497 )

      I'm a KDE fan because I believe that the desktop should let me run programs and switch between them. That means I want a real start menu, a task bar, and windowed programs that can be resized or closed. I should also be able to fully configure the computer, including networking, sound, wireless, screen brightness, add users, etc. Also it shouldn't crash and corrupt its own configuration files.

      I can get all of that with KDE, so I use it. Most other desktops, including Windows and Unity, make the basic tasks

    • ... Any reasons why KDE is so great, beyond its vast customizability?...

      KDE is my favorite UI on any OS I've used, and that includes Windows, OSX, Android, etc.

      I don't always use the additional KDE applications, and yes, I usually use the more mainstream ones like LibreOffice and Firefox. However many of those KDE apps are actually pretty good, and they provide reasonable alternatives which are nice to have.

      It doesn't really matter though, because I use KDE primarily for the actual desktop environment itself. In additional to a really excellent desktop UI (launcher, taskbar,

    • I can understand your confusion, since you're conflating applications with the desktop. I started out on GNOME, but moved to KDE back when it was at version 1.44. I found the desktop look and feel to be vastly more pleasing than GNOME, Konqueror to be tremendously more functional and polished than whatever GNOME was using at the time, and KDE's customizability to be worlds more advanced than GNOME.

      I absolutely love all of Plasma's bells and whistles, and get quite annoyed when they crash. One of my favor

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      1) KIO
      Use sftp://yourserver/yourfile EVERYWHERE. kwrite, kate, calligra, kolourpaint ... the programmer does not need to know about the cool kio-slaves, he just loads an input stream. kdelibs do the rest
      2) KParts
      reusable components. KDEs PIM-Suite is just a wrapper about the kparts of kmail, korganizer, ...
      3) Everything's integrated. Everything works with each other inside the ecosystem, not like other desktops, which choose programs from a lot of environments. This starts at the same look everywhere, goes

  • I was most impressed with Konqueror, did everything you wanted to do (with plugins), unlike Microsoft Active Desktop ..

  • Kraptastic! (Score:3)

    by maestroX ( 1061960 ) on Thursday October 15, 2015 @11:34AM (#50736119)
    I vividly remember my Klamath choking and Fireball trashing all over the place when the library dependencies pulled in
    as konsole was trying to start (I was wary of loading a whole window system, this was C++ you know).

    I wept many tears and bled my eyes on the bulky pixel-fear-inducing window that appeared
    and burnt into my 15" aquarium after minutes seeming hours.

    The experience reminded me of the furious Emacs vs. VI battles, yet Emacs seemed to fly on the machine.

    Obviously, I was reminded at some newsgroup or other to use better compile options, as gcc 2.7.2 was *really*
    not up to par with other c++ compilers or standards these days, how could I expect anything else?

    So I spent days figuring out how to tune and compile the latest PGCC with the greatest options ever. Really.
    I made sure anything binary that would come out of the compiler would be stripped, framepointer-ommitted,
    loop-unwinded, MMX-enabled, -ftry-harder and optimized with -O9999 (if unfamiliar, just imagine the
    greatest bbq sauce recipe in existence).

    After this excruciating and cumbersome process, if fed the compiler source to the newly built compiler until
    I was satisfied and sure *nothing* unoptimized was escaping my toolchain. Then I repeated this process to
    assure my conscience; you know, these nights punch holes in your confidence.

    And again. I was relentless and unforgiving, no 386 opcode would be left in favor of 586 optimization.
    After that, I spent nearly the same time on LFS'ing and kernel-tuning my system on another partition with this übertoolchain.

    I can honestly say the system booted and flied -- it flied like a rocket.
    Rodney McKay would agonize in self-pity at the sight of it.

    Were any Stampede or Gentoo developer to see this, it would wet their pants
    and send them home crying for mommy. I'm pretty sure one of my fellow CS students
    quit shortly afterwards and took up a job at the local grocery store.

    I could pipe /dev/hda to X11 emacs and have responsive parenthesis matching at the same time!

    Then, confident but modest, started konsole on a prompt:

    % konsole
    Segmentation fault (signal 11)

    After that I dumped the computer only to discover some time after the kid next door used it to play Hind on Windows98.
    I'm sure there's some point in this story but I'm sure as hell not touching KDE to unbury it out of my brain.

  • At work, we finally transitioned away from KDE when we upgraded to RHEL6, due to the poor implementation of KDE4. Gnome, for all its warts, works and works well. Hell, even on RHEL7 if you run gnome in classic mode it retains its simplicity and most importantly a lack of support issues which KDE was notorious for.

    We can't be the only ones who had challenges with KDE, so how is it still even relevant?

  • It was great - I've considered attempting to compile it on a modern system. I've stayed up with modern KDE but 1.x worked exactly as it should have, didn't have a lot of overhead, and was incredibly usable.

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