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KDE at 30

kde.org

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Re: KDE at 30

#111

Post by thom »

thom wrote: post #50

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 KP…

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.

Re: KDE at 30

#112

Post by caycep »

andrewgodwin wrote: post #54
thom wrote: post #50

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 KP…

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.

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

Re: KDE at 30

#113

Post by floxy »

cogman10 wrote: post #103
floxy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

At least part of this is going to be the resolutions at play. In windows 95 era you were dealing with 640x480 resolutions. Maybe 1024x768. Modern displays are doing a lot more than that. 1920x1080 at a minimum. 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.

1024x768 was super common place. 800x600 next in line. I would say that 640x480 was uncommon for Windows 95. I had been running 24-bit graphics with Windows 3.1. No way that 16 bit color only became popular with Windows98. Even SVGA 1027x768x8 was limited to 256 distinct color on the screen at a time, but the palette was dynamic, and the lookup table was into 18-bit RGB space.

Re: KDE at 30

#115

Post by bjoli »

vitorsr wrote: post #73

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 pro…

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.

Re: KDE at 30

#116

Post by Kye »

geokon wrote: post #110

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)

C++ is still among the top languages.

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

Re: KDE at 30

#117

Post by calvinmorrison »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #109
calvinmorrison wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn't Trinity just maintenance and small improvements of KDE3? I don't remember to have heard about any revolutionary changes, or even just significant evolutionary improvements.

Definitely not revolutionary. Plenty of evolutionary changes - because linux itself has changed. the last major release brought

- LUKS encrypted disk support desktop-wide, - storage device hot plug/unplug - new Bluetooth GUI (tdebluez) - new media player (kplayer), - PulseAudio support - window tiling

Re: KDE at 30

#118

Post by scottlamb »

chekibreki wrote: post #3
Kye wrote: post #2

The master of ceremonies is a proper creature: https://floss.social/@kde/116673618808097094 edit: I appreciate the quality of discussion below, so far.

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.

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.

Re: KDE at 30

#119

Post by kombine »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #87
ACS_Solver wrote: post #27

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 hig…

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.

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.

Re: KDE at 30

#120

Post by kombine »

geokon wrote: post #110

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)

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