Total KDE fan and that's all I run at home. It's an interesting study also in desktop environment and software written in C++ and just how hard it is to get something that works for most people. Mistakes, corrections, building the basic blocks like Qt in the early days and keeping a bunch of people with differing cultures / tastes / backgrounds/needs motivated to make it better every day - fascinating achievement.
Thank you KDE folks - I contribute in terms of bug reports and attempts at fixes sometimes but this time I am signing up for a monthly donation - I encourage people to do what they can to keep a good thing going! https://kde.org/donate/
Agreed. I'm a late-comer to KDE, having used Linux for over 20 years but only switched to KDE in the past year. Too many annoying design decisions in GNOME and I got sick of wasting time configuring the trendy minimalist WMs. I find KDE to be a breath of fresh air. It's got sensible defaults, gets out of my way for the most part, and it's improved a lot since I last tried it in the mid-2000s.
Im a KDE user since the early Plasma 5 days, which is now more than a decade ago. It's awesome, usable, configurable, sleek and fun!
A week ago I bought a cheap mini-htpc and put Plasma Bigscreen on it, using a phone with KDEconnect as remote. So easy to use! So much better than AndroidTV let alone proprietary crap.
Yeah, additionally anyone at Microsoft that keeps throwing out half usable COM frameworks for C++ should spend some time with KParts, KIO and Qt D-Bus bindings, maybe they would finally learn how to properly design one.
KDE is how desktops should be. 'The Year of the Linux' is NOW, a few years ago. Linux and KDE have given me not only freedom over my own hardware, but freedom over how I interact with my desktops. Once you know the shortcuts, things become so much more fun. Much love to the KDE team.
I am a bit prod of having seen the original post looking for volunteers to build a Kool Desktop Environment. I was obsessively reading Usenet groups at the time. And I remember there were quite early betas published, I did not run them at first, but I remember much enthusiasm about it. So I feel familiar with the beginnings although I never participated in the project development-wise. All the way up to KDE 4 I was quite close to the project as a user. But since KDE 4 was so unstable and buggy, I left it around that time. This is also around the time when the documentary makes a big jump ahead chronologically.
I feel the documentary explains less what happened the last 10-15 years. I recall Trolltech and Qt underwent a series of acquisitions. How is KDE and Qt developed now? Who are the main contributors and sponsors? Any big backers? This information I felt missing.
Good to know, thanks. I was more involved in KDE in the past years, but I don't have that amount of time now, so I missed these things, I believe.
However, KDE rocks. My colleagues called me "a maniac" once when they see how I use that thing (i.e. Dolphin + KIO + fast window switches + multiple desktops).
I joined as a user at one point during the kde3 days, powerful apps like Amarok 1.4, k3b and konqueror with all kinds of crazy kio-slaves were the ones that really gave me pause on the boot screen and kept tipping me over towards mandrake instead of WinXP ("why can't it be that simple and as well integrated, why do I need so many ad-hoc shareware to do every basic thing like burning/ripping CDs, mounting ISOs, transcoding audio, sending it to my MP3 player").
The KDE4 days were rough, by then I had jumped over to fedora, and that one didn't shy away from shipping very early and unstable versions of it. That had me hopping for alternative DEs, I seriously tried several (and stuck for a while with some) of the minimalistic ones (enlightenment, XFCE, ...) and quickly ended up depending on either KWin, and/or some battery/networking/disks applet from plasma, or configuring something via systemsettings. The plasma desktop itself is fine (I don't mind it so much, I'm not crazy about shell theming and customisations, I do love my global menu on top, though), but what sells KDE for me is all the clever ancillary stuff that makes it "smart and usable" (dealing with Bluetooth, network setup, local and remote drives, audio output, ...), that's where the "environment" metaphor kicks in and elevates the experience above that of a "desktop shell".
Back then whenever I had a chance to try a distro with KDE 4, the Crash Handler window would pop after doing stupidest and simplest things within the desktop. Gnome 3 wasn't any better - it was more stable but departing from desktop metaphor to this mobile-desktop hybrid made me avoid it and pick Xfce instead. Which is shame because KDE4 despite the problems looked really well (and still does); I once said here that it had this "younger sister of Vista's Aero" vibe. It's really cool that they managed to bring Oxygen theme back.
I also left Kde at the 4.0 time, and for a while was on Mac OS X, but nowadays I've given up on desktop environments - I just use xmonad and dmenu, and a mishmash of apps that serve my needs. I got tired of getting used to new/different affordances every few months/years.
Been using for over 20 years now. KDE is really the best. Consistent between releases, stable, infinitely customizable, but works great out of the box with features you'd expect and often years ahead of the commercial competition in terms of new features. Every moment I spend in macos or windows for work is pure torture.
I used the betas, KDE 1-3, skipped 4 an 5, and I'm now back on the 6 train. It's really nice, and I try to use something else every now and then and I'm back in KDE a few weeks after.
What I really like right now with 6 is the updates: you kind of don't even notice. Things just work better and faster. Your system works the same as yesterday, updates are not a biggie at all.
I love reading "This week in KDE" on KDE's blog, it's just a cool list of small incremental imrpovements each week, along with credit to MR authors.
I really enjoy that it showcases all the work that goes into making a desktop actually good, even the small things you bearly notice, things like "When a grouped Task Manager task is flashing to get your attention, opening its group popup now reveals which specific window wanted attention. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #4225)"
A change doesn't need to be big and flashy and make headlines, even small changes deserve to be showcased and credited
Oh for sure. Putting KDE linux on some old hardware and it feels like a brand new computer. Updating from windows 8->10->11 on the other hand was always punishing.
It's crazy how slow and bloated windows has become over the years.
I don't remember the earliest version I used, but I vividly remember kde 3.5 and 4 because the transition was really rough. Major regressions and highly disruptive at first, but it laid the groundwork for modern kde and haven't had anything like that since. I jumped ship to gnome out of spite but was back to kde in short order.
My earliest memories with KDE was how I was not able to install it because with RedHat 5.0 you needed to download the source code and all the libraries and build it all by yourself.
I asked in the Linux IRC channel some help, gave my root account to a helpful user and very quickly learned about computer security.
I'm so glad KDE exists to take a stand for the power user and customizability, while GNOME sinks ever more into androidification. Like come on, it's a desktop pc with a mouse and keyboard, not a fucking tablet where every icon needs to be 2 miles wide. Without KDE, linux would not be usable as a daily driver for me.
Its very annoying that some very loud people can not handle the fact that people different have needs. I like to use GNOME. Its fitting me better and dont insult of KDE developers because some people prefer it. The UI systems just have different assumptions and this is just fine.
I will take the counter point. I think gnomes stance on minimal configuration and a proscribed workflow is commendable. I’m a dev, I see everyday that customization imposes costs.
What I see with gnomes though is that shedding the customization doesn’t actually make for a more solid project. The fact Wayland fractional scale took as long as it did to stabilize despite mostly working tells me gnome didn’t care about the real hardware that makes up the bulk of what exists in the world.
Similarly, it seems like plasma has a massive technical edge just in handling things like pipewire capture, etc. I find KDE is typically smoother and the gnome overview animation almost always stutters regardless of the computer I use it on from discrete gpu desktops down to mobile things.
So I can say that it seems from my experience the gnome project has naval gazed and built a model of the computing landscape they target that is divorced from reality.
I think your defense gets at the difference between a power user and a ricer. They are orthogonal. Gnome rejects ricing. There is one way. That’s fine. I configure stock KDE by changing 2 settings, 1 of which exists in gnome. But I do need to actually do things with my computers which is why the androidification dig hits.
What I will praise unreservedly is the gnome circle apps and broader which are typically polished focused and attractive.
So to me gnome fails at a desktop but has managed to foster a culture around themselves that leads to solid app development.
Part of the reason the app development environment is good is because the gnome devs made the correct choice to use C for GTK. Thus there are easy bindings for basically any language.
App development for KDE is still essentially limited to C++ and janky Python.
There is some irony in this statement given that GNOME is built on not letting people chose anything and also happens to be the default on Ubuntu, so it's literally force fed down new adopter's throats. It just rubs me the wrong way ideologically so I have to flame them whenever I get the chance.
Ignoring the fact that you can write an extension for gnome to make it do whatever you want? Yes there’s less config out of the box, but there’s literally 1000s of extensions will full access to the shells main process. I’m not saying kde is bad, it has more config out of the box, but it is objectively harder to modify if what you need isn’t covered already. Ubuntu ships gnome with pre installed extensions to turn it into the desktop it wants. That would be a nightmare in kde, would require C++ patches, a language fewer and fewer people are willing to touch.
The ancient Windows desktops were quite good so if something tried to emulate them that would be a reasonable goal.
I have no idea how modern KDE is, because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster. Nonetheless, KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows XP, even if its default configuration was somewhat similar.
Actually I consider KDE 3.5 the best desktop environment that I have ever seen, much better not only than the contemporaneous Windows XP, but also than the contemporaneous Mac OS X. The reason was that KDE 3.5 had an extreme customizability, so everyone could reconfigure it according to their tastes, so it no longer resembled any other desktop environment. Unfortunately, almost everything that I liked in KDE 3.5 was removed in KDE 4 and replaced with rigid choices that I disliked.
After KDE 4, I never had the courage to try KDE again (I fled to the refuge of XFCE), but I hope that it has recovered and now it is at least at the level of its past glory, if not better.
> ... because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster.
I totally hated that whole mess. It almost ruined KDE for me. The real disaster there wasn't that KDE released v4 prematurely, but that they didn't make it crystal clear to the distro maintainers (and end-users) that it was not ready for "prime time" use yet (it was basically "pre-release"/alpha quality), and the major distros of the time jumped on making it the default (forced it on everyone) when it was still basically utterly broken compared to the prior versions of KDE (which had become overall quite solid and reliable by that point).
It's all post-hoc rationalisation. They got caught in their own hype and released low-quality code. They fucked up, that's all, and it's a bit embarrassing that they won't admit it.
Hmm I swear I saw the exact same MacOS minimize/maximize/close buttons and on the left in Cinnamon at one point, but now that I'm looking up the latest screenshots it seems to be the usual. Maybe it was some specific distro only?
Ubuntu had the window controls on the left side from like 2010-2017 to go along with their Unity desktop. From what I recall, this has always been an option with Cinnamon but they default it to the right side.
I must have used KDE for close on two decades, from the 3.x days onwards. I seem to remember I ran Suse for a long time as it seemed to be the best distro for using with KDE.
About eight years ago I wanted to try a tiling window manager, ended up settling on Awesomewm and still with it today, but I still use Dolphin as I've found no other file manager compares. (Or maybe I'm just too comfortable with it to change.)
Also still use Konsole, but honestly, as soon as Ghostty or similar implement being able to switch tabs in MRU order instead of round-robin I'll jump.
I have a low-priority todo to give Cosmic, Hyprland and Niri a go at some point. Would be nice to go back into a fuller desktop experience over what I've cobbled together around "just" a window manager.
Their story is inspirational; if this were a commercial project, they would surely have taken over the market. Hearing about the challenges they faced with Qt, and how their HTML engine was adopted by Apple, is so interesting.
I recently switched to KDE on my main workstation and it has been such a breath fresh air. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but the mix between aesthetics, configurability and a bit of pre-2010s UX design is really good.
Really great documentary, very much suggested to watch it.
I had no idea Gnome was started without ever talking to the Qt and KDE people. If there was discussion and a solution about the license, the present would be very different I assume. Still, there would be many WMs and DE's, but KDE would be somewhat of a centerpoint.
Also, Aaron Seigo took the criticism of KDE 4 quite hard I would guess. It might be why he is not involved in the project anymore.
I’m not sure if you grasp how bad the license situation was. Debian wasn’t even able to ship KDE, like at all. Something had to be done, well beyond “just have a conversation”.
Trust me, there were plenty of discussions, and flames, and all kinds of nonsense. QT was the only game in town, so they thought they could use that as leverage on the license issue. Thus, GTK.
I frankly doubt it. GNOME has pushed many problematic choices which KDE hasn't, or at least hadn't initially. From the anti-usability bent of the UI (few buttons, monochrome over color, non-configurability), to the dependence on systemd, to dropping X in favor of Wayland etc. And this is in part motivated IMHO by the organizational backing for GNOME which is different than KDE.
Disclaimer: I'm a KDE developer though not super active.
Regarding paid developers, it used to be a few people working for Suse on KDE vs a lot of people working for Red Hat on Gnome. That's not all there is to it because team Gnome also had to maintain GTK and team KDE didn't have to maintain Qt. Gnome had the advantage of having people paid to work on low-level services such as libxml, libdbus and such. AFAIK, today no desktop has many developers paid by distros. You can see it for example on GTK being maintained by like one guy.
Reportedly, external people and companies find KDE is easier to work with than Gnome, and that probably at least played into Valve selecting KDE. Valve's support led to (among other things) KDE having a really really good compositor / window manager. Highly reliable multi-screen support, fractional scaling, high dynamic range, variable refresh rate, frame scheduling for minimum latency (hell yeah), dimming with and without backlight control... a lot of good stuff.
I just watched the first 2 minutes and I didn't even know it stood for Cool Desktop Environment initially. And then it turned to KDE because they didn't want to use CDE.
At any rate, I'm busy right now, but I'm hooked and, and totally going to watch this. Thanks for posting it.
AFAIU, "can't start with C" was not an afterthought. It was explicitly meant to be the anti-CDE, something better to prevent the clunky and non-free CDE from becoming the default DE on Linux.
(I actually somewhat like the look of Motif, CDE's toolkit. It is maybe the association with reliable, expensive, professional (etc) Unix application software. While proprietary, still much cooler than Windows.)
Other distros bundle TDE, not just Q4OS, but it is not a bad one and a quick way to try it.
Klassik is very new and as yet quite untested.
Me, I would like the original KDE fork used in Corel LinuxOS and later in Xandros Linux to be revived and modernised. For me that was the best KDE ever worked.
(The Bluecurve theme in Red Hat Linux -- before RH _Enterprise_ Linux -- was the best mainline KDE ever looked.)
What is the country-of-residence distribution of KDE contributors? Originally, and today? Judging from the film, it seems like a lot of people from Germany and Finland (maybe other Scandinavian countries); but maybe it's just the documentary availability bias + my memory bias?
I've become a big fan of CultRepo's documentaries. If you enjoyed this one, I highly recommend checking out their catalogue of free, high-quality content (https://www.cultrepo.com/films).
They cover a wide range of topics, from C++ and Java to Node.js, Kubernetes, React, and Vue.js. I particularly enjoyed the Java documentary, which offered fascinating insights into the differences between the Sun and Oracle eras, many of which I never would have expected.
I was a Gnome guy since the 16.04 Ubuntu days even with the transition to 3 and whatnot. Stopped using a linux desktop for a while but came back and used CachyOS - when deciding what desktop to use, everyone online said KDE so I gave it a shot and haven't look back since.
A few times I had to do something on a Gnome system and now it just feels like you're being kneecapped by the devs for no good reason.
Thank you KDE folks - I contribute in terms of bug reports and attempts at fixes sometimes but this time I am signing up for a monthly donation - I encourage people to do what they can to keep a good thing going! https://kde.org/donate/
A week ago I bought a cheap mini-htpc and put Plasma Bigscreen on it, using a phone with KDEconnect as remote. So easy to use! So much better than AndroidTV let alone proprietary crap.
KDE is just great.
Linux life, yo.
I feel the documentary explains less what happened the last 10-15 years. I recall Trolltech and Qt underwent a series of acquisitions. How is KDE and Qt developed now? Who are the main contributors and sponsors? Any big backers? This information I felt missing.
Qt is now its own company, namely Qt Group. Wikipedia quotes:
> In 2018, the company had 5,000 customers. Approximately 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are customers of Qt Group.[22]
So it's self-sustaining now.
AFAIK, KDE is still mostly volunteer work, but the way they develop software is pretty robust.
However, KDE rocks. My colleagues called me "a maniac" once when they see how I use that thing (i.e. Dolphin + KIO + fast window switches + multiple desktops).
The KDE4 days were rough, by then I had jumped over to fedora, and that one didn't shy away from shipping very early and unstable versions of it. That had me hopping for alternative DEs, I seriously tried several (and stuck for a while with some) of the minimalistic ones (enlightenment, XFCE, ...) and quickly ended up depending on either KWin, and/or some battery/networking/disks applet from plasma, or configuring something via systemsettings. The plasma desktop itself is fine (I don't mind it so much, I'm not crazy about shell theming and customisations, I do love my global menu on top, though), but what sells KDE for me is all the clever ancillary stuff that makes it "smart and usable" (dealing with Bluetooth, network setup, local and remote drives, audio output, ...), that's where the "environment" metaphor kicks in and elevates the experience above that of a "desktop shell".
Back then whenever I had a chance to try a distro with KDE 4, the Crash Handler window would pop after doing stupidest and simplest things within the desktop. Gnome 3 wasn't any better - it was more stable but departing from desktop metaphor to this mobile-desktop hybrid made me avoid it and pick Xfce instead. Which is shame because KDE4 despite the problems looked really well (and still does); I once said here that it had this "younger sister of Vista's Aero" vibe. It's really cool that they managed to bring Oxygen theme back.
Have those actually meaningfully changed in the last couple of decades of KDE? If so, I haven't noticed.
I remember the switch to KDE4, and it was indeed brutal. I feel bad that they took as much flak as they did for that.
Plasma has come such a long way, y'all deserve so much for the perseverance and vision.
Thank you for sharing the story!
6 has been great. If you are a windows or mac user, it's very close to that experience and very familiar.
Can't say the same of Windows or Mac OS.
I really enjoy that it showcases all the work that goes into making a desktop actually good, even the small things you bearly notice, things like "When a grouped Task Manager task is flashing to get your attention, opening its group popup now reveals which specific window wanted attention. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #4225)"
A change doesn't need to be big and flashy and make headlines, even small changes deserve to be showcased and credited
And yes, a lot of work goes into the small things.
It's crazy how slow and bloated windows has become over the years.
I asked in the Linux IRC channel some help, gave my root account to a helpful user and very quickly learned about computer security.
What I see with gnomes though is that shedding the customization doesn’t actually make for a more solid project. The fact Wayland fractional scale took as long as it did to stabilize despite mostly working tells me gnome didn’t care about the real hardware that makes up the bulk of what exists in the world.
Similarly, it seems like plasma has a massive technical edge just in handling things like pipewire capture, etc. I find KDE is typically smoother and the gnome overview animation almost always stutters regardless of the computer I use it on from discrete gpu desktops down to mobile things.
So I can say that it seems from my experience the gnome project has naval gazed and built a model of the computing landscape they target that is divorced from reality.
I think your defense gets at the difference between a power user and a ricer. They are orthogonal. Gnome rejects ricing. There is one way. That’s fine. I configure stock KDE by changing 2 settings, 1 of which exists in gnome. But I do need to actually do things with my computers which is why the androidification dig hits.
What I will praise unreservedly is the gnome circle apps and broader which are typically polished focused and attractive.
So to me gnome fails at a desktop but has managed to foster a culture around themselves that leads to solid app development.
App development for KDE is still essentially limited to C++ and janky Python.
I have no idea how modern KDE is, because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster. Nonetheless, KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows XP, even if its default configuration was somewhat similar.
Actually I consider KDE 3.5 the best desktop environment that I have ever seen, much better not only than the contemporaneous Windows XP, but also than the contemporaneous Mac OS X. The reason was that KDE 3.5 had an extreme customizability, so everyone could reconfigure it according to their tastes, so it no longer resembled any other desktop environment. Unfortunately, almost everything that I liked in KDE 3.5 was removed in KDE 4 and replaced with rigid choices that I disliked.
After KDE 4, I never had the courage to try KDE again (I fled to the refuge of XFCE), but I hope that it has recovered and now it is at least at the level of its past glory, if not better.
I highly recommend giving it another try, I'm super picky and modern KDE simply delivers the best and most flexible desktop experience, bar none.
KDE 6 is really good tho. It's so fast, works great, Dolphin is the absolute best file manager there is...
I totally hated that whole mess. It almost ruined KDE for me. The real disaster there wasn't that KDE released v4 prematurely, but that they didn't make it crystal clear to the distro maintainers (and end-users) that it was not ready for "prime time" use yet (it was basically "pre-release"/alpha quality), and the major distros of the time jumped on making it the default (forced it on everyone) when it was still basically utterly broken compared to the prior versions of KDE (which had become overall quite solid and reliable by that point).
Actually nothing mimics Windows either. Linux desktop almost completely missed the biggest desktop UX advancements happened in late 2000s.
GNOME is the mishmash of macos and, like you said, mobile design.
About eight years ago I wanted to try a tiling window manager, ended up settling on Awesomewm and still with it today, but I still use Dolphin as I've found no other file manager compares. (Or maybe I'm just too comfortable with it to change.)
Also still use Konsole, but honestly, as soon as Ghostty or similar implement being able to switch tabs in MRU order instead of round-robin I'll jump.
I have a low-priority todo to give Cosmic, Hyprland and Niri a go at some point. Would be nice to go back into a fuller desktop experience over what I've cobbled together around "just" a window manager.
KDE deserves a lot more.
I had no idea Gnome was started without ever talking to the Qt and KDE people. If there was discussion and a solution about the license, the present would be very different I assume. Still, there would be many WMs and DE's, but KDE would be somewhat of a centerpoint.
Also, Aaron Seigo took the criticism of KDE 4 quite hard I would guess. It might be why he is not involved in the project anymore.
I can understand it to start your own thing, but not even starting a discussion seems a bit immature.
I frankly doubt it. GNOME has pushed many problematic choices which KDE hasn't, or at least hadn't initially. From the anti-usability bent of the UI (few buttons, monochrome over color, non-configurability), to the dependence on systemd, to dropping X in favor of Wayland etc. And this is in part motivated IMHO by the organizational backing for GNOME which is different than KDE.
Regarding paid developers, it used to be a few people working for Suse on KDE vs a lot of people working for Red Hat on Gnome. That's not all there is to it because team Gnome also had to maintain GTK and team KDE didn't have to maintain Qt. Gnome had the advantage of having people paid to work on low-level services such as libxml, libdbus and such. AFAIK, today no desktop has many developers paid by distros. You can see it for example on GTK being maintained by like one guy.
Reportedly, external people and companies find KDE is easier to work with than Gnome, and that probably at least played into Valve selecting KDE. Valve's support led to (among other things) KDE having a really really good compositor / window manager. Highly reliable multi-screen support, fractional scaling, high dynamic range, variable refresh rate, frame scheduling for minimum latency (hell yeah), dimming with and without backlight control... a lot of good stuff.
When I switched to Linux in 2008 (Ubuntu), I felt a big relief from not using Windows anymore, andnever turned back.
Kudos to the guy with the Dell(?) laptop in the video. :)
At any rate, I'm busy right now, but I'm hooked and, and totally going to watch this. Thanks for posting it.
(I actually somewhat like the look of Motif, CDE's toolkit. It is maybe the association with reliable, expensive, professional (etc) Unix application software. While proprietary, still much cooler than Windows.)
Want a whole new desktop?
https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Want a whole new OS with it built in?
https://q4os.org/
Want to keep the KDE 6.x foundations but replace the desktop shell?
https://github.com/neeeeow/Klassik
Other distros bundle TDE, not just Q4OS, but it is not a bad one and a quick way to try it.
Klassik is very new and as yet quite untested.
Me, I would like the original KDE fork used in Corel LinuxOS and later in Xandros Linux to be revived and modernised. For me that was the best KDE ever worked.
(The Bluecurve theme in Red Hat Linux -- before RH _Enterprise_ Linux -- was the best mainline KDE ever looked.)
You probably want Trinity DE then. It's literally KDE 3, forked and maintained.
They cover a wide range of topics, from C++ and Java to Node.js, Kubernetes, React, and Vue.js. I particularly enjoyed the Java documentary, which offered fascinating insights into the differences between the Sun and Oracle eras, many of which I never would have expected.
A few times I had to do something on a Gnome system and now it just feels like you're being kneecapped by the devs for no good reason.
Don't worry, they will talk about not liking Gnome even when the topic is something completely different.