Happy 15th to the folk at the KDE project

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 19 October 2011 11:15

Opinion and Analysis

It all began with a detailed email sent by Matthias Ettrich, a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingenon, on October 14, 1996.

Posted to the de.comp.os.linux.misc group Usenet group, the email, headlined "New project: Kool Desktop Environment", called for programmers to join a project to produce a consistent, nice-looking free desktop environment.

Ettrich said he had found a great, new widget library named QT which happened to be non-free in free software terms. He said that it was time to standardise the desktop and provided an illustration of how different apps all used different sets of widgets - fvwm (own widgets), rxvt (own widgets), tgif (own widgets), xv (own widgets), ghostview (athena widgets), lyx (xforms widgets), xftp (motif widgets), textedit (xview widgets) and arena (own widgets)

Ettrich, who was involved in the LyX project at the time, listed the components that he thought could be created: a panel, a file manager, mail client, a terminal, a hypertext help system, window manager, system tools, games and documentation.

He also invited those who could maintain web pages for the project and provide sysadmin skills to join up. The idea caught on and the KDE project was born. Though Ettrich titled his original post as Kool Desktop Environment, the word Kool was never used; it simply became the K Desktop Environment.

Version 1.0 was released on July 12, 1998; 2.0 on October 23, 2000; 3.0 on April 3, 2002; and 4.0 on January 11, 2008.