KDE at 30
kde.orgOne 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).
KDE beta2 was my first.
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!
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.
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
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.
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...
The master of ceremonies is a proper creature: https://floss.social/@kde/116673618808097094
edit: I appreciate the quality of discussion below, so far.
I feel quite repulsed by the fact that the first thing you see when opening the post is a huge donation card.
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.