Initial launch
You can read Matthias’ historic announcement in full at www.kde. org/announcements/
announcement.php. Back in 1996 he noted that most applications used their own widgets, and they all looked and behaved inconsistently. There were several widget toolkits around, but none of them were ideal or consistent. Some of that widgetry, for example GTK+ and Motif, is still alive today, and the idea of writing use-once code for home-brewed buttons and dialogs is mercifully a thing of the past. Matthias saw a glimpse of the future in an exciting new widget toolkit with a cute name, Qt.
Like its GTK+ counterpart today (which had its genesis in the GIMP application), Qt was originally designed for a single application, namely a database for ultrasound images. By the time Matthias was hatching his grand plan, the authors of said application had set up their own company, Trolltech (later Troll Tech, then reverting to Trolltech), where Qt development continued. Matthias saw Qt as “a revolution in programming X”. Perhaps controversially, he also saw the that fact that it was developed commercially as an advantage.
Trolltech made Qt sources freely available under its own licence, but permissive though it was, this licence wasn’t looked upon favourably by the Free Software Foundation. Specifically, it didn’t approve of the licence forbidding the redistribution of modified versions – a key tenet of the open source principle. Be that as it may, KDE (which was now just the K Desktop Environment) 1.0 was released in July 1998, incorporating Qt 1.3 under this licence. The release announcement expressed developers’ hopes that KDE would “bring open, reliable, stable and monopoly free computing to the average computer.” By this time, there was already considerable interest in KDE, and the idea that Linux’s leading desktop environment (Gnome hadn’t been released yet) might one day be proprietary led to concern and consternation. KDE 1.0’s components included kwm and kfm, which would respectively inspire KDE 2’s Kwin window manager and Konqueror file manager, both of which live on to this day (although after an extended period of identity crisis Konqueror is now a web browser).
The more zealous critics called for people to boycott KDE in favour of Motif (bizarre, since at that time it could require royalties to be paid) or its LGPL-licenced cousin LessTif. Qt 2.0 was made available under the Q Public licence in June 1999 and, after some wrangling, Qt 2.2 appeared in December 2000 under the GPL 2.
Those wishing to know more about what early KDE was like need not rely on the few screenshots one can find on the Internet Archive. This time last year, to celebrate the anniversary of the project announcement, the KDE Restoration Project revamped the KDE 1.1 codebase so that it could compile (using cmake rather than the antiquated auto* agglomeration of horrors) and run on a modern system. See www.heliocastro. info/?p=291 for more info, or build it yourself from phabricator.kde.org: the repos you seek are called KDE 1: Qt 1 , KDE 1: Libraries and KDE 1: Base Module .
Three is the magic number
Desktop Linux welcomed many refugees when what’s generally agreed was an abomination of an operating system, in the form of Windows Vista, was released. By this time KDE was well into its third outing (version 3.0 was released in April 2002) and enjoyed the dubious honour of being the most Windows-like of all the UNIX desktop environments. So readers of a certain age will probably remember it fondly.
A major feature of KDE 3 was its support for locking things down, a feature often requested by developers of kiosk-type systems. So KDE was experiencing adoption outside of the
traditional personal desktop sphere during the dot com era.
Changes in TrollTech’s licencing policy enabled Qt 4’s intrinsic operating system agnosticity to be fully harnessed, so that KDE 4 (released early in 2008) could be ported to other operating systems, the burgeoning mobile market being a major aspiration, as well OS X and Windows versions. The latter two never really saw serious adoption, but things look promising for mobile ( checkoutthebox,belowleft).
Controversially, version 4.0 was released in a deliberately unfinished state, as a sort of developer preview. The rationale was to garner interest and generate feedback. This more or less backfired, unless generating complaints and bug reports counts as success. Linus Torvalds was said to be bemused by the over-configurability of it all, claiming his explorations had made his shortcuts “look like a drunken fratboy had been messing with my desktop.” There were also complaints about its resource usage and unnecessary frippery in the form of graphical effects. By the time 4.2 was released, in November 2008, most of the kinks had been ironed out.
A year later, KDE SC (Software Compilation) 4.4 was released, with the new name alluding to the wider scope of the KDE community. KDE 4.7 saw many of its components ported to QML, so that they could capitalise on GPU power and the new QtQuick rendering framework, so that those pleasing fade effects, shadows and glows all rendered with the upmost of slickness (unless your graphics drivers refused to play nice with Kwin). KDE 4 saw the aRts sound daemon replaced by the Phonon multimedia API. And Pulseaudio became the preferred means of messing up your audio. Another exciting addition was the Threadweaver library for harnessing the power of multicore systems.
Packaging KDE used to be an all or nothing task. Applications were bound to desktop libraries, so that if you wanted to install, say,
Kate (the text editor), on a lightweight desktop, then you’d end up with most of KDE installed alongside, and your lightweight desktop would cease to deserve its adjective.
A modular approach
A change was signalled around 2006 with the KDEmod effort, which was aimed at boosting the modularity of the KDE desktop within Arch Linux. The idea of having to install a single monolithic package with many applications that went unused was an anathema to Arch’s KISS (keep it simple, stupid) philosophy. This project eventually gave rise to Chakra Linux in 2010. KDEmod and Chakra were initiatives outside the KDE community, but with the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to imagine that they influenced the restructuring that took place towards the end of KDE 4’s reign.
Back then, in late 2013, the project was ostensibly divided into Platform, Plasma Workspaces and Applications factions, but development of these was sufficiently intertwined and interdependent as to make the distinction (at least from a project management point of view) moot. Their releases all had to be cadenced, and new features couldn’t be introduced in one area unless the other two had accepted the changes necessary to accommodate them.
For the next release, in which Platform (a monolithic collection of libraries and services on which Applications depended) would become Frameworks (featuring discrete libraries such as Baloo, Nepomuk and Phonon), a bold effort was undertaken to decouple these efforts. They could then have independent release cycles and things be more modular and manageable. This effort paid off, and the fifth KDE desktop was launched with a new name, Plasma 5, though calling it KDE Plasma 5 is still permitted.
The KDE tricronym today is used to refer to the community rather than the desktop or any particular component thereof. In some sense this was a much less ‘in your face’ release than KDE 4, although the
“Controversially, version 4.0 was released unfinished, as a sort of developer preview”
configurability is still there though. You can even have an Ubuntu-style global menu if you dig around in Application Style>Window decorations settings. Another welcome addition is the launcher being mapped to the Super (Windows) key out of the box.
KDE has been represented by the KDE eV (registered association) since 1997. German law required seven people to form an eV, and Matthias had to enlist housemates and developer’s partners to make up the numbers. Today, the board has over 150 members and its remit is to provide assistance and distribute donations, but it has no influence on development of the software. Desktop environments are tricky things to package, and fixed release distributions generally stick with whatever version of Plasma and friends the distro shipped with, providing only security updates and bug fixes. This makes sense, as there’s a reasonable chance that pulling the rug out from your desktop and trying to slide a new one in to place without anyone noticing is tricky and there’s potential for all kinds of breakage.
On Ubuntu, the easiest way to install Plasma is to install the corresponding kubuntu-desktop metapackage. Besides the desktop, this gives you some of the core KDE applications too. There are two other metapackages: kde-full , which gives you the entire KDEApplications suite, and kdeplasma-desktop , which will give you just the desktop and no applications.
If you’re using stock Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, then installing these packages will give you Plasma 5.5.5, which was released in March 2016, just after we did our last Plasma feature. If you’re on 17.04, then you can do slightly better: the repos provides 5.9 which dates back to the beginning of this year. Plasma 5.11 is scheduled for release right around the time you read this. The Kubuntu Backports PPA is the place to go to get fresh Plasma on Ubuntu, but remember these packages aren’t tested to the standard of those in the main repo. Add it at your own peril with: $ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/ backports
Other distros provide similar mechanisms. OpenSUSE has repos for both Leap and Tumbleweed that provide daily builds of the required components, but these are called ‘unstable’ for a reason. Slackware users can get help with Alien BOB’s repository. If you want a distro that provides newer KDE packages without risk, then Arch Linux will serve your needs. It provides modular packages, which enables more in-depth customisation of your KDE install. Start with the plasma group or plasma-meta package. Add the kdebase group. Then choose from the kdeedu, kdegames, kdegraphics groups and so on. Of course, Arch Linux isn’t for everybody, and its easier-to-use descendents (Manjaro or Antergos, say) inherit these fresh packages. Other distros have up-to-date repos, too: Fedora tracks the latest Plasma updates, and they can be had with dnf install @kdedesktop , Then there are dedicated KDE distros such as Chakra and KaOS.
Neon lights
Probably the best showcase of the latest and greatest KDE technologies, though, is KDE neon (see https://neon.kde.org), the ‘notquite distro’ based on Ubuntu 16.04. It can be used as a live disc without risk, or in a VM, but with all the graphical wizardry will look and perform best when installed on bare metal. Being an Ubuntu derivative, there’s very little ( bwahaha–Ed) chance installing it will do any unrequested damage. Neon is available as a user edition, or a choice of stable and unstable developer editions (in order of increased likelihood of things misbehaving). Out of the box, few applications are installed besides the KDE core ones, but all the latest KDE offerings are available by a PPA. You’ll also find the growing in usefulness Discover app store.
Note that nothing outside of the KDE ecosystem is packaged in Neon. That doesn’t mean those things aren’t available, it just means they’re available in the versions packaged for Ubuntu 16.04. So you can end up with very new KDE applications alongside somewhat older ones from outside the fold. Of course, you can then add further PPAs to get newer versions, but this may introduce incompatibilities, or at any rate bring about undesired or unexpected quirkiness.
Plasma 5 makes heavy use of hardware acceleration for rendering, and offers a choice of rendering backends (accessible via the Compositor settings). Everything is rendered as an OpenGL (or OpenGL ES if the hardware supports it) scenegraph, so if suitable hardware is available all that fading and transparency doesn’t tax the CPU at all. The converse of this is that if suitable hardware isn’t available, then things will be slow. All the effects can be turned off via the desktop effects dialog, but we still wouldn’t recommend running KDE with graphics hardware that predates the Obama ( those werethedays–Ed) era.
Resource-wise, it’s not at all as bad as it used to have a reputation for; Gnome has definitely taken the memory hog crown. Our own experiments and anecdotal reports show Plasma 5 uses around 400MB to start a clean session. But such stats are pretty useless in an era when opening a couple of tabs in a web browser consumes a couple of gigabytes!