In October 14th 1996, Matthias Ettrich announced and detailed a new project that was in search of contributers. The project was temporarily dubbed the ‘Kool Desktop Environment’, later to simply become the ‘K Desktop Environment’. Of course, 7 years later and KDE is about to reach version 3.2, consist of 4.5 millions lines of code and represents the effort of nearly 1400 man-years.
KDE Celebrates Seven Years of Existence
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Happy Birthday KDE! And a BIG thank you to all the contributors that made that wonderful desktop environement possible. And I’m really looking forward to the upcoming KDE3.2 which will be a huge improvement.
Happy Birthday K.
Especially when you consider Windows has had over 10 years to improve its graphical interface.
It’s great to see an open-source project have such long lasting success. I can’t wait to see what KDE is like in another 7 years.
7 years is quite some time when it comes to software and this is obvious when you look how far KDE has gotten from 1.0 to 3.1.4, very impressive.
I am eagerly awaiting KDE 3.2
On another note, Qt 3.2.2 has been released a few days ago.
Happy birthday from me too, KDE! Even though I just dumped you for xfce4, I still love you
!
Apple uses it’s HTML library to build WebCore and that library took some optimizing when they releeaseed Safari.
—
http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/
Especially when you consider Windows has had over 10 years to improve its graphical interface.
you cannot say that kde(,gnome,etc..) didn’t take advantage of these years..
KDE has come a *long* way in 7 years. I remember using one of the betas years ago (1997, 1998?) — let’s just say it was a world apart from the CVS version that’s sitting on my hard-drive today.
My guess is that you’re only going to see the pace of development pick up even more now that KDE has reached a level of maturity. In many ways, the difference between KDE 2.2.2 and KDE 3.0 was less than the difference between 3.1.4 and 3.2. At this point the KDE folks have established pretty much the best underlying technology out there. The APIs are very powerful and the level of integration is phenomenal.
What’s really missing right now is polish. Some parts are starting to look pretty sharp (especially in 3.2) but GNOME and OS X are still miles ahead in the polish department. Going forward, its going to be a matter of whether the other DEs can work on their core technology vs whether KDE can polish the UI. Now, KDE still has a very big challenge ahead of it. Some of the things that make KDE’s framework so powerful (very automated layout, for example) also contribute to the auto-generated feel some KDE apps have. The trick is to overcome those issues while maintaining the benifets of the technology.
Oh my god I am getting old. I still remember running KDE 1 on a redhat 5.5 system.
i think it was kde 1.5 – can’t remember if i ran kde 1 too – i think i prefered fvwm back in these days..
you can still test a kde 1.1 running on Solaris 7 at my university
..bleeding edge education..
I’ve tried the rest, but stuck with the best (KDE). Thanks for a kool desktop environment, and awesome developer framework.
Looking forward to some more spit and polish and a more refined UI for Konqueror (hopefully).
I liked gnome a lot more before kde 2. After that, there was no coming back.
Bravo to the Kool Development Engineers that brought us that gem, and all supporting companies.
you can still test a kde 1.1 running on Solaris 7 at my university
..bleeding edge education..
Don’t bleed to death 😉
I remember how horrified I was when I first tried KDE back in 1997 or 1998. Now I have been using it both at work and at home for a year, full-time. It’s just great – stable, logical and pleasant to use.
I have fond memories of downloading the source and all the dependencies waaaay back when and compiling the thing from scratch on my good ol’ Pentium 75. What fun it was to see it fire up for the first time. Looking forward to what this incredible project produces in the future.
Seriously. Kool Desktop Environment? That’s cringeworthy… as is the K<appname> thing. Please please please stop doing that because it makes it hard to take serious.
That aside, KDE is improving but I feel that recently Gnome has shot ahead both in useability and moreso in look-and-feel.
And *that* aside, happy birthday KDE.
Suppose the “year” in “man-year” means a calendar year. Then
1400 man-years in 7 years => 200 developers.
I wonder if there are really that many developers who
are working full-time on KDE itself. Perhaps the figure
includes the time spent on KDE application development?
Congrats, on 7 years of great work.
Wow. 7 Years? I remember testing out beta 3 when I was a linux noob back in 97 or 98. I remember the thrill of actually building the software, changing config files, getting it to work, and lamenting that I couldn’t reproduce it the next time I installed Linux. (since I had such little hard drive space that every time I wanted to burn a CD in Windows, I had to clear out my Linux partition to have enough room to do so… heh)
“That’s cringeworthy… as is the K<appname> thing. Please please please stop doing that because it makes it hard to take serious.”
As a Free Software developer I take the freedom to name my app as I like (which could very well include a big literal k as first letter). If you don’t like it, if you don’t take it seriously … well guess what? I don’t care. It’s one of my hobbies and I am doing it for fun. I have no problem if people don’t want my applications because of their name. Actually I don’t take people who choose their tools depending on the tool’s names seriously. 😉
Even when I am a strong GNOME fan (mostly for personal tastes) I just can say two words:
1. Contratulations
2. Thanks
KDE was the innovator that puts simplicity on open source world! even GNOME was born because the success of KDE! Before KDE what we wan’t: MOTIF? TWM?
Bored desktops…
KDE was the really innovator that puts live on X world!
So, Contratulations and thanks
Sorry for another “Me, Too!” post – remeber how impressed I was back in the day when I got KDE1 running on RH5.2
Was miles ahead of fvwm.
Long live KDE!
Suppose the “year” in “man-year” means a calendar year. Then
1400 man-years in 7 years => 200 developers.
Actually, a man-year is defined (in the US) as 2,080 hours (52 weeks * 40 hours a week).
Thus, 1400 man-years is 2,912,000 hours. Almost 3 MILLION hours. While I find that hard to believe, think about this number: 4.5 million lines of code. And it’s mostly volunteers!
I remember how horrified I was when I first tried KDE back in 1997 or 1998. Now I have been using it both at work and at home for a year, full-time. It’s just great – stable, logical and pleasant to use.
Well, I’m using KDE too but I think is not really that logical. Gnome has a very logical GUI. Kde has not, still is better than Gnome, in my opinion, for those features I need and provides. In KDE I really hate all those options in the right click button menu, It’s too much redondant.
So on average it took 1 month to code 3 lines? Sounds kind of slow to me.
Seriously. Kool Desktop Environment? That’s cringeworthy… as is the K<appname> thing. Please please please stop doing that because it makes it hard to take serious.
That aside, KDE is improving but I feel that recently Gnome has shot ahead both in useability and moreso in look-and-feel.
And *that* aside, happy birthday KDE.
I totally agree with you. We already know we are into the K environment. It is not necessary to put ‘K’ everywhere
Also we can’t even sort the apps alphabetically because of that!
Grats KDE! Here is to the best Desktop on the planet! I am eternally greatful for this project!
Hip-hip-hooray!!!!!!!!!!!
Don’t worry. It adds another 3 lines of codes on top of everytimely hacked, optimized, dynamic 4500000 lines of codes beneath 😉
>
>As a Free Software developer I take the freedom to name my app as I like (which could very well include a big literal k as first letter). If you don’t like it, if you don’t take it seriously … well guess what? I don’t care.
>
>
Indeed, and that is exactly the problem, isn’t it?
I think it is a good idea to start KDE applications appnames with “k”. So everyone knows at once he is using a KDE application. Many Gnome applications also start with “g”, e.g. gpaint, gedit and I also think this is a good idea (there is nothing like namespaces in filesystems :-))
I don’t really care if they use a ‘K’ in front of their apps…
I mean, ever wondered what would happen to Kate if they ditched the ‘K’?
Um, 3 million hours, 4.5 million lines of code. That’s a little under one hour per line ,which sounds about right. Remember, there are two effects at work: in maintainence mode, a day of work might result in the total code count being *lowered* due to refactoring. In rapid development mode, thousands of lines may be generated in a week (if you’re in a “zone”
Overall, the average developer writes a few thousand lines of code per year. Since there are 2000 work hours in a year, KDE’s average of about an hour per line of code seems to be consistent with the industry.
The reason they do it to show the program belong to the KDE developer community. It is a problem because the adding a k isn’t a very cool idea to begin with, and it gets worse by repetition. Adding a K is in fact a pretty effective way of breaking the name, making it flow less easily, and heaping consonants on top of each other. The programmer-style of designations/contractions (as used in say function-calls)isn’t used much elsewhere and will normally be foreign pattern to use in a name.
It is pretty incredible that a habit as destructive as this has become so widespread and it is truly a testament to the exceptionally poor aestaetic judgements of geek commonity of developers. If you are in doubt about this, just ask your girlfriend whether she thinks k3b or kroupware are cool names for software.
Bart Decreem said it just right: the K is bit offensive as matter of style, and contributes to KDE’s general lack of elegancy (no, Crystal is absolutly not enough).
I have an opinion on KDE’s naming problem (a pretty obvious one): When a part of an integrated environment – just call it by general designation – “CD-burner” – and call the normal name the “development name”. Hide the development name in the credit section, and make absolutely no reference to it elswhere.
I don’t want anything to do with trolltech, scox, or any other canopy company. Msft is much more ethical.
Honestly, I don’t care about the K itself. I just want to be able to understand what an application does right from its name. When I have tons off apps starting with the ‘K’ it’s not that good.
Will is right. K3b doesn’t explain much. Most of the distros out there change the KDE apps name in something comprensive (RedHat,SuSE..).
Idem GNOME, they already understood the need to lose the ‘G’ for their apps. Evolution, Mono, Ximian Desktop, Red Carpet, Gimp, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Xnap. These are the greatest apps with their unique and very cool names.
hahaha…did I said Xnap? I meant Xchat!
That’s the confirmation about my thought.
All this is a little treacly though. All you people can Kriticize is the KName thing? And one measly swipe at Trolltech?
Linux is losing that old neurotic pimply geek spirit…
Oh wait, this is OSNews, not Slashdot.
I guess that’s why nobody’s said “In Soviet Russia the GUI parses YOU” yet.
Idem GNOME, they already understood the need to lose the ‘G’ for their apps. Evolution, Mono, Ximian Desktop, Red Carpet, Gimp, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Xnap. These are the greatest apps with their unique and very cool names.
Well, Gimp predates GNOME, and OpenOffice, Mozilla and Xchat aren’t GNOME applications so they had nothing to do with the naming.
Its called brand identification. Most apps, you can’t tell what they from their name.
MS Outlook – No clue.
MS PowerPoint – Again, no clue.
MS Visio – Come again?
MS Excel – Pardon?
MS Access – Maybe for blind people?
And notice the “MS” prefix added to everything? Its not just “Word” its “Microsoft Word.” Not just “Office” but “Microsoft Office.”
Getting outside Microsoft apps:
CoffeeCup, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Premiere, Director, Nuendo, Softimage, Maya, etc.
Don’t even get me started on the totally f’ed up names of engineering and science apps. Wanna guess what Stella does? Or PSpice? How about ArcView? SolidEdge?
I don’t want anything to do with trolltech, scox, or any other canopy company. Msft is much more ethical.
a) KDE is not made by Trolltech. It uses Qt, which is made by Trolltech
b) Canopy’s financial interests in Trolltech predate the whole SCO mess.
C) Canopy owns less than 10% of Trolltech. They have basically no influence within the company. The Trolltech folds have openly and vocally criticized SCO’s attack on Linux.
d) MS is very probably involved in SCO’s attack on Linux, as they are the ones that have the most to gain. We know they already gave millions for a Unix license they didn’t need, and it looks as if they may be involved in the latest 50M$ injection of cash into the litigious company (the folks at Groklaw are following this closely). So I don’t know how much more ethical MS really is, compared to SCO…
It is irrelevant. Developers add, but many times remove and completely rewrite lines of code and this is why it seems like there aren’t so many lines in comparrison to years. Remember KDE has had a lot of rewrites such as from DE 1 to 2.
Keep in mind developers don’t just add lines.
All you suckers out there whining about KDE app names carrying a K in front:
1. get a life
2. take a kreativity & konsistency kourse
3. you can set in the control center the menu to show the description of each app before the app name. Is that enough for you K haters? I guess so.
regards folks
Ah KDE. I remember when APCmag (in Australia) including the source tarballs of KDE 1.0 in one of their issues (late ’98, early ’99). I was using WindowMaker, but wanted to try out KDE since reading about it in a book somewhere.
I was new to linux back then and was using RedHat 5.2. It was the first time I had to RTFM and compile software…got a thrill watching 6 or so xterms compiling the different sets of packages at once..on a Celeron 333. A real thrill when I sent up the environment paths etc and edited the file (~.xinitrc maybe??} to use KDE instead of WindowMaker…and it all worked!
KDE sure has come a long way since then…keep it up!
Happy birthday KDE! –: )
All you suckers out there whining about KDE app names carrying a K in front:
1. get a life
2. take a kreativity & konsistency kourse
3. you can set in the control center the menu to show the description of each app before the app name. Is that enough for you K haters? I guess so.
regards folks
Well, is this the soul of the Open Source Community or is just a Religion War?
We are not criticizing the KDE quality but just a poor thing like a name thing.
You should get a life…and maybe a KPussy.
The K is for identification. If you look at other environments, you get exactly the same thing:
-Windows: WinAmp, WinZip, WinDVD, etc.
-OSX: iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, etc.
-Gnome: Gnumeric, GStreamer, Gaim, Gedit, Gabber, Gconf
The same is true of X (XChat, XChess, etc.), PocketPC (PocketWord, PocketChat, PocketGrandmaster), Palm and numerous other environments.
It is more or less a standard with application programmers to attempt to name small and medium applications with reference to the platform under which they are meant to operate.
I’m sure people now see the truth of this, and they will begin a vigorous campaign to remove this sort of representative naming across all platforms. If they fail to do so, I might suspect that their ire is less than specifically aimed at the naming, and more because they fail to find another good point to take issue with for a genuinely good Desktop Environment product.
I can’t see the complaining about the K-apps naming. First of all, I don’t think it makes the platform looks less professional: for that you have to use and see KDE in action. Secondly, lame names happen on every platform. Finally I like to idea of the K-prefix so when I find an app on the web I know straight away whether it’s a KDE app, Gnome app, X-app or whatever. And last but not least: does it _really_ matter?
If a program has a K in front of its name I know it uses the QT-libraries and probably the KDE core libs. If a program has a G in front then I know it uses the GTK libraries and maybe some Gnome ones.
Sensible innit ?
Happy birthday K! Although i’ve been through all the bad times with you, i’ve been with you every step of the way 😀
It’s a shame that you’ve gotten so easy to use because i’ve just ported my network over to YAWM. Don’t feel bad that i’ve done it, it was for your own good.