KDE

KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community producing free and libre software like Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and many cross-platform applications designed to run on modern Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems. The Plasma Desktop is a desktop environment provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, Manjaro Linux and also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

The goal of the community is to develop free software solutions and applications for the daily needs of an end-user, as well as providing tools and documentation for developers to write such software. In this regard, the resources provided by KDE make it a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita, digiKam, and many others.

History

Origins

K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.