KDE Desktop

 Information of KDE Dekstop

This article is about the free software community. For the desktop and other graphical environments, see KDE Plasma Workspaces. For other uses, see KDE (disambiguation).

KDE /ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/ is an international free software community^[1] producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems. It is known for its Plasma Desktop, a desktop environment provided as the default working environment on many Linux distributions, such as Kubuntu, Pardus, and openSUSE.^[2]

The goal of the community is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system. In this regard, the KDE project serves as an umbrella project for many standalone applications and smaller projects that are based on KDE technology. These include Calligra Suite, digiKam, Rekonq, K3b, and many others.
KDE software is based on the Qt framework. The original GPL version of this toolkit only existed for the X11 platform, but with the release of Qt 4, LGPL versions are available for all platforms. This allows KDE software based on Qt 4 to also be distributed to Microsoft Windows and OS X.

 

KDE

Founder(s)	Matthias Ettrich
Type	Community
Founded	October 14, 1996
Product(s)	KDE Software Compilation, Calligra Suite, KDevelop, Amarok, etc.
Focus	Free software
Method	Artwork, development, documentation, promotion, and translation.
Motto	Experience Freedom!
Website	kde.org

Product releases

Main article: KDE Software Compilation

KDE Plasma Desktop 4.10, showing KWrite

Matthias Ettrich chose to use Trolltech’s Qt framework for the KDE project.^[6] Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, a few applications were being released. On 12 July 1998 the first version of the desktop environment, called KDE 1.0, was released.

Version	Date	Information
	October 14, 1996	KDE development announced
1.0	July 12, 1998
2.0	October 23, 2000
3.0	April 3, 2002
4.0	January 11, 2008