KDE at 30
kde.org
KDE is turning 30 this year! Three decades of passionate community effort against all odds; delivering control, privacy, and freedom to our users; and tons and tons of software.

Contribute to our gallery of historic photos, tell us a story about that time KDE got you out of a pickle, or share a little-known KDE-related fact.

Become a supporting member and help guarantee the next 30 years of top-notch free software.

Or, most important of all, organize a KDE-themed event/party and we’ll include it on our map!

  • Thorry@feddit.org
    6·
    5 days ago

    I started out Linux with Suse 5 and when version 6 rolled around I bought it. For several 5 and 6 versions I had the physical box set with a thick book and a bunch of cd’s. Plus of course the boot floppy, because booting from CDs was only a thing in dreams. I didn’t have very much internet at the time, so physical media ruled supreme.

    When version 6 was released it included KDE 1.0 and I was very much interested. Unfortunately hardware support was lacking and software was incomplete at best. So I spent months trying to get X Windows running at all and then running without crashing. When I finally got that black and white checkerboard pattern with the familiar X mouse cursor some tears were shed. I could move my serial grey ball mouse and the cursor would move, and it didn’t even crash.

    I started with some small utilities and the basics were working. But without a window manager like KDE it’s not much fun. Unfortunately that also didn’t work. But I knew C, C++, multiple forms of assembly and a bunch of other programming languages. My sneakernet version of Ralph Brown’s Interrupt List was my holy bible, hacking all sorts of stuff together on my machine. The Suse distro came with everything needed to develop software and the sources were included on the CDs. So I started hacking and sunk so much time into it.

    We didn’t have internet beyond expensive and slow dial-up. But I did have a treasure trove of books, a lot from my grandpa, some from my dad and my own collection was coming along nicely as well. With a lot of hacks and persistence I got KDE somewhat working. Not long after that I switched over to Debian and used Gnome on that. I got into QT software development for a while. These days I use Arch btw and use KDE, absolutely love it!

    I often think back fondly of all of those nights and weekends I spent on my little machine. Getting stuff running just for the fun of it. These days the world moves so fast (or I’m just old). I wouldn’t mind slowing everything down and spending some years getting KDE 1.0 to work on my old machine.