KDE: The documentary [video]

Total KDE fan and that's all I run at home. It's an interesting study also in desktop environment and software written in C++ and just how hard it is to get something that works for most people. Mistakes, corrections, building the basic blocks like Qt in the early days and keeping a bunch of people with differing cultures / tastes / backgrounds/needs motivated to make it better every day - fascinating achievement.

Thank you KDE folks - I contribute in terms of bug reports and attempts at fixes sometimes but this time I am signing up for a monthly donation - I encourage people to do what they can to keep a good thing going! https://kde.org/donate/

KDE is how desktops should be. 'The Year of the Linux' is NOW, a few years ago. Linux and KDE have given me not only freedom over my own hardware, but freedom over how I interact with my desktops. Once you know the shortcuts, things become so much more fun. Much love to the KDE team.

Linux life, yo.

I am a bit prod of having seen the original post looking for volunteers to build a Kool Desktop Environment. I was obsessively reading Usenet groups at the time. And I remember there were quite early betas published, I did not run them at first, but I remember much enthusiasm about it. So I feel familiar with the beginnings although I never participated in the project development-wise. All the way up to KDE 4 I was quite close to the project as a user. But since KDE 4 was so unstable and buggy, I left it around that time. This is also around the time when the documentary makes a big jump ahead chronologically.

I feel the documentary explains less what happened the last 10-15 years. I recall Trolltech and Qt underwent a series of acquisitions. How is KDE and Qt developed now? Who are the main contributors and sponsors? Any big backers? This information I felt missing.

I joined as a user at one point during the kde3 days, powerful apps like Amarok 1.4, k3b and konqueror with all kinds of crazy kio-slaves were the ones that really gave me pause on the boot screen and kept tipping me over towards mandrake instead of WinXP ("why can't it be that simple and as well integrated, why do I need so many ad-hoc shareware to do every basic thing like burning/ripping CDs, mounting ISOs, transcoding audio, sending it to my MP3 player").

The KDE4 days were rough, by then I had jumped over to fedora, and that one didn't shy away from shipping very early and unstable versions of it. That had me hopping for alternative DEs, I seriously tried several (and stuck for a while with some) of the minimalistic ones (enlightenment, XFCE, ...) and quickly ended up depending on either KWin, and/or some battery/networking/disks applet from plasma, or configuring something via systemsettings. The plasma desktop itself is fine (I don't mind it so much, I'm not crazy about shell theming and customisations, I do love my global menu on top, though), but what sells KDE for me is all the clever ancillary stuff that makes it "smart and usable" (dealing with Bluetooth, network setup, local and remote drives, audio output, ...), that's where the "environment" metaphor kicks in and elevates the experience above that of a "desktop shell".

Wow, great job everyone. Love seeing all the faces being the scenes, and the humble beginnings.

I remember the switch to KDE4, and it was indeed brutal. I feel bad that they took as much flak as they did for that.

Plasma has come such a long way, y'all deserve so much for the perseverance and vision.

Thank you for sharing the story!

Been using for over 20 years now. KDE is really the best. Consistent between releases, stable, infinitely customizable, but works great out of the box with features you'd expect and often years ahead of the commercial competition in terms of new features. Every moment I spend in macos or windows for work is pure torture.

Their story is inspirational; if this were a commercial project, they would surely have taken over the market. Hearing about the challenges they faced with Qt, and how their HTML engine was adopted by Apple, is so interesting.

KDE deserves a lot more.

Wonderful quality documentary, just like KDE itself. Really nice to see people behind my favorite software.

I must have used KDE for close on two decades, from the 3.x days onwards. I seem to remember I ran Suse for a long time as it seemed to be the best distro for using with KDE.

About eight years ago I wanted to try a tiling window manager, ended up settling on Awesomewm and still with it today, but I still use Dolphin as I've found no other file manager compares. (Or maybe I'm just too comfortable with it to change.)

Also still use Konsole, but honestly, as soon as Ghostty or similar implement being able to switch tabs in MRU order instead of round-robin I'll jump.

I have a low-priority todo to give Cosmic, Hyprland and Niri a go at some point. Would be nice to go back into a fuller desktop experience over what I've cobbled together around "just" a window manager.

I recently switched to KDE on my main workstation and it has been such a breath fresh air. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but the mix between aesthetics, configurability and a bit of pre-2010s UX design is really good.

Really great documentary, very much suggested to watch it.

I had no idea Gnome was started without ever talking to the Qt and KDE people. If there was discussion and a solution about the license, the present would be very different I assume. Still, there would be many WMs and DE's, but KDE would be somewhat of a centerpoint.

Also, Aaron Seigo took the criticism of KDE 4 quite hard I would guess. It might be why he is not involved in the project anymore.

In a documentary about KDE, it's interesting how many (most) of the people shown using a computer are running macOS...

I just watched the first 2 minutes and I didn't even know it stood for Cool Desktop Environment initially. And then it turned to KDE because they didn't want to use CDE.

At any rate, I'm busy right now, but I'm hooked and, and totally going to watch this. Thanks for posting it.

A great way to start my morning, thank you for posting

I wonder if it was edited in Kdenlive

I wish I could have a DE that looks like KDE 3 or before...

Never new about the origin story. Really fun watch.

It is very hard to imagine what life would be without the awesomeness that KDE is.

What is the country-of-residence distribution of KDE contributors? Originally, and today? Judging from the film, it seems like a lot of people from Germany and Finland (maybe other Scandinavian countries); but maybe it's just the documentary availability bias + my memory bias?

I've become a big fan of CultRepo's documentaries. If you enjoyed this one, I highly recommend checking out their catalogue of free, high-quality content (https://www.cultrepo.com/films).

They cover a wide range of topics, from C++ and Java to Node.js, Kubernetes, React, and Vue.js. I particularly enjoyed the Java documentary, which offered fascinating insights into the differences between the Sun and Oracle eras, many of which I never would have expected.

I was a Gnome guy since the 16.04 Ubuntu days even with the transition to 3 and whatnot. Stopped using a linux desktop for a while but came back and used CachyOS - when deciding what desktop to use, everyone online said KDE so I gave it a shot and haven't look back since.

A few times I had to do something on a Gnome system and now it just feels like you're being kneecapped by the devs for no good reason.