Founded | October 14, 1996 |
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Founder | Matthias Ettrich |
Type | Community |
Focus | Free software |
Products | KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks, KDE Applications, Calligra Suite, KDevelop, digiKam, Amarok, etc. |
Method | Artwork, development, documentation, promotion, and translation. |
Slogan | Experience Freedom! |
Website | kde |
KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community developing 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. It further provides tools and documentation for developers to write such software, which makes it a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita, digiKam, and many others.
The Plasma Desktop, being one of the most recognized projects of KDE, is the default desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Chakra, Kubuntu, and Manjaro Linux. It was also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, but was later replaced with "Lumina", a desktop environment which, like KDE, is written in C++ and Qt.
The work of the KDE community can be measured in the following figures:
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.