
KDE Project releases KDE 1 - oever
http://www.heliocastro.info/?p=291
======
thom
KDE was the first desktop environment I really stuck with on Linux, previously
I'd just used Blackbox and whatever apps seemed to work. For me, it peaked
around KDE 3.2 - it felt like a nicely structured, object-oriented system. You
could open up KOffice documents in tabs in Konqueror alongside web pages,
thanks to KParts. Every address bar and file dialog could connect to any
protocol, thanks to KIO. KMail and KNode were functional and consistent.
KDevelop was very nice, for someone coming from a Visual C++ background. And
Atlatik stole more hours than I can remember.

I have to admit I drifted off to OS X for most stuff, but I still have fond
memories of how well thought out, consistent and tasteful everything was.

~~~
etatoby
Same here. First Linux desktop I ever used was running KDE 1. I kept using KDE
for years, up to 3.x, because it was just incredibly integrated, fast, and
functional. I cannot shake the feeling that it was engineered, or at least
directed by a single competent person with a vision. I don't know if that's
true, but KDE 1 to 3 had that "single mind" feeling, as opposed to "designed
by committee."

After that, I moved to OS X for various reasons, until recently when the
latest OS X 10.11 and 10.12 drifted so far away from the original OS X concept
as to turn me away.

As a newly returned Linux user, I tried Gnome Shell in Ubuntu, but recycled
its bytes in a couple of days. Then I tried the latest KDE 5, which was even
worse, an ungodly monstrosity. I briefly toyed with the idea of using a
supposedly modern fork of KDE 3
([http://www.trinitydesktop.org](http://www.trinitydesktop.org)) but then
settled for Cinnamon on Mint.

Still, KDE 3 was definitely some sort of pinnacle in desktop computing. Maybe
the Trinity guys are not entirely crazy!

~~~
problems
I don't know what happened to KDE and Gnome. They used to dominate, now many
people look at them as jokes.

I seriously prefer Unity over both of them in their current incarnations and
that's something I never thought I would have said when Unity first came out.

~~~
ryukafalz
>They used to dominate, now many people look at them as jokes.

Many people also use them every day and love them. I'm one of them.

~~~
iamcreasy
Old Gnome and new Gnome are very different. The old Gnome is now Mate. Also
Cinnamon from Linux Mint has captured a large portion of the user base. There
is Unity that comes by default with Ubuntu and many people(like me) are too
lazy to switch. And finally, there is up and coming Pantheon from elementary
OS.

It's largely fragmented I guess...

------
inDigiNeous
Yeah that takes me back to sitting in front of a huge ass 19" CRT monitor,
setting up computers in a networked school class, running Mandrake Linux with
KDE 1.x something.

Gotta say KDE was pretty cool then. Back then I kinda hoped Gnome would just
give up and the developers focus on working on KDE instead .. but no, that's
not the Linux way of things :)

~~~
nailer
There was some licensing stuff over Qt at the time (it got resolved, just too
late) hence GNOME starting.

And yeah KDE was awesome. First time I ever saw an OSS app doing UI right
(before Firefox)

------
unicornporn
I'm looking at KDE 1 and thinking it actually looks better than the latest and
greatest. Aesthetically I think KDE really went downhill.

KDE 1 might not look modern, but at least the design is well thought out,
consistent and not full of strangely balanced UI elements with either too much
or too little whitespace.

~~~
mrweasel
KDE seems to either appeal to people or turn them away completely. While I
appreciate all the hard work the developers have put into KDE, I have always
found it to be down right ugly, regardless of version.

Not that Unity or Gnome is much better.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> Not that Unity or Gnome is much better.

Looking at [1], [2], [3], [4] I would be curious to hear why do you think that
they look worse than what i.e. macOS has to offer?

1 - [http://i.imgur.com/KIUkPBU.png](http://i.imgur.com/KIUkPBU.png) 2 -
[http://i.imgur.com/T5AMpdG.png](http://i.imgur.com/T5AMpdG.png) 3 -
[https://i.imgur.com/duA9HpA.png](https://i.imgur.com/duA9HpA.png) 4 -
[https://i.imgur.com/c6epiwe.png](https://i.imgur.com/c6epiwe.png)

~~~
leadingthenet
Is there a guide on how to make Unity or Gnome look like that? I haven't used
either in quite a while.

~~~
matwood
This is a good point. All of those screenshots look much better than out of
the box Unity, so why is the out of the box look so bad.

------
Koshkin
Compared to the classic desktop environments like CDE or Windows 3.0/3.1 I
find more modern ones too distracting, as if they try to make you to focus on
_them_ rather than on what you actually want to do. I just miss the no-
nonsense, non-gimmicky look and feel of these classic, well-engineered desktop
environments.

~~~
z0r
I think Unity isn't too bad about screen real estate and mostly staying out of
the way, and I like the Cinnamon throw back a great deal. But what I like most
of all is chucking the entire desktop metaphor into the bin and using a tiling
window manager with a simple status bar and a launcher like dmenu. It's the
biggest upgrade I've ever made to my computer interface, and ever since I made
the move I find real desktop environments to be universally gimmicky.

------
bhaak
> completely revamp of buildsystem, Goodbye auto*hell tools headaches, welcome
> cmake

Someone's heaven is someone else's hell. That goes both ways.

~~~
majewsky
I was involved with the KDE project when CMake had just been introduced. The
reason for the switch to CMake (which by that time was still quite new) was
that the auto*hell had become so messy that only three developers would even
dare touch it to add new dependencies or compile flags etc., which is insane
for a project the scale of KDE. OTOH, most developers are comfortable doing
these things themselves in CMake. That's not to say there aren't parts of
CMake that are still only understood by select people (hello cross
compilation).

------
digi_owl
Frankly that looks much better than the current Plasma stuff.

~~~
127
KDE 3.5 was really great. Haven't had that since then. Guess they had to clean
the codebase, but at what cost?

~~~
digi_owl
Looking across history, it seems like the GUI side of _nix had something of a
seismic event somewhere around 2007. A event that has still not settled down
to this day.

~~~
kijin
The original iPhone was released in 2007.

Desktop environments have been desperately trying to look like a phone
interface ever since.

And yet, nearly 10 years later, I'm still writing this on a desktop PC with
three large monitors and a very typical keyboard and mouse...

~~~
sangnoir
> Desktop environments have been desperately trying to look like a phone
> interface ever since.

Not the first time I've read this on HN, so I will quote my last answer to
that[0]

"I doubt the plausibility of that timeline - the original iPhone was
_announced_ in January 2007, KDE 4.0Alpha1 was _released_ in May 2007[1]."

The iPhone only got released in June of 2007, so KDE4 preceded the iPhone,
unless you are suggesting the KDE devs were inspired by the iPhone
_announcement_.

0\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12555866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12555866)

1\.
[https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-alpha1.php](https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.0-alpha1.php)

~~~
Grishnakh
KDE is the one large DE which _didn 't_ try to look like a phone interface.
The OP erred slightly by implying that _all_ DEs have been trying to look like
phones. If anything, KDE4 tried to look a lot like Vista/Aero and Win7 (which
IMO isn't a bad thing for Vista; that OS didn't work too great, but it was IMO
the best-looking Windows UI ever).

Gnome3 came out quite some time after the iPhone, and was definitely part of
the trend to tabletize all UIs.

Also, it wasn't just KDE that eschewed this new trend; most of the smaller
Linux ones did too, plus the Gnome2 derivatives MATE & Cinnamon which have
only been trying to look like Gnome2.

------
72deluxe
Brilliant. I remember using KDE 1 on an old Elonex laptop and on a 486 (my
first experience of Linux). I remember it reaching the very configurable 3.5
series before I abandoned it and went to GNOME2, and then on to OSX...

But I have very fond memories of KDE 1. It seemed very similar to CDE on UNIX
boxes. Really simple, and no needless bells or whistles.

I am tempted to install this again and use it on my RPi3 if source is
available. That'll beat using WindowMaker or Blackbox on it like I do
currently.

Really good to see.

------
tehabe
Those memories, KDE 1 was my first glimpse into the world of Linux on SuSE
Linux 6.3 I think.

Many things were weird too me though, Kppp for example didn't support
ISDN4Linux. Also connection on demand was not perfect, it would connect
without the need. But that is another topic for another time.

~~~
inDigiNeous
Oh man. I had already forgot about ISDN4Linux. Spent two weeks just getting
the ISDN working, writing scripts, compiling the kernel. Imagine nowadays
spending 2 weeks to get online, reading HOWTOs, having to write shell scripts
(to dial the ISP and hangup) just to get basic functionality ..oh yeah that's
wifi and linux these days ;)

~~~
majewsky
Is wifi still that bad, though? I (personally) haven't seen any wifi problems
in the wild for at least 5 years.

~~~
gtirloni
I just spent 3 hours this week fighting the iwlwifi driver and my Intel 7265-D
card. Turned out power saving mode was causing all the drops (iwconfig $iface
power off).

~~~
neppo
funnily, I had the same network dropping issue due to wifi power saving on
windows 10

------
qwertyuiop924
The sad thing is, it looks way more practical and tasteful than KDE5. I would
say I miss nice DEs, but that's not true: i3 is way nicer than any DE has
been, for me.

~~~
baldfat
i3 user here. I call it the best system for 2% of people, and the other 98%
HATE it. One time I left it up and my wife had to use it when I wasn't home.
Talk about a unfun conversation. BUT I still use most of the KDE programs.

KDE is by far my favorite Desktop Environment (i3 to me is not a DE) and I
find the macOS being my least favorite. KDE unfortunately had a license issue
with Qt at first and was the reason why GNOME was actually founded. Then KDE
became the brunt of community anger and that reached fever pitch at KDE 4.0
(That was pushed out by Distributions due to community excitement) KDE 4.8+
has been a great DE but people would still say it was bloated even though in
reality it was the same size if not smaller then Gnome 2.x.

I still use some KDE apps on Windows (Kate (now VS Code has taken over)
digiKam and Okular (PDF viewer). The KDE on Windows also provides for Kritia
(My favorite painting program) Here is a blog on the active project
[http://kfunk.org/2016/06/18/kde-on-windows-
update/](http://kfunk.org/2016/06/18/kde-on-windows-update/).

~~~
Ezhik
I really long for a tiling wm with sane defaults.

Even something as simple as volume buttons needed to be configured manually in
i3wm, and after battling compositing for so long, I ended up just giving up
and using GNOME.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Well, yeah. They're WMs, not DEs. However, you can use i3 with gnome by
launching gnome-session with the arg --session=i3. The instructions for
setting up the DM to do this on Ubuntu can be found at
[http://blog.hugochinchilla.net/2013/03/using-
gnome-3-with-i3...](http://blog.hugochinchilla.net/2013/03/using-
gnome-3-with-i3-window-manager/). They're for Ubuntu, but it's fairly similar
in other distros (although it varies by DM).

------
Philipp__
Why do I find these retro DE more appropriate and eye pleasing than modern
ones? KDE 1 with HaikuOS icons would look amazing! I was rocking WindowMaker
until recently.

------
oever
The KDE 1 release is now available as a Docker image.

[http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-
su...](http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-supporting-
freedom/)

------
antod
Building KDE 1.0 (or was it 1.1?) from source on Redhat 5.1 was the first ever
major thing I did with *nix - I barely understood anything about Linux or
building software at the time. I was so amazed that I even got it working.

My old Pentium 200 classic (64MB RAM from memory) barely had a working dialup
connection, and it seemed to take ages to download the tarballs and build
them.

I remember building 3.2 (ish?) again years later on a much much faster machine
and it still seemed to take about the same about of time though :)

------
mhd
Ah, I still remember complaing on the mailing list that this new "Kool Desktop
Environment" (yes, that was its name) had no proper HIG and it's probably
better if they get some style guides ready _before_ starting up...

The heady days of early Linux GUIs. When Tk was king and nobody thought that
somebody would do something like Xt _again_...

~~~
eloisant
Yes, the mix of Tk, Lesstif, Xaw... Each of them ugly, and no consistency
between them.

KDE was suddenly a modern UI on Linux!

------
jlebrech
KDE1 source came with Slackware 3.6, it was pretty cool to compile it all from
a tarball. but it was also nice to customise FVWM to whatever i wanted it to,
for example use the BeOS colour scheme and put the buttons in the same place
on windows.

------
paraiuspau
1997, downloading all the KDE1 essentials on a 14.4 kbps modem.. Still wasn't
enough to break the hold fvwm1 had over me.

------
albertzeyer
This might be a good choice for a low resource desktop, kind of like an
alternative to Fluxbox et al.

~~~
appelza
Not really. KDE1 was not meant as a low resource application, and it's
probably slower than KDE5 in fact.

~~~
Yaggo
KDE 1.0 was release in 1998, almost _two decades_ ago. Even a decade old
machine low-end machine is scifi-high-end by 1998 standards.

That being said, it may be impractical to browse the modern web with KHTML 1.0
(from which webkit was forked by Apple, hence it being a remote ancestor also
for current Safari and Chrome!).

~~~
Zardoz84
No body forbid you of running Firefox/Chrome on KDE 1

------
tonyedgecombe
It looks pretty good for a version 1.

------
frik
I preferred KDE 1-2 over 3 and hated 4.0+. Same with Gnome 2, hate 3.0+

------
chajath
I would like to see wmaker and gnome-panel 1 setup make a come back

------
signa11
how is this different than the trinity-desktop-environment
([https://www.trinitydesktop.org/](https://www.trinitydesktop.org/)) ?

~~~
wolfgke
According to
[https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php](https://www.trinitydesktop.org/about.php)
Trinity Desktop Environment is a continuation of KDE 3, while the article is
about a build of KDE 1.0.

~~~
signa11
ah ok cool. thanks !

------
pvdebbe
Cool. If they bring up ksirtet then I'm forever grateful

~~~
heliocastro
kdetoys is on the line, let's see

------
tofupup
interesting

------
minikites
I realize I sound like the world's largest wet blanket but imagine if this
effort was spent on improving current versions of free software.

~~~
nekopa
It looks like he already does a lot of work on current versions of free
software, seems like he's on the kde team.

Or do you feel life should be all work and no play? I think stuff like this
gives people the energy to work on current stuff.

~~~
minikites
I could have done a better job elaborating in my original post, I was too
glib. To me it's less about this particular example (it's small potatoes
overall) and more about the double standard for the tech industry. Imagine if
university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun.
Imagine if Ford started producing Model T's again just for fun. Tech is the
only industry where people goof off, get paid (in dollars or praise) and yet
there are still complaints about how bad it is to work in technology.

Edit:

To add on to this, I think what frustrates me most is the lack of collective
self-reflection or appreciation of privilege in the tech industry. I'm not
trying to deny the existence of real problems in the tech industry but every
time I (as a non-tech industry worker) hear my friends or see some article
about how underpaid tech workers are (at 3 to 4 times my salary) I have to
clench my bowels and try not to have an aneurysm. I would love to see articles
regularly hit the top of Hacker News titled "Look at how good we have it"
(including some recognition about how bad the economy is for everyone else)
but I don't think I've ever seen that.

~~~
__s
There'd be value to a museum making a reproduction of a Model T, & there's
value to the history of science, to focus on what kind of world scientists
then were thinking in terms of when they created various hypotheses

I've invested a lot of my personal time in creating the fastest befunge
implementations I know of. I intend to spend even more time eventually when I
get to having it JIT to assembly. I find it fun, I don't get paid for it, & I
have a modest salary (under 40k/yr)

It _did_ end up having positive outcomes, where I was JITing befunge code to
python bytecode, & it got me thinking about the bytecode's performance, so to
optimize my befunge implementation I went a level deeper & optimized the
python implementation to wordcode instead of bytecode, giving anyone who uses
Python 3.6 a 1% improvement

But maybe working on improving the performance of Python by 1% is frivolous,
since Python's just some big codebase whose only use is in silly things like
my befunge interpreter..

That said, I agree with you somewhat on that tech industry rant. I mention my
salary's modest, but it was less while I was working as general labor in
flooring, which was way more than when I was vending icecream off a bike
(which was much more than when they'd have me put together coolant packs for
25$ in a 6 hour day)

You're directing it at the wrong thing. Writing a blog about some hobby
project isn't what's wrong with the world

~~~
minikites
I think I'm not making my point particularly well. It's also possible that my
point itself is terrible, as evidenced by the raft of downvotes and the fact
that I was banned from posting this comment until hours later. I guess HN is
only a place for popular opinions.

Your Python example is undeniably progress because Python is still in wide
use, a better example would be if you improved the performance of Dylan (or
some other language that has long since fallen out of use). For your flooring
example, imagine if you were contracted to work on someone's house and went,
"Instead of using fresh floorboards, we decided to install floorboards that
have been sitting out in the rain for 40 years because we enjoyed the
challenge!"

I've seen enough people make comments on how contributing to free software is
a fight for the future of political and social freedom, since those who
control technology will have a disproportionate impact on the systems of power
and I find that hard to square with the attitude that free software no big
deal and we should just have fun.

~~~
mwfunk
It's because there is no consensus on any of those things, particularly
political beliefs surrounding free software. The people who are saying free
software is about scratching itches are generally not the same people who
equate contributing to free software with fighting for the future of political
and social freedom. You're not seeing contradictory positions because you're
(usually) not seeing the same people state those positions.

If it seems that way, it's because a given online discussion isn't a random
sample of people's beliefs. For example, to someone reading Reddit or Slashdot
(or HN sometimes, unfortunately), it's easy to jump to the conclusion that
everything sucks and everyone hates everything. Post an article about Python,
and all the comments will be about how Python is terrible and everyone should
use Ruby (or whatever). Post an article about Ruby, and all the comments will
be about how Ruby is terrible and everyone should use Python (or whatever).
Read the same site for long enough and it will start to look like a mass of
contradictions- "wait, everyone here said Python sucked before and I should
use Ruby, but now they're all saying Ruby sucks and I should use Python?!?"
But really it's just different people showing up to disparage whatever the
topic of discussion is. I think it's just the nature of the medium that makes
it really hard to gauge consensus within a community.

