
KDE 2 Screenshots (2000-2002) - walrus01
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/
======
rossy
Is it wrong that I really like the look of some of these? Some are garish,
sure, but others like
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kde2b3_6.jpg)
and
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kde2final_4.jpg)
have a professional feel that is missing in modern desktop environments. Even
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kde_jp_3.jpg)
has a certain appeal to it. I miss the days when UI toolkits drew everything
as grey boxes with a 3D edge. I miss Windows 9x/2000 and Mac OS 8/9 too.

I think one of the best things about early 2000-era desktop environments was
that it was hard for programs to look out-of-place. In a modern desktop
environment, you can easily tell the difference between programs written with
different toolkits, like GTK+ and Qt. Even though each toolkit can imitate the
other (there's a Adwaita theme for Qt and a Breeze theme for GTK3,) due to the
complexity of modern UI themes, it's impossible to get things right and the
lack of drop-shadows or animations or hover effects will leave some programs
looking sub-standard. On the other hand, every developer can draw a
3D-bevelled grey box. Both GTK+ and Qt apps were made of grey boxes and they
both represented each kind of widget in a pretty similar way.

~~~
flukus
People cared about consistent look and feel back then, everyone was hating on
java because it got it wrong. Now everything seems to have it's own style and
behavior.

~~~
rossy
True that. Of the three programs I can see on my desktop right now (Chrome,
WebStorm and Outlook,) none of them are even remotely trying to look
consistent with the rest of the operating system. On the other hand, Office
2000 looks right at home on Windows 2000. Even though some controls were
technically non-native, they still fit in because the 3D bevel was universal.

~~~
svckr
I secretly enjoy the ridicule I get from other web developers for refusing to
use Chrome (except for late stage cross browser testing) because it does not
even try to fit in.

------
willvarfar
Ah back in the early 2000s life was exciting on the Linux desktop with weird
and unconventional artistic window decorators that would make plants twine
around your borders or have short beOS-style tabs or put the close buttons
bottom right and so on! Customizing the desktop was a major time-sink for the
students at my collage. :D

In fact, by comparison with how I recall Linux desktops in 2000, these KDE 2
screenshots seem to be ushering in a new era of boring conforming window
decorators :(

Where have all the crazy interesting rebelling different decorators gone? I
did a quick flick through gnome-look.org and found nothing very different.. :(

~~~
meekins
Gnome and KDE have both embraced flat designs but the Enlightenment community
seems to still do some rather "original" decorations [1]. They do look rather
retro these days though.

[https://exchange.enlightenment.org/themeGroup/show/24](https://exchange.enlightenment.org/themeGroup/show/24)

~~~
flukus
Is enlightenment still active and still the most hackable?

~~~
notalaser
It's under active development, yes. It has seen a major rewrite of a lot of
foundation libraries after 0.16.

The artwork is not of the same quality, I guess, probably because a lot of
artists have moved on, but it's a very solid environment, and the libraries
that have been developed as part of the project are great. They're used in
Tizen: [https://www.tizen.org/events/presentations/tizen-native-
disp...](https://www.tizen.org/events/presentations/tizen-native-display-
layer-efl-architecture-and-usage) ; Carsten Haitzler (rasterman) has been
working at Samsung for a few years now.

(Or at least he had been working for a few years when I read the presentation;
I think he still does, but I'm not sure)

~~~
digi_owl
For a guy that has in the past railed against the Red Hat/Gnome people,
Rasterman seems to have become very corporate in recent years...

------
zephjc
Forget glossy - fuzzy is the next big thing!
[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UqUwVPikChs/SebDLPegtvI/AAAAAAAAI0...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_UqUwVPikChs/SebDLPegtvI/AAAAAAAAI0Y/lkjpL-
jpQbs/s1600-h/fluppy-bunny.jpg)

------
thinkingkong
What a nightmare that world was. Totally customizable everything, unreasonable
defaults, window managers swapped out with widget sets and competing graphics
libraries.

I cant remember a better reason to have gotten super good at the command line.

~~~
pawadu
> Totally customizable everything, unreasonable defaults

Well, if you remove the latter the former actually becomes a positive thing.

~~~
Xiol
Or you could go the GNOME route and do the reverse.

------
partycoder
I really liked KDE up to version 3. KDE 4 seemed like a big departure from
version 3 and focused too much on the shell and libraries and not a lot on the
applications themselves.

I think the legacy of KDE is the open sourcing of Qt and the creation of the
KHTML that then was forked to create WebKit.

~~~
Zardoz84
have you try KDE 4 recently? There is a lot of hate around KDE 4 thanks to the
initial versions, but actually is the best DE for GNU/Linux

~~~
DiThi
At some point (after years!) it became OK and I went back to it, but it was
never as good as KDE 3.5 was for me. I realized it was not just nostalgia,
when a friend showed me a laptop with KDE 3.5 and used it for some minutes.

While the whole DE got worse, there's two pieces that got better and better,
Kate and KWin.

~~~
flukus
And desktop applets. KDE 4 is the only environment I ever used where these
were stable and reliable.

~~~
DiThi
> stable and reliable

They were not, for a few years.

~~~
flukus
They were for me, even on 4.0. Nothing else worked, but the plasma widgets
did.

------
znpy
I still think KDE 3.5 was awesome and we really didn't need KDE 4.

~~~
jordonwii
This. I switched to Gnome 2 as soon as Mandriva switched to KDE4, and then ran
the last version of Ubuntu with Gnome 2 until I had to upgrade.

Those were the days.

~~~
darmok
I remember doing the same thing. I loved KDE until KDE 4. Then I used Ubuntu
with Gnome 2 for a while and really liked it, but then Ubuntu decided to
switch to Unity which I found to be pure rubbish. About that time, Gnome
decided to go against all reason and foisted Gnome 3 abomination on us ... so
I checked out KDE 4 again and they'd fixed most of the bugs and made it
reasonable again :-)

And through all the migrations, I still liked KDE 3.5 the best.

------
ambrop7
Not much different from my current Xfce desktop. We now have antialiased fonts
and window shadows provided by compositing WMs though.

------
zafiro17
I look at these screenshots and think to myself, this desktop is feature
complete, or awfully close to it. What have we been doing since then? That's a
little facetious of course, and we've made desktops more usable in countless
ways since then. But still, back in 2000, KDE2 was a perfectly usable desktop
that would have enabled me to do my work.

Maybe it's nostalgia though: I first came to Linux in 2001 (SuSE Linux 7.1) on
KDE2, Gnome1, Windowmaker, and Blackbox, and I've had fun ever since then. Yes
you could make it garish or ungainly, but the very fact that you could
customize it any way you want was an instantaneous appeal for me. Sadly, in
chasing mainstream users we've gone the route of homogeneity. So now we've got
gorgeous, modern desktops like Mint Cinnamon, which is in my opinion every bit
as gorgeous as Mac OSX - maybe even more so! But it was Linux's ability to
change its GUI interface totally that instantly drew me in. That appeal drives
me away from some GUIs to this day, as should be obvious.

------
rikkus
Nice to see this. Some of these, including this one[1] are from my desktop. I
miss KDE now I'm on Windows all the time.

[1]
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kd...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/KDE%202-x/kde2b3_5.jpg)

~~~
rikkus
I've realised what I really miss: Being able to change my own desktop,
including its entire behaviour, was incredible. I first found this enjoyment
when running TkDesk[1]

[1] [http://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/](http://tkdesk.sourceforge.net/)

------
eyelidlessness
This is what I imagine it feels like looking at photos of yourself with a perm
or a leisure suit. The washed out colors. The complete obliviousness to how
embarrassing it was. The sheer joy of experiencing it at the time. The quiet
nostalgia.

Edit: the pride, because it was so much better than what came before. At least
you felt like it was.

Edit 2: seriously, the nostalgia. I miss jamming whatever nonsense together on
that poor Debian install I had on whatever weird box of discarded parts where
I kind of started learning to loonix. And I miss the infinite configurability
of KDE, even though everything I came up with felt like hammer pants.

------
flukus
How long do we think until colorful and glossy icons are in again?

~~~
zephjc
at least until after all the designers who remember from a decade ago it have
retired or died

------
andreiw
I remember it well. I was a heavy KDE user through most of the aughts until I
got an iBook. It was awesome. Very tweakable. Thoughtful apps, if a little
instable in a few places.

It's still bewilders me how KDE turned into... this Plasma thing. Did the
entire team behind KDE just walk out at some point?

~~~
distances
For what it's worth, I think the current KDE Plasma is quite evenly competing
for the nicest desktop environment around (including the proprietary ones in
functionality and looks -- polish is behind due to obvious mismatch in
development manpower).

~~~
toyg
The whole "desktop widget / workspace" thing in KDE4 was a complete waste of
time, like the "tabletization" that followed. It felt like they were chasing
fashion, cranking out slow and half-broken me-too implementations of very
debatable concepts. That's when they lost any hope of ever challenging in the
mainstream market.

They're also cursed by the typical open-source churn, where they replace
battle-tested programs with unstable "new shiny" just because nobody wants to
maintain old code.

------
victorhugo31337
Great times! I remember Red Hat Linux 7.2 (Not RHEL-7.2) with KDE installed
circa 2001.

------
jug
Brings me back to my days of studying. I remember KDE as making a huge
impression on me, it struck me as having such high quality and feature rich
applications. Coming from Windows and things like Notepad, seeing KWrite and
stuff. Jaw dropping.

Coming to think of it, it wasn't just that. It was also that the application
devs seemed to _intentionally_ seek a balance between features and remaining
straightforward and simple. That gave off an aura of quality in my opinion.

------
rayiner
Oh man. I remember trolling Linux forums back then about how shitty the Linux
desktop was compared to BeOS. Surprisingly still true.

------
christouphair
I feel so old. I remember KDE beta, before 1.0. At the time, a graphical file
manager under Linux was revolutionary.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_1)

------
Accacin
I've been happy with i3wm for quite a while now, a good balance of power user
features and ease of use.

------
lottin
I never was a big user of KDE, because it was considered non-free back then
and it wasn't included in Debian, but I have to admit it looked good — better
than Gnome. GTK version 1 was so awful looking!

------
zhuzhu
I prefer KDE 2.0 style.

