KDE
KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment and development platform built with Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It runs on most Unix and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, BSD and Solaris. There are also ports to Mac OS X using its X11 layer and Microsoft Windows using Cygwin.
The main strengths of KDE are its ease of use, flexibility, portability, and compelling feature set. It is developed in conjunction with KDevelop, a software development suite, and KOffice, a suite of office software.
The "K" originally stood for "Kool", but was changed soon after to stand simply for "K", which is "The first letter before 'L' (which stands for Linux) in the Latin alphabet."
The project's mascot is a green dragon named Konqi. Konqi can be found in various applications, including when the user logs out and in the "About KDE" screen.
A typical KDE 3.1 session: the main menu (left), KMail (background), Konqueror (center/right) and Noatun, a multimedia player (top right)
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2 Early History 3 Release cycle and version numbers 4 Architecture 5 KDE Applications 6 Timeline 7 See also 8 External links |
Like many open source/free software projects, KDE is primarily a volunteer effort, although various companies, such as Novell (in the form of SuSE), Trolltech, and Mandrake employ developers to work on the project. Since a large amount of individuals contribute to KDE in various ways (e.g. code, translation, artwork), organization of such a project is complex. Most problems are discussed on a number of different mailing lists.
Important decisions, such as release dates and inclusion of new applications, are made on the kde-core-devel list by the so-called core developers. These are developers which have made significant contributions to KDE over a long period of time. Decisions are not made by a formal voting process, but by discussion on the mailing lists. In most cases this seems to work well, and major discussions, such as the question whether the KDE 2 API should be broken in favor of KDE 3, are rare.
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, then at a student at the University of Tuebingen. He found a number of things wrong with the UNIX desktop at that time. Among his qualms, outlined in a now-famous newsgroup post, were that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike to each other. He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but rather 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 complains with desktop applications of the time were that his girlfriend could not use them. That post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.
Matthias chose to use the Qt toolkit as the toolkit of choice of the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, large and complex applications were being released. In mid-1997, the GNU project had concerns about the licensing of Qt, leading to their founding the GNOME Desktop project and Harmony, a now-abandoned project to clone Qt. Qt was later relicensed to provide the GNU General Public License as an option, which has mitigated these concerns. Both KDE and GNOME now participate in Freedesktop.org, an effort to standardise Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still some freindly competition between them.
As the project history below shows, the KDE team releases new versions on a frequent basis. They are known for sticking to their release plan, and it is rare that a release delays for more than one or two weeks. (An exception was KDE 3.1, which was delayed for more than a month because of a number of security issues in the code base.)
Maintaining a strict release plan for a volunteer project of this size is unusual; the Linux kernel, for instance, is known for its unpredictable delays, and the GNOME project had several times missed the aimed release date.
There are two main types of releases:
A major KDE release has two version numbers, e.g. KDE 1.1.
All KDE releases in the same major version (e.g. KDE1, KDE2 and KDE3) are both binary and source-compatible.
This means for instance that software developed against KDE 3.0.x will work with all KDE3 releases. Only a major KDE release will incorporate new features.
Changes requiring recompilation or porting never occur except during major version changes; this maintains a stable API for KDE application developers. The changes between KDE 1 and KDE 2 series were large and many, while the API changes between KDE 2 and KDE 3 were comparatively minor, meaning that applications could be easily ported to the new architecture. Up to now the KDE major version numbers follow the Qt release cycle.
As soon as a major release is ready and announced, work on the next major release starts. A major release needs several months to be finished and many bugs that are fixed during this time are "backported" to the stable branch, meaning that these fixes are incorporated into the last stable release.
For minor releases, a shortened release schedule is used.
A minor release is based on a CVS branch of a previous release and does not affect the "HEAD branch", the branch where the current development of the next major release takes place.
The somewhat unusual name "3.0.5a" was used because of a lack of version numbers. Work on KDE 3.1 had already started and, up to that day, the release coordinator used version numbers such as 3.0.5, 3.0.6 internally in the CVS system to mark snapshots of the upcoming 3.1. Then after 3.0.3, a number of important and unexpected bug fixes suddenly became necessary, leading to a conflict, because 3.0.6 was at this time already in use. More recent KDE release cycles have tagged pre-release snapshots with large revision numbers, such as 3.1.95, to avoid such conflicts.
While development on KDE 2.x in general has stopped, very important security fixes are backported to KDE 2.x since people still use it.
Organization of the KDE project
Early History
Release cycle and version numbers
Major release
There have been 8 major releases: 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2.Minor release
A minor KDE release has three version numbers, e.g. KDE 1.1.1, and the developers focus on fixing bugs, minor glitches and small usability improvements, as opposed to adding new features. new features,
bug fixes
KDE 3.2 released --------------------> KDE 3.3 (also called HEAD branch)
(new development
started) bug fixes only
--------------------> KDE 3.2 BRANCH (becoming a minor release)
Architecture
Several vital pieces of technology make up the advanced infrastructure of KDE:Packaging
Due to the size of KDE, it is packaged into several package categories to simplify installation. This is a reference scheme, packagers are free to use their own packages for KDE.KDE Applications
For a full list, see List of KDE applications
Applications for KDE include :Timeline
See also
External links