KDE was my first linux DE when I first switched from Windows around 2005, but I moved away from it during the early KDE4 debacle. Switched back to KDE a few years ago and cannot be happier, feels so good to be at home again. Happy birthday!
I was the same, except I never went back. However I just got a Steamdeck, and the desktop mode runs KDE, and it's very very nice. I'm probably gonna try it out as my daily driver on my desktop.
I use KDE because the GNOME UI is unbearably bad, but KDE is way more buggy in my experience.
The KDE file explorer often touches my files (updates the "most recently accessed" timestamp") for no apparent reason.
The KDE screen recorder eats up infinite RAM and takes only a few seconds to consume all of 64GB of RAM and crashes my PC.
KDE often has a bug where I cannot click inside application windows. I have to restart plasma in order to be able to click inside windows again.
Sleep often fails in that my PC will go to sleep and then wake up, but there is a black screen and even unplugging and re-plugging the display cable doesn't do anything. Even REISUO doesn't do anything, seems like the kernel is crashed.
And lots and lots of other bugs.
GNOME was never too popular among "true hackers" because compared to KDE, it is seen as less flexible, less configurable and hence more "nannying". But to me, I always found KDE too cluttered and all over the place.
Now, I just pulled up the KDE home page and was presently surprised by the very sleak looking screenshots of a KDE desktop. Looks much more polished compared to the KDE of 20 years ago.
Congratulations and Happy Birthday, KDE!
Hell, having to install an extension to disable the corner actions killed my desire to use Gnome forever! In KDE things like this are plainly available in Settings, as it should be.
Gnome 1.4 with Sawfish it was, even more than KWM thanks to Lisp.
Then RedHat/Helix dumbed it down with 2.2 and beyond and with the 3/4.x releases we are still with a hog mixing C, Rust and Javascript.
If it only used Guile instead of JS...
You're talking development, but I'm thinking purely from an end-user perspective.
That was fun, you could make any window have it's own theme.
I used to love GNOME, but I've switched to KDE after GNOME 3 came out (can't stand it!). Long live KDE!
KDE 2 was the desktop environment I started using with Mandrake 8.0 in 2001. I absolutely loved KDE 3, it was my favorite desktop environment. When KDE 4 was released, I even designed a few Plasma themes, one of which aimed to bring back the quartz design of KDE 3. Currently, I am using macOS, but I often find myself reminiscing about the systems from the early 2000s. Those were truly special times in the world of desktop environments. Everything was free of bloatware back then, and we didn't need a ton of ad blockers for browsing the internet. We could use Kopete for chatting, or we were on IRC with Konversation. It was a different world altogether. In memory of those times, I’m going to download Kubuntu today and see where they stand currently. It will be interesting to explore the advancements and changes in the KDE environment since those early days!
Happy birthday and thanks to all the KDE hackers for the gift of the best desktop environment on GNU/Linux and on computers in general. Light years ahead of anything else. Also so many very nice applications. Often winder how you can even manage to do it all.
Nice ! Hopefully KDE will have a true multi-monitor support one day :)
Could you elaborate? I've been using it with multiple monitors for over a decade, and I don't know what I should be missing.
Support for synced panels on multiple monitors is still not there. It was present on Windows 17 years ago.
Even duplicating a panel on multiple monitors is not possible, at least for me this is basic multi monitor functionality.
Configure your panels as you like, change one monitor and the panels are gone. There's an issue open since 2021 about this problem : https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446654
I've been using Windows for more than 17 years and I have no clue what you're talking about; the term “panel” is not an established term in Windows’ desktop environment.
It is in KDE. KDE panel -> Windows Taskbar.
I wrongly applied KDE terminology when talking about Windows.
That's not a "problem",the bug report says it's a feature you want to be implemented.
I guess you could replicate your panel in the other monitor "by hand", or just duplicating the relevant entries and setting them up for the other monitor at plasmarc.
Did you try plugging the monitors in?