Krita 4.0 pre-alpha interface screenshot with kiki As of today, the name KDE no longer stands for K Desktop Environment, but for the community that produces the software.

What would have been previously known as KDE 4 was split into three parts: KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Platform (now KDE Frameworks) altogether bundled as 'KDE Software Compilation 4' (abbreviated 'KDE SC 4'). The rebranding focused on de-emphasizing the desktop environment as 'just another product', and emphasizing both the community and the other technologies provided as KDE software. On 24 November 2009 the KDE Marketing Team announced a rebranding of the KDE project components, motivated by the perceived shift from building a desktop environment to a wider ranging project around a community of 'people who create software'. This allowed KDE software based on Qt 4 or newer versions to theoretically be distributed to Microsoft Windows and OS X. The original GPL licensed version of this toolkit only existed for platforms which used the X11 display server, but with the release of Qt 4, LGPL licensed versions are available for more platforms.

On 12 July 1998 the first version of the desktop environment, called KDE 1.0, was released. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, a few applications were being released.

In the beginning Matthias Ettrich chose to use Trolltech's Qt framework for the KDE project. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to 'K Desktop Environment' before it was dropped altogether in favor of simply KDE in a rebranding effort. The K was originally suggested to stand for ' Kool', but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun through the X/Open consortium, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. The name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems.

His initial Usenet post spurred significant interest, and the KDE project was born. In order to solve the issue, he proposed the creation of a desktop environment in which users could expect the applications to be consistent and easy to use. In his opinion, desktop applications of the time were too complicated for end users. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked or behaved alike. KDE (back then called the K(ool) Desktop Environment) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen.Īt the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop.

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