13 ms·

KDE Project releases KDE 1

281 points by oever 10y ago

minikites 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - aembleton 10y ago
      Was he paid to do it? It might just be a fun side project for him. If you don't like it, don't use it.
    - chriswarbo 10y ago
      > Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun. My university physics curriculum was pretty much all around in the 1940s (classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, special and general relativity, etc.) I'm currently in a computer science department where the curriculum includes a bunch of stuff like Cassandra, Mongo, Javascript, Unity, etc. I think it would be good for those of us in computing to take more notice of our field's past (even by the 1940s we had lambda calculus, combinatory logic, etc.)
      - minikites 10y ago
        If you took more than an intro class then I would say your university did you a disservice. And of course history has it's place for all fields of knowledge, but not at the expense of progress, which is the point I'm (poorly) attempting to make.
        jlappi 10y ago
        To me, it sounds more like that's the only point you can salvage from your original post. And that's stretching it.
        minikites 10y ago
        I appreciate your contribution.
    - artpepper 10y ago
      But people do restore classic cars, for fun.
      - minikites 10y ago
        It's not a perfect example because free software doesn't map onto any traditional industry that well.
    - __s 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        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.
    - david-given 10y ago
      > Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun. Well, here's Stephen Granades' awesome video where he explains how the luminiferous aether works, and how it transports light, and even (helps) perform an experiment to demonstrate it. It's got real science in it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNVG33awq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNVG33awq4 So, while I get your point, I'm still slightly on the 'that actually sounds quite cool' camp...
- kybernetyk 10y ago
  If you think that free software could be "brought forward" in some way then go and do it yourself. But telling other people what to do with their life time is highly immoral.
  - minikites 10y ago
    In what way is it "highly immoral"? Is it more or less immoral than burglary (for example)?
- heliocastro 10y ago
  It was FUN. KDE is doing 20th years, i've been there for 16 now. No, nobody payed me, i made it because i have passion for the project and it shaped my professional career. And YES, we need keep our memories for future reference
signa11 10y ago
how is this different than the trinity-desktop-environment (https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ https://www.trinitydesktop.org/) ?
- wolfgke 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    ah ok cool. thanks !
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
It looks pretty good for a version 1.
unicornporn 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    Unity is terrible, but at least Ubuntu admits it. I do think Gnome can be made to be pretty.
    - hd4 10y ago
      What's wrong with Unity? And where did they admit it was bad? It does the job, it doesn't need a lot of RAM, it's good-looking, stays out of the way. By far the best experience I've had as a developer on desktop Linux.
  - uola 10y ago
    I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but there nothing wrong with the look as such. The, maybe controversial, problem is that the substance isn't there. Things you expect, or strive for, in modern application development like developers tools, multimedia support, security features, adoption, distribution etc. isn't up to the task. It seem like whenever Linux desktop technologies get good enough to go somewhere they reinvent themselves under a slightly different paradigm.
  - unicornporn 10y ago
    I actually just went back to Linux after 11 years of macOS and I can't say Gnome 3 does it for me either. 10.6 was my favorite version of OS X and I think that OS has been going mostly downhill from there. When switching I realized I've been spoiled with well thought out design and UX, but I must say I really enjoy the simplicity and polish of MATE DE[1]. It's sort of like traveling back to a time when a desktop was a desktop (oh boy, am I getting old) and not a shopping mall were I'm supposed to buy stuff and have my habits tracked and measured. [1] http://mate-desktop.org/ http://mate-desktop.org/
thom 10y ago
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.
- zaphar 10y ago
  Same here, KIO was incredibly useful. As a young dev, I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive. I still have fond memories of KDE in the early years before flashy looks became a must have feature.
  - distances 10y ago
    KIO is very much still alive, and in frequent use for me at least. Treating remote folders over SSH straight in my favorite file manager is pretty indeed.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    > I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive. I wish it worked as well as you describe. It only works if the application you are using is KIO-enabled. On Windows, you can use a "\\servername\sharename\path\to\file.txt" style path (a UNC path) virtually anywhere and it just works. It also has the smarts to pass along your credentials, etc, so it's virtually transparent. The only exception I've seen to this is that the command prompt doesn't understand a UNC path as a working directory, but commands like copy, etc, do work with it.
    - thom 10y ago
      Not sure this is a fair comparison. It works with basically any KDE app, for any protocol that has a KIO slave. There certainly must be a lot of confusion for users that don't understand why it doesn't work in random non-KDE apps they've installed, or the command line, but I suspect very few of them are typing in SSH URLs anyway. At the same time, Windows doesn't accept an SFTP URL in a file open dialog. Anyway, I use emacs on both platforms and it handles all of this for me, so my dog retired from this game many years ago.
inDigiNeous 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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)
72deluxe 10y ago
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 10y ago
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.
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  SuSE 5.3.1 had it with GNOME 1 (and FVWM 95 and Enlightment) Funny thing. You can run GNOME 1 over KDE 1
  - tehabe 10y ago
    I also remembered incorrectly, it was SuSE 6.1, the first one with Linux 2.2. It also came with WordPerfect 8 but I don't know if I actually used it.
    - Zardoz84 10y ago
      I have yet the 6 cdroms . It was my first Linux/Unix experience. I remember trying RedHat and Debian, aparte of SuSE and I found at these moment SuSE YaST installer was the BEST installer (I was 14 years old ~> 98's)
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Iirc, Gnome didn't have a dedicated WM for the longest time. for a while Rasterman (of Enlightenment fame) was working for Red Hat and Gnome used Enlightenment as their WM. But there came to a disagreement between Rasterman and the Gnome devs about where things were going, and he left Red Hat and started working on turning Enlightenment into a full DE. Not long after i think we started seeing various WMs being bundled with Gnome, culminating in some that used composition and OpenGL to render the desktops as sides of a cube. After that it seems that everyone involved with the major DEs got hooked on eyecandy.
    - chriswarbo 10y ago
digi_owl 10y ago
Frankly that looks much better than the current Plasma stuff.
- 127 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
    - satysin 10y ago
      Yeah it was their response to Vista with dwm and other fancy UI things. Yet here we are at the end of 2016 and Wayland still isn't quite there and gnome went some weird direction with everything. I hate how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen for gnome. Cinnamon is really nice albeit a little bloat with options. That isn't really a bad thing though imho.
    - kijin 10y ago
      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 10y ago
        > 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
albertzeyer 10y ago
This might be a good choice for a low resource desktop, kind of like an alternative to Fluxbox et al.
- appelza 10y ago
  Not really. KDE1 was not meant as a low resource application, and it's probably slower than KDE5 in fact.
  - Zardoz84 10y ago
    Worked really well on a 486 or an K6-2 . I don't get your point that would be slower that KDE 5.
    - heliocastro 10y ago
      Guys, is FAST as hell, and the screenshot was taken from inside KDE 1 using a PLasma 5 application, so in general sparse term, is usable. I will make it totally usable in next weeks tough, as i didn't have time to port 100 %.
  - Yaggo 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      No body forbid you of running Firefox/Chrome on KDE 1
- cmiles74 10y ago
  When KDE 1 came out, I had installed from source on a 75Mhz PowerPC 601 with 128MB of RAM[0] running MkLinux[1]. It ran acceptably, it was much more responsive that System 7.5. [0] http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_7200_75.html http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powerma... [1] http://mklinux.org http://mklinux.org
bhaak 10y ago
> completely revamp of buildsystem, Goodbye auto*hell tools headaches, welcome cmake Someone's heaven is someone else's hell. That goes both ways.
- majewsky 10y ago
  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).
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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/.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Some KDE apps are nice, but I tend to find the UI to have too much bling for my tastes: it's distracting. But Konqurer and Krita are both excellent (although I use firefox), and I've heard good things about Kate (although I'm an Emacs user). As for i3, yeah. It's actually a really nice system: you can do almost anything by keyboard although you only need to know five shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+h, $mod+v, $mod+shift+q, and $mod+shift+e respectively), and there are a few other handy ones ($mod+enter, $mod+<number>). it's a really clean, and it just feels good to use. But it's really confusing to those who don't know it. I had a friend who tried to use my computer once... that was fun to watch.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    > Then KDE became the brunt of community anger and that reached fever pitch at KDE 4.0 I'm a long-time KDE user and I actually like the plasma desktop. KDE 4.0 should never have been a public release -it was not ready, but KDE got through it. I'm not embarrassed to admit I felt some schadenfreude towards the Gnome 3 struggles
gorkemcetin 10y ago
This is a wonderful piece of work guys. I've submitted it on ProductHunt - your upvotes welcome so every Linux lover out there can try it out. https://www.producthunt.com/newest https://www.producthunt.com/newest
paraiuspau 10y ago
1997, downloading all the KDE1 essentials on a 14.4 kbps modem.. Still wasn't enough to break the hold fvwm1 had over me.
Philipp__ 10y ago
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.
pvdebbe 10y ago
Cool. If they bring up ksirtet then I'm forever grateful
- heliocastro 10y ago
  kdetoys is on the line, let's see
jlebrech 10y ago
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.
mhd 10y ago
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 10y ago
  Yes, the mix of Tk, Lesstif, Xaw... Each of them ugly, and no consistency between them. KDE was suddenly a modern UI on Linux!
Koshkin 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
frik 10y ago
I preferred KDE 1-2 over 3 and hated 4.0+. Same with Gnome 2, hate 3.0+
oever 10y ago
The KDE 1 release is now available as a Docker image. http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-supporting-freedom/ http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-su...
chajath 10y ago
I would like to see wmaker and gnome-panel 1 setup make a come back
tofupup 10y ago
interesting
antod 10y ago
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 :)

281 points by oever 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - aembleton 10y ago
    Was he paid to do it? It might just be a fun side project for him. If you don't like it, don't use it.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    > Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun. My university physics curriculum was pretty much all around in the 1940s (classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, special and general relativity, etc.) I'm currently in a computer science department where the curriculum includes a bunch of stuff like Cassandra, Mongo, Javascript, Unity, etc. I think it would be good for those of us in computing to take more notice of our field's past (even by the 1940s we had lambda calculus, combinatory logic, etc.)
    - minikites 10y ago
      If you took more than an intro class then I would say your university did you a disservice. And of course history has it's place for all fields of knowledge, but not at the expense of progress, which is the point I'm (poorly) attempting to make.
      - jlappi 10y ago
        To me, it sounds more like that's the only point you can salvage from your original post. And that's stretching it.
        minikites 10y ago
        I appreciate your contribution.
  - artpepper 10y ago
    But people do restore classic cars, for fun.
    - minikites 10y ago
      It's not a perfect example because free software doesn't map onto any traditional industry that well.
  - __s 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      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.
  - david-given 10y ago
    > Imagine if university science departments switched to 1940s curriculum just for fun. Well, here's Stephen Granades' awesome video where he explains how the luminiferous aether works, and how it transports light, and even (helps) perform an experiment to demonstrate it. It's got real science in it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNVG33awq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNVG33awq4 So, while I get your point, I'm still slightly on the 'that actually sounds quite cool' camp...
kybernetyk 10y ago
If you think that free software could be "brought forward" in some way then go and do it yourself. But telling other people what to do with their life time is highly immoral.
- minikites 10y ago
  In what way is it "highly immoral"? Is it more or less immoral than burglary (for example)?
heliocastro 10y ago
It was FUN. KDE is doing 20th years, i've been there for 16 now. No, nobody payed me, i made it because i have passion for the project and it shaped my professional career. And YES, we need keep our memories for future reference

signa11 10y ago

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

wolfgke 10y ago
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 10y ago
  ah ok cool. thanks !

tonyedgecombe 10y ago

It looks pretty good for a version 1.

unicornporn 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Unity is terrible, but at least Ubuntu admits it. I do think Gnome can be made to be pretty.
  - hd4 10y ago
    What's wrong with Unity? And where did they admit it was bad? It does the job, it doesn't need a lot of RAM, it's good-looking, stays out of the way. By far the best experience I've had as a developer on desktop Linux.
- uola 10y ago
  I almost can't believe I'm saying this, but there nothing wrong with the look as such. The, maybe controversial, problem is that the substance isn't there. Things you expect, or strive for, in modern application development like developers tools, multimedia support, security features, adoption, distribution etc. isn't up to the task. It seem like whenever Linux desktop technologies get good enough to go somewhere they reinvent themselves under a slightly different paradigm.
- unicornporn 10y ago
  I actually just went back to Linux after 11 years of macOS and I can't say Gnome 3 does it for me either. 10.6 was my favorite version of OS X and I think that OS has been going mostly downhill from there. When switching I realized I've been spoiled with well thought out design and UX, but I must say I really enjoy the simplicity and polish of MATE DE[1]. It's sort of like traveling back to a time when a desktop was a desktop (oh boy, am I getting old) and not a shopping mall were I'm supposed to buy stuff and have my habits tracked and measured. [1] http://mate-desktop.org/ http://mate-desktop.org/

thom 10y ago

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.

zaphar 10y ago
Same here, KIO was incredibly useful. As a young dev, I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive. I still have fond memories of KDE in the early years before flashy looks became a must have feature.
- distances 10y ago
  KIO is very much still alive, and in frequent use for me at least. Treating remote folders over SSH straight in my favorite file manager is pretty indeed.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  > I was amazed at the ability to open a file on the server as if it was on my hard drive. I wish it worked as well as you describe. It only works if the application you are using is KIO-enabled. On Windows, you can use a "\\servername\sharename\path\to\file.txt" style path (a UNC path) virtually anywhere and it just works. It also has the smarts to pass along your credentials, etc, so it's virtually transparent. The only exception I've seen to this is that the command prompt doesn't understand a UNC path as a working directory, but commands like copy, etc, do work with it.
  - thom 10y ago
    Not sure this is a fair comparison. It works with basically any KDE app, for any protocol that has a KIO slave. There certainly must be a lot of confusion for users that don't understand why it doesn't work in random non-KDE apps they've installed, or the command line, but I suspect very few of them are typing in SSH URLs anyway. At the same time, Windows doesn't accept an SFTP URL in a file open dialog. Anyway, I use emacs on both platforms and it handles all of this for me, so my dog retired from this game many years ago.

inDigiNeous 10y ago

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 10y ago
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)

72deluxe 10y ago

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 10y ago

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.

Zardoz84 10y ago
SuSE 5.3.1 had it with GNOME 1 (and FVWM 95 and Enlightment) Funny thing. You can run GNOME 1 over KDE 1
- tehabe 10y ago
  I also remembered incorrectly, it was SuSE 6.1, the first one with Linux 2.2. It also came with WordPerfect 8 but I don't know if I actually used it.
  - Zardoz84 10y ago
    I have yet the 6 cdroms . It was my first Linux/Unix experience. I remember trying RedHat and Debian, aparte of SuSE and I found at these moment SuSE YaST installer was the BEST installer (I was 14 years old ~> 98's)
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Iirc, Gnome didn't have a dedicated WM for the longest time. for a while Rasterman (of Enlightenment fame) was working for Red Hat and Gnome used Enlightenment as their WM. But there came to a disagreement between Rasterman and the Gnome devs about where things were going, and he left Red Hat and started working on turning Enlightenment into a full DE. Not long after i think we started seeing various WMs being bundled with Gnome, culminating in some that used composition and OpenGL to render the desktops as sides of a cube. After that it seems that everyone involved with the major DEs got hooked on eyecandy.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago

digi_owl 10y ago

Frankly that looks much better than the current Plasma stuff.

127 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
  - satysin 10y ago
    Yeah it was their response to Vista with dwm and other fancy UI things. Yet here we are at the end of 2016 and Wayland still isn't quite there and gnome went some weird direction with everything. I hate how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen for gnome. Cinnamon is really nice albeit a little bloat with options. That isn't really a bad thing though imho.
  - kijin 10y ago
    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 10y ago
      > 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

albertzeyer 10y ago

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

appelza 10y ago
Not really. KDE1 was not meant as a low resource application, and it's probably slower than KDE5 in fact.
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  Worked really well on a 486 or an K6-2 . I don't get your point that would be slower that KDE 5.
  - heliocastro 10y ago
    Guys, is FAST as hell, and the screenshot was taken from inside KDE 1 using a PLasma 5 application, so in general sparse term, is usable. I will make it totally usable in next weeks tough, as i didn't have time to port 100 %.
- Yaggo 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    No body forbid you of running Firefox/Chrome on KDE 1
cmiles74 10y ago
When KDE 1 came out, I had installed from source on a 75Mhz PowerPC 601 with 128MB of RAM[0] running MkLinux[1]. It ran acceptably, it was much more responsive that System 7.5. [0] http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powermac_7200_75.html http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/specs/powerma... [1] http://mklinux.org http://mklinux.org

bhaak 10y ago

> completely revamp of buildsystem, Goodbye auto*hell tools headaches, welcome cmake Someone's heaven is someone else's hell. That goes both ways.

majewsky 10y ago
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).

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

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 10y ago
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/.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Some KDE apps are nice, but I tend to find the UI to have too much bling for my tastes: it's distracting. But Konqurer and Krita are both excellent (although I use firefox), and I've heard good things about Kate (although I'm an Emacs user). As for i3, yeah. It's actually a really nice system: you can do almost anything by keyboard although you only need to know five shortcuts ($mod+d, $mod+h, $mod+v, $mod+shift+q, and $mod+shift+e respectively), and there are a few other handy ones ($mod+enter, $mod+<number>). it's a really clean, and it just feels good to use. But it's really confusing to those who don't know it. I had a friend who tried to use my computer once... that was fun to watch.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Then KDE became the brunt of community anger and that reached fever pitch at KDE 4.0 I'm a long-time KDE user and I actually like the plasma desktop. KDE 4.0 should never have been a public release -it was not ready, but KDE got through it. I'm not embarrassed to admit I felt some schadenfreude towards the Gnome 3 struggles

gorkemcetin 10y ago

This is a wonderful piece of work guys. I've submitted it on ProductHunt - your upvotes welcome so every Linux lover out there can try it out. https://www.producthunt.com/newest https://www.producthunt.com/newest

paraiuspau 10y ago

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

Philipp__ 10y ago

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.

pvdebbe 10y ago

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

heliocastro 10y ago
kdetoys is on the line, let's see

jlebrech 10y ago

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.

mhd 10y ago

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 10y ago
Yes, the mix of Tk, Lesstif, Xaw... Each of them ugly, and no consistency between them. KDE was suddenly a modern UI on Linux!

Koshkin 10y ago

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 10y ago
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.

frik 10y ago

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

oever 10y ago

The KDE 1 release is now available as a Docker image. http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-supporting-freedom/ http://jriddell.org/2016/10/14/kde-1-neon-lts-20-years-of-su...

chajath 10y ago

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

tofupup 10y ago

interesting

antod 10y ago

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 :)