KDE: 30 Years Since the First Announcement

On 14 October 1996, Matthias Ettrich of the University of Tübingen sent out the message "KDE Project Announced". In it he introduced the Kool Desktop Environment, a free graphical environment for Linux and Unix-like systems. Exactly 30 years have passed since then.

The reason was the absence of a convenient desktop. Unix was gaining popularity thanks to free variants, above all Linux, but there was no coherent and pleasant-looking free environment for the end user. There were enough individual applications, free or inexpensive, and Linux/X11 would have covered almost any task if a real graphical interface existed. Ettrich did not consider window managers and widget libraries to be a graphical environment.

The Qt library from the company Troll Tech was chosen as the foundation. In the announcement it is described as an almost complete widget library in C++ with a Motif look, which can be switched at startup to a Windows 95 look, and whose source code is available free of charge for free development. The KDE code was planned to be distributed under the GPL. The author noted separately that he had no connection to Troll Tech whatsoever.

The work in the announcement was divided into parts. The panel was initially to work as an fvwm module. The file manager was to have dragging files between windows and diskette handling transparent to the user, and the author of the XF-Mail mail client was ready to port it to Qt. Further down the list came a simple text editor, a terminal, an image viewer and an HTML help system.

Ettrich said right away that he would not be able to do everything alone: LyX remained his main project. He looked for helpers on the kde@kde.org mailing list and wrote that 20-30 interested people were enough to start. Work on the panel had already begun by the time of the announcement.

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.