Chapter 7: What's this KDE Thing?

What does the acronym KDE stand for?

KDE stands for The K Desktop Environment, and is made by the KDE organisation worldwide. KDE is open software in every sense, and the company is made up of the Unix community whom contribute to it. Anyone with the desire to can contribute to KDE, you needent just be a programmer either, you can be a bug reporter, a documentarist, a graphic design artist and many other imaginable posts. You make KDE what it is, and KDE provides back to you. The ideas behind the Gnome project are inherently similar.

So What is KDE then?

KDE is a Windowing Manager and Graphical User Interface for the UNIX operating system, not just Linux (but was made on Linux machines). KDE has been with us since approximately 1997 and is the one of two most popular desktops for Linux. You can freely download and distribute KDE, and these days, there is no restriction on copying it.
At the heart of KDE, lies a graphical toolkit and fully featured programming language called Qt. Qt is found on many platforms including Mobile Phones/PDAs, Windows and Mac OS, but is still most popular on the UNIX platform. Qt is made by a commercial company called Trolltech. Before early 2000,

KDEs main aims are to make a highly usable, user friendly, functional and highly powerful graphical user interface. They definitely have fulfilled that goal.
Users coming from either a Windows or a Mac OS background will feel quite at home with KDE as it has a very similar look and feel to both. For example, the Windows style 'Start' menu is alternated by the 'K' menu. Like MacOS X, it allows for skinning, transparencies and other eye candies, and can incorporate many 'Themes'.



If you wish to switch to KDE, and you use Ubuntu, you can add it to your system by simply installing the package kubuntu-desktop in Synaptic.


What are the strong points about KDE?

• It is a fully featured Graphical User Interface, much like the Mac OS or Windows Desktop
• It has an excellent combination File Manager / Web Browser called Konqueror
• It is very user friendly, offering extensive help almost all of the time
• It has an excellent control panel for simplistically configuring your Linux system in one, easy to find place.
• It is highly themeable and customizable, allowing you to make KDE look whatever way you wish
• It has an integrated sound system, Arts, which is very powerful and allows you to do your own sound synthesis
• It has thousands of open source applications, games and utilities available.
• By default, it comes with loads of great applications such as an award winning Email client, Kmail, a complete Office suite, KOffice, editors, games and graphical programs
• It handles files very well: knowing what to do with even files that are foreign to the operating system
• It's multimedia capabilities are extensively versatile, allowing for easy movie, sound and tv/capture playback and recording



Click to view the image of KDE fullsize
Image: Konqueror Web Browser, with amaroK multimedia music player 'plugged-in' to the side, so you can play your tunes and surf the web at the same time!. To the left, the Kontact all-in-one Email, Contact Manager, Calendar, Journal, RSS feed viewer and PDA synchronisation tool.
Note: desktop is a dual-screen example.


Click to move on to Chapter 8...