25 Years of KDE: A Developer's Personal Journey with the Linux Desktop Environment
By
thangqt
An everything bagel for the brain. Substantive, layered, well-seasoned.
Summary
Jonathan Riddell shares his personal journey with KDE, starting from his university days in the early 2000s when he discovered Linux and the KDE desktop environment. He describes his transition from Windows to SuSE Linux 6.2, his experiences at tech expos during the .com boom, and how IBM's prediction about Linux taking over the desktop inspired him to work with KDE. The article highlights his learning experience with Qt programming, open development practices, and the free software community, including his formative experience at the pre-Akademy conference (then called Kastle) in Nove Hrady.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWindows seemed uninteresting, it was impossible to work out how it worked or write programs for it
SuSE Linux 6.2 was much more interesting to try and opened a world of understanding how computers worked and wanting to code on them
IBM said that Linux had made it on the server and now was going to take over the desktop so I realised that working with KDE would be a good idea
I learnt more about software development in a week there then my years at uni
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