KDE

KDE (/ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is an international free software community producing free and libre software like Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and many cross-platform applications designed to run on modern Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems. The Plasma Desktop is a desktop environment provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, Manjaro Linux and also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

The goal of the community is to develop free software solutions and applications for the daily needs of an end-user, as well as providing tools and documentation for developers to write such software. In this regard, the resources provided by KDE make it a central development hub and home for many popular applications and projects like Calligra Suite, Krita, digiKam, and many others.

History

Origins

K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.

KDE Plasma 4

KDE Plasma 4, subsequently renamed from KDE Plasma Workspaces, is the umbrella term for the fourth generation graphical environments provided by KDE. It comprehended of three workspaces, each targeting a certain platform: Plasma Desktop for traditional desktop PCs and notebooks, Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and Plasma Active for tablet PCs and similar devices.

KDE Plasma 4 was released as part of KDE Software Compilation 4 and replaced Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba, which formed the Desktop in earlier KDE releases. They are bundled as the default environment with a number of free software operating systems, such as Chakra,Kubuntu,Mageia (DVD version),openSUSE, or PC-BSD.

With the release of KDE SC 4.11 on 14 August 2013 KDE Plasma 4 was put into "feature freeze" and turned into an long-time stable package until August 2015. On 15 July 2014 KDE Plasma 4’s successor, KDE Plasma 5, was released.

Features

Plasma features containments, essentially an applet that contains other applets. Two examples of containments are the desktop background and the taskbar. A containment can be anything the developer wants: an image (either raster graphics or an SVG image), animation, or even OpenGL. Images are most commonly used, but with Plasma the user could set any applet as the desktop background without losing functionality of the applet. This also allows for applets to be dragged between the desktop and the taskbar (two separate containments), and have a separate visualization for the more confined taskbar.

KDE Plasma 5

KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the desktop environment created by KDE primarily for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Plasma 4 and was initially released on 15 July 2014. It includes a new default theme, known as "Breeze", as well as increased convergence across different devices. The graphical interface was fully migrated to QML, which uses OpenGL for hardware acceleration resulting in better performance and reduced power consumption.

Overview

Software architecture

KDE Plasma 5 is built using Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Plasma 5.0 improves support for HiDPI displays and ships a converged graphical shell, able to modify the graphical shell according to the device in use. It also includes a new default theme, dubbed Breeze. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES)-based scene graph (canvas). Plasma 5 completes the migration of KDE Plasma 4 to QtQuick. Qt 5's QtQuick 2 uses a hardware-accelerated OpenGL(ES) scenegraph to compose and render graphics on the screen, which allows for the offloading of computationally expensive graphics rendering tasks onto the GPU, which frees up resources on the system's main CPU, and is faster and more power efficient.