KDE is an international free software community that develops free software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma graphical shell, KDE Frameworks, and the KDE Gear range of applications including Okular, Kdenlive and Krita. Many KDE applications are cross-platform and run on platforms Qt runs on, such as Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows. KDE is legally represented by KDE e.V. based in Germany, which also owns the KDE trademarks and funds the project.
History
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the X11 desktop. Namely the toolkits (of) "Xaw, Fvwm, XForms, Motif" and Tcl/tk. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked or behaved alike. In his opinion, desktop applications of the time were too complicated for end users. In order to solve the issue, he proposed the creation of a desktop environment for Linux/X11 in which users could expect the applications to be consistent and easy to use. His initial Usenet post spurred significant interest, and the KDE project was born.
The name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun through the X/Open consortium, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for "Kool", but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Therefore, the KDE initialism expanded to "K Desktop Environment" before it was dropped altogether in favor of simply KDE in a rebranding in 2009. The KDE community's mascot is a green dragon named Konqi. Konqi's appearance was officially redesigned with the coming of Plasma 5, with Tyson Tan's entry winning the redesign competition on the KDE Forums.. Another archived by KDE itself.
In the beginning Matthias Ettrich chose to use Trolltech's Qt framework for the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, a few applications were being released. On 12 July 1998 the first version of the desktop environment, called KDE 1.0, was released. The original GNU General Public Licensed version of this toolkit only existed for platforms that used the X11 display server, but as of the release of Qt 4, GNU Lesser General Public Licensed versions are available for more platforms. This allowed KDE software based on Qt 4 or newer versions to be distributed to Microsoft Windows and OS X.
The KDE Marketing Team announced a rebranding of the KDE project components on 24 November 2009. Motivated by the perceived shift in objectives, the rebranding focused on emphasizing both the community of software creators and the various tools supplied by the KDE, rather than just the desktop environment. KDE 4 was split into KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and KDE Frameworks (KDE Platform 4 at the time), bundled as KDE Software Compilation 4. Since 2009, the name KDE no longer stands for K Desktop Environment, but for the community that produces the software.
Community KDE e.V. organization The financial and legal matters of KDE are handled by KDE e.V., a German non-profit organization. Among others, it owns the KDE trademark and the corresponding logo. It also accepts donations on behalf of the KDE community, helps to run the servers, assists in organizing and financing conferences and meetings, but does not influence software development directly.
Local communities In many countries, KDE has local branches. These are either informal organizations (KDE India) or like the KDE e.V., given a legal form (KDE France). The local organizations host and maintain regional websites, and organize local events, such as tradeshows, contributor meetings and social community meetings.
Identity KDE has community identity guidelines (CIG) for definitions and recommendations which help the community to establish a unique, characteristic, and appealing design. The KDE official logo displays the white trademarked K-Gear shape on a blue square with mitred corners. Copying of the KDE Logo is subject to the LGPL. Some local community logos are derivations of the official logo.
Many KDE applications have a K in the name, mostly as an initial letter. The K in many KDE applications is obtained by spelling a word which originally begins with C or Q differently, for example Konsole and Kaffeine, while some others prefix a commonly used word with a K, for instance KGet. However, some apps do not to have a K in the name at all, such as with Stage, Spectacle, Discover and Dolphin.
Projects
The KDE community maintains multiple free-software projects. The project formerly referred to as KDE (or KDE SC (Software Compilation)) nowadays consists of three parts: KDE Plasma, a graphical desktop environment with customizable layouts and panels, supporting virtual desktops and widgets. Written with Qt and KDE Frameworks. KDE Frameworks, a collection of libraries and software frameworks built on top of Qt (formerly known as 'kdelibs' or 'KDE Platform'). KDE Gear, utility applications (like Kdenlive or Krita) mostly built on KDE Frameworks and which are often part of the official KDE Applications release.
Other projects
KDE neon KDE neon is a Linux distribution that uses Ubuntu LTS as a core. It aims to provide the users with rapidly updated Qt and KDE software, while updating the rest of the OS components from the Ubuntu repositories at the normal pace.
Subtitle Composer Subtitle Composer is an open-source subtitle editor for the Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems, based on Qt and KDE Frameworks. The project became part of KDE starting in December 2019. It supports the most common text and bitmap-based subtitle formats, video previewing, audio waveform, speech recognition, timings synchronization, subtitle translation, OCR and JavaScript macros/scripting. Subtitle Composer is free software released under the GNU General Public License.
Contributors Developing KDE software is primarily a volunteer effort, although various companies, such as Novell, Nokia, or Blue Systems employ or employed developers to work on various parts of the project. Since a large number of individuals contribute to KDE in various ways (e.g. code, translation, artwork), organization of such a project is complex. A mentor program helps beginners to get started with developing and communicating within KDE projects and communities.
Communication within the community takes place via mailing lists, IRC, blogs, forums, news announcements, wikis and conferences. The community has a Code of Conduct for acceptable behavior within the community.
Development Currently the KDE community uses the Git version control system. The KDE GitLab Instance (named Invent) gives an overview of all projects hosted by KDE's Git repository system. Phabricator is used for task management.
On 20 July 2009, KDE announced that the one millionth commit has been made to its Subversion repository. On 11 October 2009, Cornelius Schumacher, a main developer within KDE, wrote about the estimated cost (using the COCOMO model with SLOCCount) to develop KDE software package with 4,273,291 LoC, which would be about US$175,364,716. This estimation does not include Qt, Calligra Suite, Amarok, digiKam, and other applications that are not part of KDE core.
Core team The overall direction is set by the KDE Core Team. These are developers who have made significant contributions within KDE over a long period of time. This team communicates using the kde-core-devel mailing list, which is publicly archived and readable, but joining requires approval. KDE does not have a single central leader who can veto important decisions. Instead, the KDE core team consists of several dozens of contributors who make decisions not by a formal vote, but through discussions.
The developers also organize alongside topical teams. For example, the KDE Edu team develops free educational software. While these teams work mostly independent and do not all follow a common release schedule. Each team has its own messaging channels, both on IRC and on the mailing lists.
KDE Patrons A KDE Patron is an individual or organization supporting the KDE community by donating at least 5000 Euro (depending on the company's size) to the KDE e.V. As of March 2026, there are thirteen such patrons: Blue Systems, Canonical Ltd., Google, GnuPG, Kubuntu Focus, Slimbook, SUSE, The Qt Company, TUXEDO Computers, Rocky Linux, Framework Computer, Techpaladin Software, and Mbition.
Collaborations Wikimedia
On 23 June 2005, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation announced that the KDE community and the Wikimedia Foundation have begun efforts towards cooperation. Fruits of that cooperation are MediaWiki syntax highlighting in Kate and accessing Wikipedia content within KDE applications, such as Amarok and Marble.
On 4 April 2008, the KDE e.V. and Wikimedia Deutschland opened shared offices in Frankfurt.
Free Software Foundation Europe In May 2006, KDE e.V. became an Associate Member of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
On 22 August 2008, KDE e.V. and FSFE jointly announced that after working with FSFE's Freedom Task Force for one and a half years KDE adopts FSFE's Fiduciary Licence Agreement. Using that, KDE developers can – on a voluntary basis – assign their copyrights to KDE e.V.
In September 2009, KDE e.V. and FSFE moved into shared offices in Berlin.
Commercial enterprises Several companies actively contribute to KDE, like Collabora, Erfrakon, Intevation GmbH, Kolab Konsortium, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (KDAB), Blue Systems, and KO GmbH.
Nokia used Calligra Suite as base for their Office Viewer application for Maemo/MeeGo. They have also been contracting KO GmbH to bring MS Office 2007 file format filters to Calligra. Nokia also employed several KDE developers directly – either to use KDE software for MeeGo (e.g. KCal) or as sponsorship.
The software development and consulting companies Intevation GmbH of Germany and the Swedish KDAB use Qt and KDE software – especially Kontact and Akonadi for Kolab – for their services and products, therefore both employ KDE developers.
Others KDE participates in freedesktop.org, an effort to standardize Unix desktop interoperability.
In 2009 and 2011, GNOME and KDE co-hosted their conferences Akademy and GUADEC under the Desktop Summit label.
In December 2010 KDE e.V. became a licensee of the Open Invention Network.
Many Linux distributions and other free operating systems are involved in the development and distribution of the software, and are therefore also active in the KDE community. These include commercial distributors such as SUSE/Novell. or Red HatAll KDE & Fedora: This month (May) in Redhat KDE . Ltinkl.blogspot.de (2006-07-11). Retrieved on 2013-07-17. but also government-funded non-commercial organizations such as the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey with its Linux distribution Pardus.
In October 2018, Red Hat declared that KDE Plasma was no longer supported in future updates of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though it continues to be part of Fedora. The announcement came shortly after the announcement of the business acquisition of Red Hat by IBM for close to US$43 billion. As a result, Fedora now makes KDE Plasma and other KDE software available also to Red Hat Enterprise Linux users through their Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) project.
Releases