[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“KDE stands for the K Desktop Environment and was first
released in 1998 by Matthias Ettrich, who was a student at the
time. Ettrich saw a need for the Unix world to have a unified
desktop environment which had a consistent look and feel, rather
than just multiple applications looking and behaving however they
wanted to. When it was originally conceived, KDE was written in C++
using the Qt toolkit for its graphical interface and to this day,
remains true to its heritage.“Now in its 11th year, KDE has come a long way in a short amount
of time and recently celebrated the release of version 4.0, marking
a turning point in the development of the project. The major reason
for the major update was the implementation of Qt 4, which resulted
in a complete rewrite of the project. KDE 4.0 stable was released
in January 2008 with much fanfare, with the project announcing:
“This significant release marks both the end of the long and
intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning
of the KDE 4”