“AD: Could tell us about the creation of
KDE?“ME: Around 1995 I became a real GNU and Linux
fan. I was so convinced by the system that I couldn’t understand
how fellow students, no matter what they studied, could bother with
Windows 3.1–no multitasking, 16-bit address space, permanent
crashes, horrible icons, ugly fonts. There really was nothing good
one could say about it, but it was popular. The application used
most was Word 2.0, despite the steep price, the instability and the
poor end results. Students manually were splitting up their
documents into smaller chunks, because their word processor
couldn’t handle more than 10 pages safely at once. We [GNU and
Linux] and had TeX and LaTeX, which were easy to use, produced
great results, never crashed and were free. Why would anybody not
want to use them?“Back then, Microsoft was far away from victory, so I was
unwilling to believe in technology lock-up theories. Rather, I
blamed existing software and its lack of end user focus. This was
when I started to write a graphical front-end to LaTeX, which later
became the LyX document processor. Although the project really
didn’t stop the success of Word, it turned into a successful free
software project with an active development community, and it
taught me how free software projects work internally…”
Related Story:
Linux
Journal: Inteview with Miguel De Icaza(Apr 25, 2003)