I found KDE beta 4 hidden off in the /opt directory on the Red Hat 5.something install CD. It’s hard to overstate how impressive it was. I was running Windows 2000 at the time and dabbling with Linux.

Linux, at the time, required you to run startx to run XFree86. Once there, you could run a window manager from the terminal, or you could put one in your .xinitrc file. You could also load other programs. A few window managers did this for you, giving you a dock or start-button interface for launching things. Then the programs you launched had a mishmash of visual styles and UI models arising from using completely different widget sets. Copying and pasting text between them might work, drag and drop or anything other than rich text did not.

KDE was different. You still had to start X manually (graphical login things existed but I didn’t know how to configure them) but then it launched into a complete desktop. It wasn’t just a window manager, it was a complete suite of applications with a consistent UI throughout. It felt at least as polished as a fresh install of Windows at the time.

score 1 · canonical