[clug] KDE Desktop

rodney peters rodneyp at iinet.net.au
Sat Jun 1 07:12:05 UTC 2019


George,

I've used mainly KDE since 2001.

The current Plasma 5.55 is fairly stable on openSUSE Leap 15.1. Other 
distro might have a later release, because openSUSE is staying in step 
with the commercial SUSE Enterprise.  Only slight bug I encounter is 
loss of switching between desktops one machine, but not on my main PC.

There are half a dozen choices of icon style, if you have a preference.

I stopped using the KMail email client some time ago, because it was too 
complicated to migrate it to new installations.

You are likely to use some GTK-based apps as well eg GIMP, Xsane.  I 
have not encountered any difficulties with that.

KDE is a very sophisticated desktop environment and I don't use many of 
the features.

I also use LXQT Desktop, that uses the same QT layer as KDE, for PC 
having lesser resources eg 1.6 GHz dual-core.  Not improving as fast as 
I anticipated, but still very stable and usable.  It's available for Debian.

I have not taken much notice of ownership of QT.  It has changed hands a 
few times.  If they pulled the plug on KDE then they would lose most of 
their testing base.

Rod

On 1/6/19 4:10 pm, George at Clug via linux wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
> Who has tried KDE Desktop recently?
>
>
> Today I installed Debian Buster KDE Desktop, and was amazed at how
> much it has been updated since I installed it from other Distros.
>
>
> The KDE GUI is menu driven, and thus I actually quite liked the new
> look and feel.
>
>
>
> Very polished and stylish looking.
>
>
> If anyone has comments, I would be interested in reading.
>
>
> I would ask, is the KDE Desktop well supported?  And are there still
> any issues with ownership of Qt ?  I guess FOSS purists would have
> issue (e.g. Richard Stallman).
>
>
>
> https://blog.qt.io/blog/2016/01/13/new-agreement-with-the-kde-free-qt-foundation/
> https://www.qt.io/faq/
>
>
> 1.1. Who actually owns and controls Qt?
> Qt trademarks and most of the copyrights are fully owned and
> controlled by The Qt Company. The development work for Qt toolkit is
> done through the open source governed Qt project by The Qt Company
> R&D and external Qt contributors. The Qt project is an open
> ecosystem and infrastructure for developers and companies to
> contribute to Qt. All external contributions are licensed to the Qt
> company allowing re-licensing under both open source and commercial
> terms.
> The Qt Company has a binding agreement with KDE Free Qt Foundation to
> ensure the availability of Qt under certain open source licenses for
> desktop and mobile platforms. The open source community and
> availability of Qt is an extremely important part of the whole value
> proposition of Qt, and something The Qt Company wants to commit to and
> drive forward.
>
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE
> In the beginning Matthias Ettrich chose to use Trolltech’s [1] 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 GPL [2]
> licensed version of this toolkit only existed for platforms which used
> the X11 [3] display server, but with the release of Qt 4, LGPL [4]
> licensed versions are available for more platforms. This allowed KDE
> software based on Qt 4 or newer versions to theoretically be
> distributed to Microsoft Windows and OS X.
>
>
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Plasma_Workspaces
> KDE Frameworks [5] provide more than 70 free and open-source libraries
> built on top of Qt [6]. They are the foundation for KDE Plasma and
> most of the KDE applications, but can be part of any project that
> would like to make use of one or more of its modules.
>
>
> https://kde.org/announcements/rmsresponse.php
>
> In a recent editorial [7] on Linux Today, Richard Stallman claimed
> that KDE is still in violation of the GPL even though Qt is now
> covered under the GPL and all KDE code is compatible with the GPL. His
> rather absurd reasoning is that since KDE once violated the GPL, it
> will always be in violation unless the individual copyright holders
> "grant forgiveness."  We maintain, as always, that there are no
> licensing problems with KDE. Here's why:
>
>
>
>   All code in KDE is copyrighted and covered under a free software
> (Open Source) license. The vast majority of the code was written
> explicitely for KDE. A few bits were written elsewhere and
> incorporated into KDE.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolltech
> [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
> [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11
> [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
> [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Frameworks
> [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)
> [7]
> http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-09-05-001-21-OP-LF-KE



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