A Short Guided Tour of 's History
The CEO of a big software company, at the beginning of the 80s...(apocryphal)
640KB ought to be enough for everybody

Before
Since the beginning of development, there has been one great problem: There were stable kernels, and good, powerful software. Unfortunately, only a few people could use , because it was written mainly for those students and professionals who had studied the system for a long time. For example, the standard method for reading USENET news was:

find /var/spool/news -name '[0-9]*' -exec cat {} \; | more

Although fast and relatively efficient, this couldn't be called user friendly. Today, there are many good front ends available, such as tin and , which provide easy-to-use, intuitive graphical user interfaces (s). Unfortunately, the s lack a common look-and-feel. Commercial libraries for programmers like promised a solution to this, but these libraries remained, until recently, far too expensive and far too slow.
The configuration of programs is also often difficult. While compiling is usually done with a command line such as ./configure && make && make install only a very few programs can be configured with menus or scripts. In most cases, you must edit text configuration files yourself. It often happens that a misplaced period ruins the whole file, forcing you to restart the configuration process. Whenever you need to change your settings or reconfigure a program, the whole mess comes up again.
All this contributes to the fact that and other 's fail to reach a wider audience. At the same time, many people are not satisfied with their current operating system, often because of the lack of stability and performance found in those operating systems. Other people hate to buy a new computer each time a new version of the program they cannot live without comes out, because it needs more RAM and more disk space. Often the new version provides functions few people really need.
is different. Although we do not try to replace the standard shell, we are working on a tool that will make using easier. We also want to attract more users to the environment. Simple things will be made easy, yet complex things will still be just as possible. A single interface will be provided, instead of the dozens currently required.

What Can Do For You
is designed for everyone.
Those new to , or those who simply have no interest in learning to use new technologies and commands not found in their previous operating systems don't need to face the intricacies of the command line unless they want to. Yet there is much offers that is of value to experienced users, with tools to make simple what were previously complex tasks, and the command line just a mouse click away if you want it.
No matter what your level of experience with or any other operating system, brings you:
A good looking, easy to use desktop environment.
A powerful, easy to use file manager
An equally powerful and easy to use web browser
A simple, centralized configuration
A comprehensive list of applications, so you can be productive within minutes of your first login.
Online help to support you in every situation.
Consistency of interface. Menus are in the same place across applications, keybindings behave the same way, toolbar icons, once learnt, always work the same.

The Background Of
In October 1996, German LyX developer Matthias Ettrich initiated the development of with a USENET posting. Soon after, a couple of interested developers began planning and programming parts of the new project. One year later, the window and file managers, the terminal emulator, the help system and the display configuration tool were released for Alpha and Beta testing and proved to be relatively stable.
In July 1998, 1.0 was released. It was the stable version for the next six months, while developers continued work on improving without stability constraints. In January 1999, their improvements were consolidated and integrated to produce 1.1, the new standard, stable version.
Development continued from there with 2.0, an almost complete rewrite of the desktop, being released on October 23rd 2000. The 2.x version evolved through six minor releases over the period of a year, each bringing an already impressive desktop further features and stability.
At the time of writing, 3.0 is in preparation for release, introducing a broad range of improvements over the 2.0 series. Although the didn't change as dramatically as it did during the move from 1 to 2, many refinements like a completely new printing system, vastly improved SSL support (for secure Internet transactions) or full support for languages which are written right-to-left (like Arabic or Hebrew) found their way into the desktop. You can find more information about this exciting development at .
The developers and users communicate primarily via several mailing lists, as described in the Mailing Lists section. If you would like to help, please do, is driven by volunteer contribution, and you are always welcome to take part.

Legal Notices
is open source software, and all of is released under free licenses such as the GPL.

How To Get New Components
The main web site for is . Here you can find all important information regarding , including announcements, bugfixes, developer information and much more.
For software upgrades, please visit our site, , or use a mirror if one exists near you. You can find an up to date list of mirrors at http://www.kde.org/ftpmirrors.html.
On the servers, the directory unstable always contains brand new software, but it is often untested and may not even compile. If you are looking for more reliable components, please take a look in the stable directory, where we put Beta and release versions.
If you are interested in developing applications of your own, you should visit http://developer.kde.org/" where you will find a wealth of information, including tutorials, API guides to the libraries, and much more. You should also visit Troll Tech's server (http://www.trolltech.com) which features a great deal of information concerning the library used by . You will probably find it valuable to join the developer mailing list.