KDE's 25th Anniversary

13 october 2021

It's today tomorrow KDE's 25th Anniversary! and for this occasion, I painted this artwork (source file here).

You'll find on the website − https://25years.kde.org/ − the full celebration of the event: videos, meeting, activities, old KDE distro ready to run on virtual machine, merch (Tee-Shirt/Stickers).

But if you still wonder what is KDE; I'll try to give you an overview: KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. KDE helps these projects to get common tools: bug trackers, software development forge, distributing the software, organizing in real life events like sprints,conferences, etc... You might already know a couple of projects under the umbrella of KDE:

• Krita, the painting software I use for all my artworks.
• Kdenlive, the video editor I use for all videos on my channel.
• Plasma, the desktop environment I use on my Kubuntu Linux distro (it was named KDE in the past).
• Kate, a text-editor I used to refactor the website of Pepper&Carrot last summer ... and many others.

I first discovered KDE around 2004 thanks to a portable USB version of Knoppix distro, with KDE 3.0 (probably part of an article from the blog of Framasoft). That was my first contact with a GNU/Linux distro and I was impressed how everything was fitting a pen drive of that time, so probably a 256MB one. I kept it on that pen drive for years; it was my Swiss Army Knife tool to backup, fix partitions and test my PC running at that time Windows XP.

It's only later, at the time of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS ("The Hardy Heron"), around 2009, I switched full time to Linux, and then spent my first years with Linux Mint. Then I distro jumped to test everything, distro, desktop environment for years, before adopting Kubuntu since the last four years. (I'm sharing how to install my full setup in this article)

🎉 So, again (update: in advance by one day) Happy Anniversary KDE! 🎉

Link: https://25years.kde.org/