KDE was a huge part of my life for well over a decade, from when I first installed a v1 beta, to when I got my CVS commit rights circa 2000, to coding and organizing events all the way through 2010. Eventually, though, my life went a different direction.
Well today I was cleaning up my linkedin connections, trying to keep the network relevant (fewer vectors for spam or whatever) and I removed all but four of my dozens of KDE and former KDE contacts. It was interesting clicking through each profile – so many of those early contributors are now CEOs, presidents, partners, founders, etc. Open source software experience, and the KDE community experience clearly drew in a lot of very talented and ambitious people.
So now I’m just here to reminisce. How’s everyone doing? When did you discover KDE?
Nice! Mandrake was really great when it was new – Basically redhat(clone)+KDE+Mandrake Control Center. Compared to the pain of getting KDE installed on redhat (originally), it was quite a slick system. It was my third linux distro, and I rode it up until the Mandrake+Connectiva merger.
After the aforementioned redhat pains, but prior to Mandrake, I also dabbled with Caldera. This was so slick at the time: https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3563 – a pity they “enshittified” before the word was coined, because that’s exactly what happened haha. It was the first distro with a graphical install process, which just seems normal now but was quite revolutionary at the time. Plus it came with KDE preconfigured.
After the connectiva merger, I moved to slackware and stayed there until I exited KDE development. It was a great development box because the systems were so minimal and just sort of stayed out of the way. At the KDE 4.0 release event, we even managed to get Patrick Volkerding to attend – which is sort of like meeting your own personal linux hero. That was fun.