KDE Plasma

KDE Plasma(Offen called just KDE) is a popular desktop environment for the X Window System based on the Qt toolkit. It runs on Linux and similar platforms such as BSD. It is still in its experimental stages for the Windows platform.

Origins
K Desktop Environment (KDE) was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the Unix desktop. Among his concerns was that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the creation of not merely a set of applications but a desktop environment in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints about desktop applications of the time was that it is too complicated for end user. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.

The name KDE was intended as a wordplay on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE is an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun through the X/Open consortium, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for "Kool", but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. The KDE initialism is therefore expanded to "K Desktop Environment".

Releases
Development of KDE was announced on October 14, 1996. The first release was made available on July 12, 1998.

KDE Programs

 * File Manager - Dolphin
 * Web Browser - Rekonq (formerly Konqueror)
 * Office Suite - KOffice
 * e-mail Client - KMail
 * IM Client - Kopete
 * Disk Burning - K3b
 * Audio Player - Amarok