KDE Dot News

dot.kde.org · Company blog · on HN since 2008

KDE's news site announces releases, hardware partnerships, project goals and legal updates for the KDE community and Plasma desktop.

What HN saysHN links it for KDE announcements, such as the Qt free foundation anniversary and the branding change that retired the KDE acronym's expansion.
86HN people shared it
37linked it in comments
191stories submitted
1.2Kstory points
1 year agolast shared
2008people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    KDE and Slimbook Release a Laptop for KDE Fans
    5 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · 1 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Plasma on TV: Presenting Plasma Bigscreen
    4 people · 28 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
  3. 3
  4. 4
    Kirigami UI – Qt Components for Convergent Apps
    3 people · 14 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    Plasma: A Safe Haven for Windows 7 Refugees
    3 people · 12 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
  6. 6
    KDE's Goals for 2018 and Beyond
    3 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    Qt Is Guaranteed to Stay Free and Open – Legal Update
    3 people · 6 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    KDE Frameworks 5 Tech Preview
    2 people · 69 points · first shared 2014 · 22 comments on HN
  9. 9
    KDE developers release stable images for the the Pinebook
    2 people · 32 points · first shared 2018 · 6 comments on HN
  10. 10
  11. 11
    KDE's Qt 5 Patch Collection
    2 people · 14 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
    KDE Software Store
    2 people · 8 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
  15. 15

What HN people wrote when they linked it

boudewijnrempt · 2020-05-23
Wacom. The very, very best is a second hand Wacom Intuos 3, if you can get a few spare pens. That's before Wacome started adding all kinds of smart interpolation curves to the tablet hardware itself. My Intuos 3 is eleven years old and going strong. We got it back then: https://dot.kde.org/2007/11/16/art-tablets-krita
sho_hn · 2012-02-15
I'm somewhat nervous about posting this due to its somewhat sensitive nature, but I'd like to share my own experiences with Indian programming students, and perhaps some of you who are more familiar with the education system in the country could provide some background info for me. As in, the following is definitely not meant to be any sort of judgement, because I'm relatively clueless and there is significant selection bias to the data my perspective affords. I'm involved with programming mentoring program in a large open source community, KDE. A significant percentage of the mentoring requests I receive, I'd say about half of them, are by Indian CS students, often in their second or third year of college education. On average, they share the following attributes: * They're nice and polite people, and, a sometimes significant language barrier aside, nice to work with. * Unfortunately, their education level as pertaining to the programming practice tends to be far below that of Western students who have spent a similar amount of time in CS college education. They've had, say, C++ classes, but their understanding even of OOP basics tends to be lacking, not to mention groking something like an event loop. This is not necessarily a fatal problem considering that receiving programming mentoring is the point of the mentoring program, but we don't quite have the resources to make up for it all -- the idea is more to focus on helping with KDE specifics than general…
papachito · 2010-04-19
He's comparing KDE and Gnome core components (window management) and the linux kernel with developing iPhone apps. That's a bad comparaison in my opinion. Hacking on an operating system kernel or a window manager requires great skills that most kids (and adult devs) do not have. A fair comparison would be iPhone apps Vs KDE or Gnome apps. And here KDE and Gnome get tons of new contributers each months, check how active is http://kde-apps.org for example, or the Ubuntu developer activities. Tasks that require less skills will always attract more developers or cooks or whatever in all professions. Here's a Graph of KDE contributers http://dot.kde.org/2009/07/14/growth-metrics-kde-contributors up to July 2009. As a KDE dev that follows the mailing list, I can tell you the list of contributers is still groing well. Not to mention all the people that build KDE apps without being official KDE devs.
ryanhecht · 2025-07-31
Apparently they "retired the expansion" of the initialism in 2009: https://dot.kde.org/2009/11/24/repositioning-kde-brand/
p4bl0 · 2023-06-29
See also the post on KDE's website: https://dot.kde.org/2023/06/21/celebrating-25-years-kde-free-qt-founda… I submitted it to HN but it didn't get any traction at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430030 /
B1FF_PSUVM · 2023-06-12
> Jobs was already ballistic about Android vs. iPhone. This was 2005, well before that, which is part of what makes it interesting. I think this was about the time that Apple picked up the KDE Konqueror browser Webkit platform and reworked it. I seem to recall there being some objections to Apple fulfilling its open-source obligations by tossing a massive patch "over the wall" ... P.S. quick search result, 2003: https://dot.kde.org/2003/01/08/apple-announces-new-safari-browser
elcritch · 2022-07-07
Because it's a laptop built in co-operation with the KDE Project. It's mean to give KDE developers a "showcase" laptop platform. From the original Slimbook 1 release: The KDE Slimbook allows KDE to offer our users a laptop which has been tested directly by KDE developers, on the exact same hardware and software configuration that the users get, and where any potential hardware-related issues have already been ironed out before a new version of our software is shipped to them. https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-laptop-kde-fan…
circularfoyers · 2022-07-07
I don't think there's anything specific about the hardware for KDE besides the logo. I think this is more about giving back to the community, which I personally think it admirable and makes me look upon Slimbook more favorably. > Remember that with every purchase, KDE receives a donation from Slimbook and KDE Community members get a generous discount! https://dot.kde.org/2022/07/06/new-kde-slimbook-4-now-available
billsix · 2020-12-09
Sure, if they don’t mind Qt automatically being relicensing under BSD “The little known KDE Free Qt Foundation makes sure that Qt stays free and open-source. It guarantees that all Qt modules currently licensed under LGPLv3 must continue to be available under LGPLv3 in the future. This covers all modules from Qt Essentials and many add-on modules. If The Qt Company discontinued the FOSS version of Qt, the Foundation would have the right to make Qt available under the BSD license. This is a very powerful protection of free and open-source Qt.“ https://www.embeddeduse.com/2019/12/21/safe-guarding-the-lgpl-future-o… https://dot.kde.org/2016/01/13/qt-guaranteed-stay-free-and-open-–-lega…
rasengan · 2020-11-21
Handshake raised $10mm which was donated (all $10mm) to non-profit organizations and open source projects, including GNOME [1], Debian [2], KDE [3], among others. Far from an "ICO scheme," the project further allocated the majority of the coins to developers and existing domain holders. Unlike most decentralized projects you may be thinking of, Handshake is a real project and people are buying domains [4]. Compare the activity on chain with _____, and Handshake speaks for itself. [1] https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/08/gnome-foundation-receives-400000-fr… [2] https://dot.kde.org/2020/01/21/kde-receives-generous-donation-handshak… [3] https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190329 [4] https://dns.live/
zozbot234 · 2020-11-07
There is a lengthy history of general toxicity, gatekeeping attitudes and the like in the Gnome dev community, dating back to the early 2.x days. This extensive comment https://dot.kde.org/comment/60560#comment-60560 dates back to 2003, and back then RedHat wasn't even heavily involved in development (the major corporate sponsors back then were Eazel and Ximian, which are basically unheard of today) but clearly the overall attitude has not changed much since then.
gen3 · 2020-08-19
KDE has a tv environment. I’m not sure how good it is though, I use an Apple TV. https://plasma-bigscreen.org/ https://dot.kde.org/2020/03/26/plasma-tv-presenting-plasma-bigscreen
nabla9 · 2020-03-22
Qt will be free because there is agreement with KDE Free Qt Foundation https://dot.kde.org/2016/01/13/qt-guaranteed-stay-free-and-open-%E2%80…
emilsedgh · 2019-10-09
purerandomness · 2018-11-05
KDE just recently received a 300k donation [1]. You seem to remember KDE from the 4.x dark times. Give it a try, it has vastly improved in the last 2 years. [1] https://dot.kde.org/2018/10/15/kde-ev-receives-sizeable-donation-hands…
chomp · 2018-11-03
You're right. Ubuntu warty shipped with libqt3. However if you remember back when, there was still an axe hanging over the KDE team in the form of Trolltech. The fear was that if Qt free stopped existing one day (or if Trolltech wanted to stop licensing as GPL), the community would be up a creek. The clarifying agreement: (https://dot.kde.org/2004/07/24/trolltech-and-kde-free-qt-foundation-an… finally fixed things in a way to where if Trolltech got bought out or stopped releasing the free version, it would immediately become BSD licensed. This agreement still exists to day as far as I know. As far as I remember discussions going back then, people did not trust Trolltech much, and knew the license situation was "weird" - even after the GPL licensing. I don't have anything I can cite specifically, only old discussions that I vaguely remember.
AdmiralAsshat · 2018-10-25
Some of the KDE guys seem to have made it their pet project to get KDE to run well on a Pinebook[0]. [0]https://dot.kde.org/2018/08/22/kde-plasma-arm-laptop-pinebook
jhasse · 2018-02-11
> No need for Gtk+ on Plasma Mobile phones, for example. Plasma Mobile officially supports Gtk+. "Native apps are developed using Qt; it will also support apps written in GTK, Android apps, Ubuntu apps, and many others" https://dot.kde.org/2015/07/25/plasma-mobile-free-mobile-platform > Gtk+2 has some major apps like Gimp that ensure that it's here to stay for a while. Gtk+3's life will sure be shorter, more like Qt4's. Why? Also: GIMP will move to Gtk+ 3 in a few years. Furthermore Gtk+ 3 has even bigger apps: Firefox and Chrome. > For some it might be even hard to integrate the glib's mainloop. That's a valid argument.
jcelerier · 2018-02-07
> That's a killer UI, and I'm happy to admit it's incredibly good for what I've seen/used of Qt apps over the years... but it's not the norm. It's the norm for Qt apps since 2011 - 2012 when qml was introduced (of course, older apps use the older tech - and honestly, sometimes it makes more sense : at least all the colors, fonts, etc... will respect your desktop theme unlike "modern" toolkits). Here's how some QML code looks: https://github.com/jcelerier/TodoMVC-QML/blob/master/Main.qml ; as you can see, it's far from bloated (mostly due to the language being based on reactive semantics). For instance a consequent part of KDE has been rewritten in QML and more is underway with Kirigami : https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/12/kde-releases-kirigami-ui-20
oelmekki · 2017-10-05
Highly probable : https://dot.kde.org/2017/09/14/plasma-mobile-and-purisms-librem-5-free… Although, it's obviously not done yet.
ollieparanoid · 2017-05-26
There's KDE Kirigami, which will create programs that run on GNU/Linux/Android/iPhone from what I understand. But I have not tried it myself yet: https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/02/kde-releases-beta-kirigami-ui-20
comex · 2017-04-22
Eh, not quite. Apple could satisfy its LGPL obligations by throwing source dumps of WebCore over the wall - without releasing the rest of WebKit, exposing SVN history, or having a public bug tracker. In fact, for the first two years of Safari's life, that's exactly what they did. Then in 2005 they opened it up properly, voluntarily: https://dot.kde.org/2005/06/07/apple-opens-webkit-cvs-and-bug-database
distances · 2017-01-26
The big benefit of Slimbook would be the tested hardware "where any potential hardware-related issues have already been ironed out before a new version of our software is shipped to them", according to the KDE announcement: https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-laptop-kde-fan…
brudgers · 2017-01-26
KDE announcement: https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-laptop-kde-fan… Slimbook site seems to have collapsed under the internet's hug.
jeorgun · 2014-06-27
Really? I'd been under the impression I was the only KDE user left who actually liked the Oxygen widget theme. Everyone else seems to be cheerleading for the new look being shown off here (http://dot.kde.org/sites/dot.kde.org/files/plasma-main_0.jpg), which… uh… is the single lamest attempt to jump on the flat design bandwagon I've ever seen. I guess you can't please everyone.
Elv13 · 2014-01-17
KDE is the community, not the toolkit. Most KDE specific widgets have been merged/replaced in Qt over time. KF5 mostly is a bunch of small libraries using Qt. http://dot.kde.org/sites/dot.kde.org/files/kf5_big_0.png Qt is also used by a few "big" software and as the default toolkit for BB10, Jolla and Mer (totaling a nice 1% market share ;) ). It is also seen as the successor to Motif for large scientific applications.
mlinksva · 2013-10-02
Maybe this is one of the reasons the dependencies are being split up http://dot.kde.org/2013/09/25/frameworks-5 (for KDE generally; I imagine Krita would benefit though know no details).

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