June 3, 2009, 2:56 pm
In the Linux world there are many opposing camps. In the editor realm it is Emacs vs Vi and in the package world it’s Deb vs RPM. Then there’s plain old binary vs source, but in the desktop arena it’s predominantly GNOME vs KDE. It’s a fairly even split between major Linux distributions, although most do support both. GNOME has enjoyed increasing popularity of late with both Ubuntu and SUSE opting to use it as their default. Other distros however, remain steadfast supporters of the other side of the fence.
KDE stands for the K Desktop Environment and was first released in 1998 by Matthias Ettrich, who was a student at the time. Ettrich saw a need for the Unix world to have a unified desktop environment which had a consistent look and feel, rather than just multiple applications looking and behaving however they wanted to. When it was originally conceived, KDE was written in C++ using the Qt toolkit for its graphical interface and to this day, remains true to its heritage.
