Running Linux, 5th Edition

The K Desktop Environment

KDE is an open source software project that aims at providing a consistent, user-friendly, contemporary desktop for Unix, and hence, Linux systems. Since its inception in October 1996, it has made great progress. This is partly due to the choice of a very high-quality GUI toolkit, Qt, as well as the consequent choice of using C++ and its object-oriented features for the implementation.

KDE employs a component technology called KParts that makes it possible to embed one application into another transparently, such that, for example, the web browser Konqueror can display PDF documents in its own browser window by means of the PDF display program KPDF , without Konqueror having to have a PDF display component of its own. The same goes for the KOffice suite (see http://koffice.kde.org), discussed in Chapter 8, where, for example, the word processor KWord can embed tables from the spreadsheet application KSpread seamlessly.

KDE is in ever-continuing development, but every few months the KDE team puts out a so-called official release that is considered very stable and suitable for end users. The KDE team makes these available in source form, and most distributions provide easy-to-install binary packages within days of a source release. If you don't mind fiddling around with KDE and can stand an occasional bug, you can also live on the bleeding edge and download daily snapshots of KDE, but this is not for the fainthearted. At the time of this writing, the current ...