00:00I always describe myself as a relative newcomer to KDE.
00:03I've only been here 10 years.
00:09Using Linux on the desktop was tedious.
00:13Microsoft software at that time was really, really bad.
00:17I mean, it was normal that a computer would regularly crash.
00:22I saw a post on Usenet.
00:25There was this guy who had posted a call to ARMS to create a desktop environment.
00:34The initial vision of KDE was very much driven by how can we make Linux successful and more appealing to
00:41the general public.
00:42And the cool story is that it's been a bunch of self-organizing people who saw that vision and for
00:47one reason or another that spoke to them.
00:49And they got involved and they made it happen.
00:53KDE started with this lofty goal of replacing Windows and of course it was crazy.
00:59The goal of world domination is always there, of course.
01:03The Qt library was very convincing from the very beginning.
01:06There was a drawback to it because Qt was not really open source at that time.
01:11We got lots of criticism, lots of flack from the free software community over the licensing.
01:17If you disagree, go do your own thing. And in fact, some people did.
01:22Can you explain to me what is Gnome?
01:24It's a KDE ripoff started by Miguel de Icaza.
01:28People were talking past each other and it got heated.
01:31A lot of it boiled down to Qt is evil, KDE is evil, Gnome is good without people really knowing
01:38the details.
01:39We wanted something that had lots of features, allowed people to do things in new ways.
01:43We got a lot of backlash with the release of 4.0 and people were saying, okay, KDE sucks.
01:49People were disappointed, people were angry about their favorite features, Gnome.
01:54This was the end and I was gonna die and it was all my fault.
01:58I was the person to push the button and I did so consciously. And I stand by it.
02:02Yeah, I mean, we have been doing this thing for a long time.
02:05And it's one of those things that maybe shouldn't have worked.
02:08The thing that I'm most proud of having done in my life and continue to be doing is KDE.
