Running Linux, Third Edition

The K Desktop Environment

The K Desktop Environment 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 amazing 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.

It should be noted up front that KDE is not a window manager like fvwm, but a whole desktop system that can be used with any other window manager. However, it also comes with its own window manager called kwm, which will give best results and is therefore what we will cover here.

In the section about configuring the fvwm window manager, you have seen that configuring Linux desktops usually means learning the syntax of configuration files and editing those files, something that long-term Linux users take for granted but that often rebuffs new users. The KDE team has therefore made it one of its goals that everything that is configurable in KDE (and about everything is) should be configurable via GUI dialogs. You can still edit configuration files, if you prefer, but you don’t need to, and even the most experienced users usually admit that in order to do simple things like change the background color of the desktop, it’s faster to click a few buttons than to read the manual page, find the syntax for specifying the background color, open the configuration ...