It certainly doesn’t seem like the modern Linux desktop has been more than 10 years in the making, but it’s true: work on KDE started way back in 1996. The Linux desktop back then consisted mainly of components not written on Linux systems, but rather ported from the X desktops of proprietary UNIX systems.
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Qt was not regarded as open-source at the time -- its code was available free of charge, but under a restrictive licence that forbade commercial use. Many thought that this could prove a problem in the long run, but KDE’s future was by no means certain, and the developers reasoned that they could deal with the licencing issues if and when KDE succeeded.
Of course, KDE did succeed, and by 1997 the licencing issues had already come back to haunt them. Beyond words of warning and worry, there was more practical fallout, including the exclusion of KDE from Red Hat Linux, which put KDE beyond the reach of many of the less experienced users it hoped to attract.
Partly in response to the Qt woes, in 1997, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena founded the GNOME project. Mena was working on early versions of The GIMP, and realised that GTK, the C-based GUI toolkit developed as part of the GIMP, could be adapted to handle general desktop duties. GNOME gained many supporters, including Red Hat, which fast-tracked development to make GNOME 1.0 the default desktop in Red Hat 6.0.
With its development head-start, and the boost provided by the mature Qt toolkit, KDE reached version 1.0 in July 1998, ahead of GNOME 1.0 in March 1999. Around this time, Qt developers Trolltech announced that the upcoming 2.0 version of Qt would be released under the Q Public Licence (QPL), a true open-source licence. Eventually the code was also licenced under the GPL, nullifying concerns about Qt licencing, at least in regard to development of open-source projects like KDE.
By that time, though, GNOME was already well established, and it was clear that its developers weren’t going to abandon their hard work just because Qt’s licence had changed. Besides, in building GNOME they’d created their own unique vision for the perfect Linux desktop, often differing from the plans of the KDE developers. For better or worse, Linux would have two major desktops.
A tale of two desktops
Both GNOME and KDE have gone from strength to strength since those early days, and both today are great desktops, though they remain quite distinct projects. There are many similarities of course, and this is to be expected: neither really diverges from the basic desktop concepts that also underpin Windows and Mac OS, since those concepts seem to work well, and they’re certainly familiar to existing computer users.
In terms of design and intent, the most fundamental difference between GNOME and KDE is in the way they approach usability. The GNOME project takes a very proactive, and sometimes controversial approach, with a detailed set of human interface guidelines (usually called the “HIG”) that guide application design. Among other things, the HIG recommends that applications use sensible default values for all configuration options, and that those options are kept to a reasonable minimum to avoid confusion.
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The KDE approach to usability is less hard-line than GNOME’s, though the developers take it no less seriously. KDE remains incredibly configurable, and for many users this is a great boon: rather than having the desktop dictate a user’s behaviour, a power user can jump right in and customise the desktop to suit their needs.
.but if ur new to Linux and coming from windows world to world without windows,initially try using kde and gnome,afterwards settle with GNOME;a pure fsf product.So Anytime prefer Ubuntu over Kubuntu.
