[wink]

People have different tastes and opinions, and I don't remember how GNOME looked in 1998, but KDE 1? 2? wasn't so great imho (saying that as a huge fan of plasma, and intermittent KDE user for the last 25y).

I used enlightenment for a bit and was very happy with it - just like some things on a desktop at home don't matter, but do on a laptop. I've more than once mangled i3 and gnome or xfce or kde together to have the "desktop environment" things like wifi and power management and so on.. whereas in the 90s on a desktop I cared about neither of these things.

And while this was all very much a long time ago, I don't see how enlightenment would have changed - it's just a bit barebones compared to a DE, just like i3.

[pino83]

> KDE 1?

Yeah, compared to Win 95 at least, it looked interesting in a positive way...

Problem was: Whenever you clicked on something, some message box appeared, with some one-line error message that contained the word "unknown" or "unexpected"... :)

[badsectoracula]

With KDE1 is was most likely "Not yet implemented" :-)

I never used KDE2, KDE3.x was rock solid though. It wasn't until KDE4 where things took a massive nosedive and everything was crashing if you looked at it wrong - something that lasted until most of KDE5's lifetime, though by late KDE5 and now KDE6 it seems to be fine.

Well, "fine", for some reason Wayland sessions crash and restart the entire session whenever i press any key (doesn't happen with Xorg sessions), so i guess there are still some minor bugs to be fixed :-P

[pino83]

No no, it always tried to do something, with a lot of self-confidence, but then constantly failed.

I can spontaneously remember k3b (CD burning tool) constantly failing because the CLI tools behind it (cdrecord, mkisofs, ...) replied in some way that k3b hasn't expected (e.g. because the locale was non-english, or the CLI tool devs changed the strings slightly, or there was a pointless warning text that k3b did not expect, ..., ...).

Admittedly, k3b was later... KDE3 era? But this is exactly how KDE1 felt... And in very bad days it still does today... You click on something, the developers assumed that the file manager can deal with it, but instead you just see the file manager saying "Unknown protocol" or similar. All the problems that arise when your system is very modular, but every module is a separate hobby project with no coordination.

I definitely loved KDE3 and was sooo excited about KDE4. And it was a pretty terrible disappointment. Nowadays I'm again fine with Plasma. Since mid KDE5 days.

> for some reason Wayland sessions crash

That's definitely a mess, too. I'm not fundamentally against Wayland. I'm using it right now. Even if it is still slightly broken today (yes, Wayland is a protocol; here I mean: the biggest implementations). But the entire Wayland story is very very sad. It took ages before it was at least usable for five minutes. And then everywhere the X11 support already gets disabled, while Wayland is still in a somewhat immature state. Sure, I somewhat understand what the devs say, and I can't force them anyways. But it's really not a success story for the Linux desktop.

[robinsonb5]

KDE1 had some very nice themes! I remember using one that drew inspiration from the visuals of Bryce on the Mac. Dark mode theme - and animated window titles which would scroll gently if the window title was too long to fit.

[ptx]

Wasn't it KDE 2 that introduced themes? I remember early versions of KDE and Qt only offering a choice between Windows and Motif look-and-feel.

[robinsonb5]

My memory wasn't playing tricks on me after all - Suse Linux 6.3 had KDE 1.1.2 with several nice themes [1] - I'm pretty sure the version I used back in the day was SuSE 7 (a boxed copy, bought from Staples!)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/1m3vkba/kde_th...

[ptx]

Ah, perhaps I should have said "styles" rather than "themes"! I was thinking of the look-and-feel of the widgets, not the colors and window decorations. The widgets in all those screenshots seem to use Qt's Windows style.

Here's an example of the Motif style in KDE 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Screenshots_of_K...

KDE 2 introduced customizable styles for the widgets, I'm pretty sure, e.g. this somewhat gaudy one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Screenshots_of_K...

...or this BeOS-inspired one: https://timeline.kde.org/images/kde2b3_6.png

The release notes for 2.0 [1] say:

> KDE's sophisticated theme support starts with Qt's style engine, which permits developers and artists to create their own widget designs. KDE 2.0 ships with over 14 of these styles, some of which emulate the look of various operating systems, and additionally does an excellent job of importing themes from GTK and GNOME.

[1] https://kde.org/announcements/1-2-3/2.0/

[robinsonb5]

I'm sure it was version 1.something that had the Bryce theme - I remember being annoyed that the scrolling title feature had disappeared when KDE2 came out.

But it's always possible that my memory's playing tricks on me.