KDE Projects are projects maintained by the KDE community, a group of people developing and advocating free software for everyday use, for example

KDE Plasma Plasma is a desktop environment by KDE, and can refer to: * KDE Plasma 5 (2014–today) * KDE Plasma 4 (2008–2015) * Plasma Mobile for smartphones * Plasma Bigscreen Plasma Bigscreen is a software project from KDE which contains an interface op ...

and

KDE Frameworks KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, fi ...

or applications such as Amarok,

Krita Krita ( ) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital art and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on th ...

or Digikam. There are also non-coding projects like designing the Breeze desktop theme and iconset, which is coordinated by KDE's VisualDesignGroup. Even non-Qt applications like

GCompris GCompris is a software suite comprising educational entertainment software for children aged 2 to 10. GCompris was originally written in C and Python using the GTK+ widget toolkit, but a rewrite in C++ and QML using the Qt widget toolkit has ...

, which started as a GTK-based application, or web-based projects like WikiToLearn are officially part of KDE.

Overview

As of today there are many KDE projects that are either stand-alone or grouped into larger sub-projects: *

Workspaces *

(formerly KDE-Libs): A collection of

libraries A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

that provides

frameworks A framework is a generic term commonly referring to an essential supporting structure which other things are built on top of. Framework may refer to: Computing * Application framework, used to implement the structure of an application for an op ...

and functionality for developers * KDE Applications Bundle: Containing core applications like Konqueror, Dolphin, KWrite, and Konsole.

KDE Core projects

Plasma Plasma or plasm may refer to: Science * Plasma (physics), one of the four fundamental states of matter * Plasma (mineral), a green translucent silica mineral * Quark–gluon plasma, a state of matter in quantum chromodynamics Biology * Blood pla ...

– UI for multiple workspaces *

KWin KWin is a window manager for the X Window System and a Wayland compositor. It is released as a part of KDE Plasma 5, for which it is the default window manager. KWin can also be used on its own or with other desktop environments. KWin can be c ...

–

Window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...

KHTML KHTML is a browser engine developed by the KDE project. It is the default engine of the Konqueror browser, but it has not been actively worked on since 2016. Moreover, KHTML will be discontinued for KDE Frameworks 6. Built on the KParts framewor ...

– HTML rendering engine, forked into

WebKit WebKit is a browser engine developed by Apple and primarily used in its Safari web browser, as well as on the iOS and iPadOS version of any web browser. WebKit is also used by the BlackBerry Browser, PlayStation consoles beginning from the PS ...

in 2004 * KJS -

JavaScript engine A JavaScript engine is a software component that executes JavaScript code. The first JavaScript engines were mere interpreters, but all relevant modern engines use just-in-time compilation for improved performance. JavaScript engines are typica ...

* KIO – Extensible network-transparent file access *

KParts KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, fi ...

– Lightweight in-process graphical component framework * XMLGUI – Allows defining UI elements, such as menus and toolbars via

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

files *

Phonon In physics, a phonon is a collective excitation in a periodic, Elasticity (physics), elastic arrangement of atoms or molecules in condensed matter physics, condensed matter, specifically in solids and some liquids. A type of quasiparticle, a phon ...

–

Multimedia framework A multimedia framework is a software framework that handles media on a computer and through a network. A good multimedia framework offers an intuitive API and a modular architecture to easily add support for new audio, video and container formats ...

Solid Solid is one of the State of matter#Four fundamental states, four fundamental states of matter (the others being liquid, gas, and Plasma (physics), plasma). The molecules in a solid are closely packed together and contain the least amount o ...

– Device integration framework *

Sonnet A sonnet is a poetic form that originated in the poetry composed at the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the Sicilian city of Palermo. The 13th-century poet and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention, ...

–

Spell checker In software, a spell checker (or spelling checker or spell check) is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic di ...

ThreadWeaver ThreadWeaver is a system library initially developed for KDE Software Compilation 4 and later refactored for KDE Frameworks 5. ThreadWeaver allows developers to easily take advantage of multi-core processors and multithreading. In ThreadWeaver th ...

– Library to use

multiprocessor Multiprocessing is the use of two or more central processing units (CPUs) within a single computer system. The term also refers to the ability of a system to support more than one processor or the ability to allocate tasks between them. There ar ...

systems more effectively

KDE Applications

Major applications developed by KDE include: *

Ark Ark or ARK may refer to: Biblical narratives and religion Hebrew word ''teva'' * Noah's Ark, a massive vessel said to have been built to save the world's animals from a flood * Ark of bulrushes, the boat of the infant Moses Hebrew ''aron'' * ...

– Archiving tool *

Dragon Player Dragon Player is a simple media player (application software), media player for the KDE desktop environment. It is the renamed continuation of a video player for KDE 3 called Codeine, which was originally created and developed by Max Howell, and ...

– Media player. *

Dolphin A dolphin is an aquatic mammal within the infraorder Cetacea. Dolphin species belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (the ...

–

File manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or pr ...

Gwenview Gwenview is an image viewer for Unix-like systems (including Linux) and is released as part of the KDE Applications bundle. The current maintainer is Aurélien Gâteau. The word "Gwen" means "white" in the Breton language and is commonly used as ...

–

Image viewer An image viewer or image browser is a computer program that can display stored graphical images; it can often handle various graphics file formats. Such software usually renders the image according to properties of the display such as color depth, ...

Kate Kate name may refer to: People and fictional characters * Kate (given name), a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or nickname * Gyula Káté (born 1982), Hungarian amateur boxer * Lauren Kate (born 1981), American autho ...

–

Text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known as "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be us ...

Konsole Konsole is a free and open-source terminal emulator graphical application which is part of KDE Applications and ships with the KDE desktop environment. Konsole was originally written by Lars Doelle. It ls licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later and t ...

–

Terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termin ...

Kontact Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs (KMail, KAddressBook, Akregator, ...

–

Personal information manager A personal information manager (often referred to as a PIM tool or, more simply, a PIM) is a type of application software that functions as a personal organizer. The acronym PIM is now, more commonly, used in reference to personal information manag ...

featuring an

e-mail client An email client, email reader or, more formally, message user agent (MUA) or mail user agent is a computer program used to access and manage a user's email. A web application which provides message management, composition, and reception functio ...

, a

news client A newsreader is an application program that reads articles on Usenet distributed throughout newsgroups. Newsreaders act as clients which connect to a news server, via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), to download articles and post new ar ...

, a

feed aggregator Feed or The Feed may refer to: Animal foodstuffs * Animal feed, food given to domestic animals in the course of animal husbandry ** Fodder, foodstuffs manufactured for animal consumption ** Forage, foodstuffs that animals gather themselves, s ...

, to-do lists, etc. *

Konqueror Konqueror is a free and open-source web browser and file manager that provides web access and file-viewer functionality for file systems (such as local files, files on a remote FTP server and files in a disk image). It forms a core part of ...

–

Web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

and

Kopete Kopete is a multi-protocol, free software instant messaging client released as part of the KDE Software Compilation. Although it can run in numerous environments, it was designed for and integrates with the KDE Plasma Workspaces. Kopete was star ...

–

Instant messaging client Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...

–

Raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap images) such as JPEG, PNG, and GI ...

for

Digital painting Digital painting is an established art medium that typically combines a computer, a graphics tablet, and software of choice. The artist uses painting and drawing with the stylus that comes with the graphics tablet to create 2D paintings within a ...

Kdenlive Kdenlive (; acronym for ''KDE Non-Linear Video Editor'') is a free and open-source video editing software based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of develope ...

–

Video editing software Video editing software, or a video editor is software used performing the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a non-linear editing system. It has replaced traditional flatbed celluloid film editing tools and analog video ta ...

Thematically related groups of applications

* KDE-Plasma-Addons: Additional

widgets. * KDE-Network * KDE-Pim * KDE-Graphics * KDE-Multimedia * KDE-Accessibility: Accessibility applications. * KDE-Utilities * KDE-Edu *

Calligra Suite Calligra Suite is a graphic art and office suite by KDE. It is available for desktop PCs, tablet computers, and smartphones. It contains applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, databases, vector graphics, and digital paintin ...

: Integrated office suite * KDE-Games * KDE-Toys
KDE-Artwork
Additional icons, styles, etc. * KDE-SDK * KDE-Bindings * KDEWebdev: Web development tools. * KDE-Extragear: Extragear is a collection of applications and tools that are not part of the core KDE Applications. * KDE-Playground: This repository contains new and unstable software. It is a place for applications to mature.

Other projects

* KDE Connect: An Android application to connect the Plasma desktop to phones for remote control *

KDE neon KDE neon is a Linux distribution developed by KDE based on Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) releases, bundled with a set of additional software repositories containing the latest versions of the Plasma 5 desktop environment/framework, Qt 5 toolkit ...

: a distro featuring the latest KDE software packages on top of an Ubuntu base. * Wiki2Learn: a wiki-based web framework for people to participate and share knowledge.

Development

Source code

The source code of every KDE project is stored in a source code repository using

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

. Stable versions are released to the KDE FTP server in the form of

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

with configure scripts, ready to be compiled by operating system vendors and to be integrated with the rest of their systems before distribution. Most vendors use only stable and tested versions of KDE programs or applications, providing it in the form of easily installable, pre-compiled packages.

Implementation

Most KDE projects are using the Qt framework, which runs on most Unix and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

systems (including

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

), and Microsoft Windows.

CMake In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is not a build system itself; it generates anothe ...

serves as the build tool. This allows KDE to support a wider range of platforms, including Windows.

GNU gettext In computing, gettext is an internationalization and localization (i18n and l10n) system commonly used for writing multilingual programs on Unix-like computer operating systems. One of the main benefits of gettext is that it separates programmi ...

is used for translation.

Doxygen Doxygen ( ) is a documentation generator and static analysis tool for software source trees. When used as a documentation generator, Doxygen extracts information from specially-formatted comments within the code. When used for analysis, Doxyge ...

is used to generate api documentation.

Licensing

KDE software projects must be released under free licensing terms. In November 1998, the Qt framework was dual-licensed under the

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

Q Public License The Q Public License (QPL) is a non-copyleft license, created by Trolltech for its free edition of the Qt. It was used until Qt 3.0, as Trolltech toolkit version 4.0 was released under GPL version 2. It fails the Debian Free Software Guidelin ...

(QPL) and a commercial license for

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and int ...

developers. The same year, the KDE Free Qt foundation was created which guarantees that Qt would fall under a variant of the very liberal

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

should Trolltech cease to exist or no free version of Qt be released during 12 months. Debate continued about compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL), hence in September 2000 Trolltech made the Unix version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL in addition to the QPL which eliminated the concerns of the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...

. Trolltech continued to require licenses for developing

with Qt. The core libraries of KDE are collectively licensed under the GNU

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

but the only way for proprietary software to make use of them was to be developed under the terms of the Qt proprietary license. Starting with Qt 4.5, Qt was also made available under the LGPL version 2.1, now allowing proprietary applications to legally use the open source Qt version.