Thirty years after KDE’s debut, the venerable desktop is celebrating with cake, candles, and a call for community support.
KDE turns 30 this year, and it wants you to take the occasion to help it prepare for the next 30 by becoming a supporting member, or at least by making a one-off donation. I support the idea for those of you who use KDE and the Plasmatics for your daily driver, if you can afford it.
While I’m ready to break out the birthday party favors, and maybe pick up a birthday cake for the event, I’m a little taken aback by this being KDE’s big three-oh. This means that back when I first started using Linux in 2002, KDE was six years old. That was pretty old for anything made for Linux at the time, since Linux itself was just turning 11.
Thirty is an important birthday. At least it was for me.
I left home at 16, just ahead of what came to be called the Summer of Love. This was an age in which it was common knowledge that anybody over 30 was not to be trusted, which I still believe. Because of this, when I turned 30 it was like passing a marker on a one way street. From that point forward I looked at myself as an elder, and by the time I started using Linux I was really old.
The fact that KDE is now turning 30, 24 years after I first used it on Mandrake Linux, only serves to remind me that I’m now ancient. How ancient? Well, for two-thirds of my life newspapers were a happening thing and a daily part of most people’s lives. Papers are pretty much dead now, and the only positive in that is that I’m saved from the trouble of having to look to see if my name is in the obituary section every day, now I’m of an age where that’s a possibility.
Does that mean that because KDE is turning 30 it can’t be trusted anymore? Nah, it ain’t a person, and anyway, it’s got plenty of young blood coming in all the time to keep it from getting stuck in its ways. Besides, I think the rules have changed since I was a young’un. People aren’t in such a hurry to get the hell out of their parents’ house as soon as they graduate high school — or, as in my case, even before. They stick around, living in the basement or something, often past the age of 30. That has to push the trustworthy quotient back a bit, doesn’t it?
I figure these days, 50 is the new 30, which means that if you’re just turning 30 you can relax, you have about 20 good years in front of you in the trustworthiness department, as long as you watch where you hang out so you don’t get corrupted by the yuppie crowd at places like Starbucks.
You can maybe even extend that another five or 10 years if you do some cool stuff, like spend some money keeping open source software you use — like, I don’t know, maybe KDE — on track.
On a dedicated website for making donations, it’s easy to become a supporting member to make automagic quarterly or annual donations. Don’t worry, you can log in to edit your recurring donation at any time, just in case you lose your job to AI and need to cut back until the boss figures out that AI’s not as good as you. After that, you can adjust it back up again — and probably make it higher than before, since I’m sure you’ll negotiate a nice raise for yourself while you’ve got the boss over a barrel.
If you’re a guy who’s afraid of commitments, KDE’s also got you covered. Just click the “1 time donation” option and you’re set.
How about some Plasmatics?
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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