KDE on Windows - Exploring the Forgotten Port

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Back in the late 2000s, KDE began development on a port of their Plasma desktop environment to Windows. It was never completely finished, but some builds do exist. So today we're taking a look at one!

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● Music/Credits:
Background Music:
"Blue Mood" and "Wish You'd Never Left" from the YouTube Audio Library

Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #KDE #Windows

[Pytak]

No sound for that authentic 2000s linux experience

[ThatLinuxDude]

I thought this was lost media - we were relentlessly trying to find an archive of this recently to no avail, digging through archived mirrors and everything just for a chance, when all this time someone had archived it for at least a year while completely going under mine, and several others', radars... FINALLY, it is *good* to have KDE 4 for Windows back.

[sundhaug]

Fun fact about Konqueror is that it's powered by KHTML. KHTML was forked by Apple to create WebKit, which they use for Safari. Google then used WebKit to create Chrome/Chromium (and later they forked WebKit to create Blink

[ImNamo_]

Imagine how sick it would be if they finished the port, using the Plasma 6 DE on Windows 11

[Snoozie]

I love how the author of the post was very aware of what kind of content Michael makes. I wonder if he laughed when he read it for the first time.

[winelectronic]

The fact that the reporter acknowledged MJD is hilariously absurd. Way to predict the future.

[lucssa]

Imagine the shock I found out when I find myself in a Michael MJD video. But yeah, thanks! I do find some obscure nitbits from time to time, like that time I was finding an original copy of Mac System 0.97 or tracking down a build of KDE Neon with KDE Plasma 5.0 for an anniversary post. It was wild stuff, but yeah, it is indeed an interesting project that I managed to look into once I was looking into KDE history, but arguably it'll be cool if I find other desktop environments in a similar initiative (native or WSL-based).

[henningerhenningstone]

I bet the reason for doing this was somewhere between "just for the sake of it" and "because they could"

[kaiuweb]

Haha yeah I remember how the task bar had a Win32 backend so Plasma on Windows would actually show open Windows windows. We axed that sometime during early 5.x in preparation for the Wayland backend.
Also, whoever thought that using DBus on Windows was a good idea...
I used Dolphin on Windows 8 since Windows Explorer is borderline unusable, especially back when it didn’t even have tabs.
One of my few Windows-specific contributions to KDE Framworks was fixing drive letters in the Places panel lol

[jonglass]

Back in 2007 or 2008, I compiled the whole KDE desktop (3.something) on my PowerBook Pismo, just so I could compile and install one KDE-only app. It ran in Quartz, and I could either use the MacOS window manager or KDE's own WM. It was weird making KDE full screen, but even weirder to use XQuartz to let those KDE windows live in conjunction with MacOS windows, and even overlap. Those were heady days. I didn't know this was available for Windows. Thanks for sharing!

[iodreamify]

did not expect a KDE4 video today :) for anyone who's watching, Kde plasma 6 made major strides since then and (imo) looks way more polished

[Moremjd]

Next video: installing KDE for Windows on Wine

[idk-syiu]

7:50 that's cuz on kde 3, before plasma 4 konqueror used to also be kde's file manager

[Sylkis]

I still have a local copy of this. My mom loves the games package. No other mahjong or solitaire suite that is available for windows compares. Also the best jumping cube game and so on. I keep it saved in the cloud as well so that I can load it onto her laptops wherever she gets a new one.

[Reziac]

I've done this. It not only works well, it's portable -- once installed, you can drag it from one PC to the next. And yes it runs on Win10 and 11. (I use the apps, not the shell.)

[bluephreakr]

That hole 3 par in Kolf was _outstanding.._ Off the wall _edge_ into hole.

[glasseffect]

Windows 7 still looks more fresh and lively, than any other later iteration.

[georgeh]

In the early 2000s, shortly before I switched to Linux as my main desktop OS, I used cygwin. Cygwin created a Unix-like command line interface on Windows. I vaguely remember that cygwin allowed you to have a KDE environment running on a Windows machine. The Wikipedia article on cygwin goes into more details.

[ChuckFinley-me]

To this day I continue to use KDE4’s version of Kolourpaint, via the Chocolatey package manager, on Windows. I’m very pleased to see the full WinKDE suite preserved for posterity now. It was my favorite app suite for an OS.

[your_sweetpea]

14:45 Note that Filelight is an example of one of these applications that still has a modern Windows port, I use a newer version of it on all of my Windows machines.