Celebrating 20 years with KDE

[mick.kde]

I started with Corel, moved to Mandrake, then Mepis, Mint and now Kubuntu/KDEneon. The common thread has been KDE and now we have the best ever. Not sure why I kept these old boxes initially but after all the years, I couldn't bear to part with them now. They're full of CDs, manuals, 3.5 floppy book disks, just everything a Linux/KDE user needed back in 2000.

[claydoh]

I wish I had saved my old stuff, but alas I did not
But this makes me feel old, as my first time was around 2000 as well, along with BeOS.
I had a Mandrake 7.0 cd that came with a magazine, it had KDE 1.something. It Just Worked on my 233mmx with 128mb of ram

[jglen490]

I still have my Redhat 5.2 box, media, etc. Not a KDE desktop, but it was the distro that brought me safely home to Linux and eventually lead me to Kubuntu.

[oshunluvr]

Mandrake was my first Linux but it was before 2000. I installed the initial release in 1998. I had been using OS/2 WARP before that.

[mick.kde]

Before I get too carried away waxing nostalgic, I need to remind myself what a pain it was loading drivers and configuring hardware back in 2000. I like the 2020 Linux/KDE much, much better.

Mick

[GreyGeek]

Mandrake was my first Linux but it was before 2000. I installed the initial release in 1998. I had been using OS/2 WARP before that.

I was running Win3.1FWG inside the DOS box of OS/2 Warp and then purchased a new Sony VAIO desktop on Dec 29, 1997. It had Win95, which crashed incessantly and require four re-installs until I grew sick and tired of it and decided to go back to OS/2 and Win3.1FWG. While at Barnes & Nobel, which was were software was initially sold around here, looking to buy a new copy of OS/2 I saw the book "Learn Linux in 24 Hours", by Bill Brush. In the back was a RH 5.0 CD, both of which I still have. I installed RH 5.0 on May 1st of 1998 and it ran flawlessly without a single crash.

In September of 1998 I saw an ad for SuSE 5.3. What attracted it to me was that the ad featured KDE 1.0 Beta as the desktop. I went to the SuSE stie and purchased a copy for $20 using their WindRiver sales outlet. The CD arrived in the mail. KDE was everything I expected and more. It allowed me to configure my Linux desktop to look and feel more like Windows so that I didn't experience a mental dissonance everytime I switched between them. I ended up purchasing all of their releases between 1998 and when Novell bought them in 2003. That would be about 21 invoices, IIRC. During those four years the price rose from $20 to $25 per version, all through a sales outlet called WindRiver. Money well spent.

KDE has been my sole desktop for the last 22 years. I've never run any other desktop since KDE 1.0 Beta. I've tried several others using VM's or LiveCD or USBs, but none could match KDE.

[Teunis]

Me too

I started with downloaded Red Hat 4.x floppies, during a job in the US I bought this Linux in 24hrs book and a boxed set of manuals plus CD with Red Hat 6.1.

Because of the typical Gnome problems I virtually immediately started using KDE and regular tests of Gnome show me it KDE is still the right choice.

Once Red Hat moved to Fedora I went with Knoppix, a Debian based system and discovered the joys of deb.
And then came Canonical with their Kubuntu where I'm still at though Neon is nice too.