Klassik Revives the KDE 3 Desktop on Modern Plasma 6

12 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by turrini
(linuxiac.com)

10 Comments

searealist

6 hours ago

Unlike modern Gnome, KDE Plasma is _really_ good. In fact, you can configure it to almost perfectly mirror Gnome 2.

That being said, this is really cool, and brings back a lot of memories.

throwa356262

5 hours ago

My only problem with modern gnome is that it is a bit too opinionated. Their design team may decide to remove something people use every day just because it doesnt fit their vision of how a computer should be used.

Otherwise is it a great DE. It is good looking and runs extremely smooth and I prefer it to macos and windows 11 every day of the week.

KDE on the other hand, for some reason feels to me like going back to windows 98.

flohofwoe

4 hours ago

> KDE on the other hand, for some reason feels to me like going back to windows 98.

...which tbh is a good thing, because the Windows desktop of that time was pretty much the peak of the desktop UI paradigm, with actual research going into the UX instead of 'whims and vibes' like today (I would pick Win2k though since it had a much more solid technological foundation than Win95/98).

KDE has found its own way since it was a mere Windows desktop copy though (e.g. it's much better now - even more visually consistent - than both modern Windows and macOS). But unlike GNOME, KDE never abandondend what made it great.

PorciiVorbesc

4 hours ago

>...which tbh is a good thing, because the Windows desktop of that time was pretty much the peak of the desktop UI paradigm

Nostalgia of old out of touch PC users(of which I am one; old I mean, not out of touch ;-)).

I doubt people under 25 years old today have the same attraction to desktop UIs from before they were born and think that's the ideal usability goal for daily driving today.

flohofwoe

2 hours ago

> I doubt people under 25 years old today...

I think that really depends on whether they use PCs at all, and what for. I wouldn't dare to generalize people's habits based on age (the American "Gen*" labels never made much sense, and is usually downright discriminatory in both directions).

E.g. one result of the downward spiral of desktop UIs is that at least a lot of devs seem to have moved back to the command line, and the most hilarious thing of all is that the most modern tools (e.g. LLM frontends like Claude Code) are 1980s style TUIs. e.g. that's how bad the modern graphical user interfaces are failing us, we have to bring back half a century old UI technologies ;)

searealist

3 hours ago

What other desktop environment doesn't have a dock or taskbar?

Age has nothing to do with it. Gnome 3 is just bad.

searealist

5 hours ago

You can configure KDE Plasma to be nearly identical to Gnome 2 / Mate.

It's great.

jauntywundrkind

8 hours ago

KDE 3 was on DCOP, which would be fascinating to try to revive too. Unlike DBus where the programmer has to implement a DBus world, iirc every app was basically wired for automation from the start via DCOP, that it was just baked in. That would be fascinating to see.

I do really appreciate Klassik here though in general. There's so much nostalgia work for recreating or preserving various old systems. It's a noble tribute to see classic linux desktops also paid that honor.

ahartmetz

3 hours ago

AFAIK, there was nothing in DCOP that automatically exposed functionality, and this old documentation seems to confirm it: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Architecture/DCOP

jauntywundrkind

2 hours ago

> Currently the only real way to receive data from DCOP is to multiply inherit from the normal class that you are inheriting (usually some sort of QWidget subclass or QObject) as well as the DCOPObject class.

I could be wrong but I believe the QWidget's that make up nearly every KDE app had DCOP built in to them.