He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but, rather, a desktop environment, in which users could expect things to look, feel and work consistently.

His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.

Beginning 23 October 2000, the second series of releases, K Desktop Environment 2, introduced significant technological improvements.

[7] These included DCOP (Desktop COmmunication Protocol), KIO (an application I/O library), KParts (a component object model, which allows an application to embed another within itself), and KHTML (an HTML rendering and drawing engine).

[9] In 2002, members of the KDE on Cygwin project began porting the GPL licensed Qt/X11 code base to Windows.

Therefore, KDE SC 4 applications can be compiled and run natively on these operating systems as well.

The centerpiece is a redesigned desktop and panels collectively called Plasma, which replaces Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba by integrating their functionality into one piece of technology; Plasma is intended to be more configurable for those wanting to update the decades-old desktop metaphor.

There are a number of new frameworks, including Phonon (a new multimedia interface making KDE independent of any one specific media backend) Solid (an API for network and portable devices), and Decibel (a new communication framework to integrate all communication protocols into the desktop).

Also featured is a metadata and search framework, incorporating Strigi as a full-text file indexing service, and NEPOMUK with KDE integration.

As of August 2014, KDE no longer provides synchronized releases of the entire software compilation; instead the software is split into three parts: Major changes include a move from Qt 4 to Qt 5, support for the next-generation display server protocol Wayland, support for the next-generation rendering API Vulkan and modularization of the KDE core libraries.

[20]KDE SC releases are made to the KDE FTP server[21] in the form of source code with configure scripts, which are compiled by operating system vendors and integrated with the rest of their systems before distribution.

Most vendors use only stable and tested versions of KDE SC, providing it in the form of easily installable, pre-compiled packages.

Bugfix releases have three version numbers, e.g. KDE 1.1.1, and focus on fixing bugs, minor glitches, and making small usability improvements.

Most KDE software uses Qt which runs on most Unix and Unix-like systems (including Mac OS X), Android and Microsoft Windows.

[245] 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.