Information and Source Code

The K Desktop Environment is an open source Unix (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) desktop created by volunteers from around the world. There are many ways to contribute to the project. You can write new code, improve old code, write documentation, translate to other languages, create artwork, sounds & music, report bugs, and suggest new features. If you would like to develop code, read on. If you would like to contribute in another way, please visit i18n.kde.org (translators), artist.kde.org (artists), or the KDE web site (http://www.kde.org) for more information.

KDE uses the GPL Qt toolkit which is developed by (Troll Tech). The main components of the desktop are a file manager/webbrowser (konqueror), window manager (kwin), and panel (kicker). There are many more utilities and applications which are included in the base distribution and available elsewhere. The primary programming language used for development is C++, although bindings are available for many other languages. The KDE code consists of libraries containing classes for, for example:

Various desktop, configuration, and system administration utilities are also included in the distribution. These are some of the things KDE developers work on. A more recent creation is KOffice, a productivity suite which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, figure editor, image editor, and more. The currently released version of KDE is 3.1.