I am a bit prod of having seen the original post looking for volunteers to build a Kool Desktop Environment. I was obsessively reading Usenet groups at the time. And I remember there were quite early betas published, I did not run them at first, but I remember much enthusiasm about it. So I feel familiar with the beginnings although I never participated in the project development-wise. All the way up to KDE 4 I was quite close to the project as a user. But since KDE 4 was so unstable and buggy, I left it around that time. This is also around the time when the documentary makes a big jump ahead chronologically.

I feel the documentary explains less what happened the last 10-15 years. I recall Trolltech and Qt underwent a series of acquisitions. How is KDE and Qt developed now? Who are the main contributors and sponsors? Any big backers? This information I felt missing.

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bayindirh 20 minutes ago | parent [-]

The problems in KDE 4.0 & 4.1 is long gone. It was at 3.5.x level around 4.6, and now it's just smooth and invisible. You can surely give another try.

Qt is now its own company, namely Qt Group. Wikipedia quotes:

> In 2018, the company had 5,000 customers. Approximately 80% of the Fortune 500 companies are customers of Qt Group.[22]

So it's self-sustaining now.

AFAIK, KDE is still mostly volunteer work, but the way they develop software is pretty robust.

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Sammi 11 minutes ago | parent [-]

Valve has been contracting KDE devs to fix bugs and add features for years now, as KDE is the desktop environment on SteamOS.

	▲	bayindirh a minute ago \| parent [-]
		Good to know, thanks. I was more involved in KDE in the past years, but I don't have that amount of time now, so I missed these things, I believe. However, KDE rocks. My colleagues called me "a maniac" once when they see how I use that thing (i.e. Dolphin + KIO + fast window switches + multiple desktops).