Vlogcanic

KDE stands for K Desktop Environment. It’s a free, community driven, software project aimed to produce a powerful and easy to use desktop environment.
Matthias Ettrich founded KDE in 1996, while being a student at Tuebingen, in order facilitate and to homogenize the way in which desktop unix applications looked, felt and worked since the Unix GUI of the time lacked such characteristics.
The name KDE stems from CDE (Common Desktop Environment), the desktop Unix GUI available then. This doesn’t mean that the K stands for Kommon –it actually stands for nothing, it’s just a plain and simple K.
One critical and kind of fateful decision made by Ettrich was to choos the Qt toolkit for KDE’s development. Qt was not free software back then so the choice had mixed results. On one hand it stuck with programmers and soon a host of very complex apps became available. On the other hand, not everyone was thrilled by the use of the Qt toolkit. The influential Debian project, in particular, removed KDE from their distro beacause the non-free status of Qt didn’t line up with Debian’s interpretation of the General Public License. This situation gave birth to two new –and, in the long run, very influential– proyects: the creation of a free substitute for Qt libraries, called Harmony, and the creation of an entirely new desktop environment based completely on free software: the GNOME project.
Later on, the Qt toolkit was relicensed but not under the General Public Licence, which kept free software proponents frowning upon it. In 2000 it finally became open and free.

KDE versions.

KDE releases can be major or minor. Major releases feature a two digit version number while minor releases have three digits and don’t bring any significant new features about but are all about minor enhancements and bug fixes.
Versions labeled X.0 are special in that they are allowed to be incompatible with all previous versions so if versions 3.4 and 3.5 are guaranteed to be compatible with all the software in versions 3.2 or 3.0, they needn’t be with versions 2.x.x and versions starting with a four will not be compatible with them.
KDE has had eleven major releases so far. The last minor release found in most of this year’s distros is 3.5.7 and the next milstone in KDE’s development is expected to be the release of KDE 4.0 sometime before the year’s end.