KDE: The Documentary tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows.

The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free software communities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people who weren’t system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphical environment at a time when there was none.

The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensing fight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine that became the basis of Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Chrome; and the contentious release of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed.

Along the way, KDE invented much of how open source communities organise themselves. KDE e.V., the non-profit association that holds the project’s legal and financial responsibilities while leaving technical decisions to contributors, became a model for many other open source projects.

Today, KDE is the default desktop on major Linux distributions and on the Steam Deck, and the centre of a whole ecosystem of free and open software.

Above all, the film is about the people who built KDE, the friendships that formed, and why generations of developers have given their free time to it.

Even if my personality leans towards GNOME, the growth of KDE is one of the most amazing success stories in free software. I started using Linux in 2022 and KDE Plasma 5.27 was just about to release to some fanfare. Fast-forward to 2026 and now KDE has a position next to GNOME on Fedora’s website and is the official desktop interface of Valve’s Steam Deck and would probably be above GNOME if not for the inertia GNOME received by being the default choice.

Also this commemorates the release of KDE Plasma 6.8 and the 30th anniversary of the “Kool Desktop Environment”

Also goddamn we got a nice documentary about software communism

Note: the attached link is a link to YouTube, a proprietary video streaming service. You can use programs such as Invidious/Freetube/yt-dlp/Newpipe to access it.