Can you believe it's been 20 years since the KDE (Kool Desktop Environment) was announced on the 14th of October, 1996, by project founder Matthias Ettrich? Well, it has, and today we'd like to say a happy 20th birthday to KDE!

If memory serves, the date of October 14, 1996, remains in history as the day when the development of the KDE desktop environment officially started. The first stable release, KDE 1.0, arrived one and a half years later, on July 12, 1998. KDE was quite popular a decade ago, and it made many of us "Linux veterans" migrate from Windows 95 or 98.

"On October 14, KDE celebrates its 20th birthday. The project that started as a desktop environment for Unix systems, today is a community that incubates ideas and projects which go far beyond desktop technologies. Your support is very important for our community to remain active and strong," said the devs.

I still remember how cool was the desktop interface of the first distro (Mandrake 9.0) I used back in 2002, when my Linux journey began, and I had no idea it was KDE. After that, I remember that I used SuSE Linux 8.x with the KDE desktop environment around 2003, and a few years later, in 2005, the popular Red Hat Linux 9.0, also with KDE.

I'd love to learn about your KDE experience, if you want to share it in the comments section below, and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Kool Desktop Environment, I would like to invite you to read the announcement that started the revolution of the modern Linux desktop, as well as to check out the awesome timeline prepared by the KDE team for this unique occasion.

Happy birthday, KDE!