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With a Touch of Nostalgia, MiDesktop Brings KDE 1 Back to Life
Quoting: With a Touch of Nostalgia, MiDesktop Brings KDE 1 Back to Life —
Those of you who remember the fledgling of the Linux desktop will probably smile with a hint of nostalgia as you read this news. It takes us back more than 25 years, thanks to MIDesktop, a modern fork of KDE 1, which just released its first public development preview, bringing the late-1990s KDE desktop experience back to life on current Linux systems.
Previously known as MiDE, the project is a fork of KDE 1 that has been ported to the Osiris toolkit, itself derived from Qt 2, and adapted to run on modern Linux distributions. According to the project’s lead dev, the goal is not to recreate KDE visually alone, but to preserve its original design philosophy: speed, simplicity, and a distraction-free desktop.
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The 1990s KDE desktop is making a comeback on modern Linux
If you miss the simplicity or design aesthetic of 1990s Linux computing, there's some good news. A project to port KDE 1 and its desktop environment to modern Linux is underway, called MiDesktop.
The MiDesktop project was first teased in early 2025 by developer Alec Bloss, who managed to make the KDE 1 desktop environment compatible with modern Linux distributions. It's using a forked version of the Qt2 framework called Osiris—these days, mainstream KDE and other apps are using Qt 6. It looks and works like the original version of KDE, but it's running on top of Debian 13 or Ubuntu 24.04 with modern Linux apps.
A Reddit post from the developer explained, "It's blazing fast and lean, aesthetically functional and distraction-less. Today, packages are available for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04. You can now get a glimpse at what the Linux desktop was like in the late 90s/early 2000s, without all the trouble to get it running."