I first encountered KDE when it was in version 1.1 when a friend in India told me of a distribution which was the same as Red Hat - I was playing around with 5.2 at the time which was using the FVWM window manager - but had KDE instead. This distro was then known as Mandrake; today we know it as Mandriva.

Instead of using Mandrake, I downloaded KDE 1.1 and installed it on Red Hat; it was very nice and light years ahead of all the other DEs with which I had been playing around. Applications like KMail were nicely designed; kppp was really useful because at that time everyone was on a 56k internet connection. Additionally, for a GNU/Linux beginner, kppp was much more user-friendly than tools like minicom.

Over the years, KDE has added a huge number of applications; the one that stands out for me is k3b, the CD/DVD burning application that is quite simply the best of its kind even when one compares other platforms.

rest here