KDE (pronounced /ˌkeɪdiːˈiː/) is a free software project based around its flagship product, a cross-platform desktop environment designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows and Mac OS X systems.[1][2]. It's the default desktop environment for many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mandriva Linux, Kubuntu and Pardus. The goal of the project is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system. In this regard, the KDE project serves as an umbrella project for many standalone applications and smaller projects that are based on KDE technology. These include KOffice, KDevelop, Amarok, K3b and many others. KDE software is based on the Qt toolkit, although it has also support for programs based on GTK, as well as the GTK-based visual themes.[3] The original GPL version of this toolkit only existed for the X11 platform, but with the release of Qt 4, GPL versions are available for all platforms. This allows KDE software based on Qt 4 to also be distributed to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.
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