# What is &kde;?

&kde; is an international technology team that creates Free Software for desktop and portable computing. Among &kde;'s products are a modern desktop system for &Linux; and &UNIX; platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. &kde; software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. &kde; 4's full-featured applications run natively on &Linux; &BSD;, &Solaris;, &Windows; and Mac OS X.

KDE is...

- A Desktop Environment

- An Application Development Framework

- An Office Application Suite

## &kde; The Desktop Environment

&kde; or the K Desktop Environment, is a network transparent, easy to use contemporary desktop environment available for &UNIX; and compatible systems. Together with a free implementation of &UNIX; such as &GNU;/&Linux;, &UNIX;/&kde; constitutes a completely free and open computing platform available to anyone free of charge. Source code is available for everyone to look at, learn from, modify and improve. Whilst there is always room for improvement, &kde; today delivers a viable feature packed alternative to the more commonly found commercial operating system/desktop combinations available.

&kde; will continue to bring open, reliable, stable and monopoly-free computing enjoyed by scientists and computing professionals world-wide to the everyday user.

## &kde; The Application Development Framework

&kde; also brings to the forefront many innovations for application developers. An entire infrastructure has been designed and implemented to help programmers create robust and comprehensive applications in the most efficient manner, eliminating the complexity and tediousness of general &UNIX; application development. &kde; recognizes the fact that a computing platform is only as good as the first class applications available to users. &kde;'s application framework, implements the latest advances in framework technology positioning it in direct competition with popular development frameworks like Microsoft's MFC/COM/ActiveX technology etc. &kde;'s innovative KParts compound document technology enables developers to quickly create first rate applications using cutting edge technology.

More information about &kde; development can be found at .

## &kde; The Office Application Suite

&koffice; is a free, integrated office suite for &kde;.

Leveraging the &kde; application development framework a great number of applications have been built for the K Desktop Environment. A selection of those applications is contained in the &kde; base distribution. At this moment &kde; is developing a complete office application suite based on &kde;'s innovative KParts technology. This modern day office suite offers spread-sheet applications, presentation creators, organizers, news clients and much more. &kpresenter;, a part of this application suite has already been successfully used for many presentations.

More information about &koffice; can be found at .