K Desktop Environment

KDE is an international free software community producing free and libre software like Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks and many cross-platform applications designed to run on modern Unix-like and Microsoft Windows systems. The Plasma Desktop is a desktop environment provided as the default work environment on many Linux distributions, such as openSUSE, Mageia, Kubuntu, Manjaro Linux and also the default desktop environment on PC-BSD, a BSD operating system.

The KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) was formerly used as an umbrella term consisting of a desktop environment and an associated range of KDE Applications produced by KDE. Prior to version 4.4, released in February 2010, the Software Compilation was known as KDE, which stood for K Desktop Environment until November 2009. The KDE SC included only applications whose development teams chose to follow the Software Compilation's release schedule; as a result, many popular KDE applications, such as Amarok and Digikam, were not part of the Software Compilation. To date there have been four series of releases. After that, the KDE SC was split into three separate product entities: KDE Plasma, KDE Frameworks and KDE Applications, each with their own independent release schedules.