“KDE: The Documentary tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows.

The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free software communities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people who weren’t system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphical environment at a time when there was none.

The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensing fight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine that became the basis of Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Chrome; and the contentious release of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed.

Along the way, KDE invented much of how open source communities organise themselves. KDE e.V., the non-profit association that holds the project’s legal and financial responsibilities while leaving technical decisions to contributors, became a model for many other open source projects.

Today, KDE is the default desktop on major Linux distributions and on the Steam Deck, and the centre of a whole ecosystem of free and open software.

Above all, the film is about the people who built KDE, the friendships that formed, and why generations of developers have given their free time to it.”