It’s always been just KDE to me. In the past year or so, I’ve noticed people calling Plasma KDE or even just Plasma. What happened? Why do people insist on making the name longer? Why the word Plasma? What is Plasma referring to? And, are they trying to move away from the KDE name to just Plasma?
Answer: Plasma is the desktop environment. KDE is the community that makes Plasma and many other related software.
Everyone here sorta answers the questions but not entirely. So KDE started back in the 1990s as K Desktop Environment as a play on the Common Desktop Environment. The K was originally suggested as standing for Kool buy I guess others in project didn’t think that was very kool and it was left officially as just K.
As to why Plasma - when KDE 4 was released, “Plasma” replaced Kdesktop shell and whatnot and was named Plasma because plasma evokes dynamic fluidity like plasma or some such lol. Unfortunately I can’t find anything easily on the interwebs that shows how it got it’s name :/
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