How to run KDE apps on Windows

Posted on August 27, 2008 at 5:38 am

KDE or the K Desktop Environment is known for its easy to use desktop GUI interfaces for UNIX [source: http://www.kde.org]. If you use the popular Linux flavors, more probably you have used the KDE as it’s GUI. We will look at how to run KDE-based applications on Windows.

KDE for Windows is still on it’s beta stage but the current version has some packages already that you can use as an alternative to web and software development. It also comes with the KDE Games which we will see later on this blog.

First, get the KDE installer from http://windows.kde.org/, it is a small program wherein it will guide you on which KDE package you want to download from several mirror servers. The interface of the installer is a wizard type dialog where in you chose the packages that you want:

I checked everything above except the languages package and I got the below confirmation of the packages I checked including their current version and description:

After hitting next above, the download dialog should appear. This is a good thing for us users who don’t want to download individual packages and libraries just to run programs. I remember when I was using UNIX and for those non-KDE apps, they were a nightmare to install. Downloading could take a few minutes to an hour depending on your Internet speed.

After the installation, the KDE apps are now on my Programs:

The list of applications is good and well categorized. The Office apps are still a little sluggish and maybe because they are still in their Alpha stage:

The KDE games are my favorite and it was nice to be able to play my favorite KDE games like KReversi (similar to Othello) and KBreakout (similar to Arkanoid or Breakout). The games are more stable than the Office apps, I had no issues running them on my XP machine.

Overall it was nice to be able to run these KDE apps on a Windows machine. Previously I needed to reboot to my Linux OS just to run them. Hopefully we can get to see the KDE desktop itself run on Windows soon.