MiDesktop (formerly MiDE) is a fork of KDE version 1, fixed for modern Linux systems. It’s been ported to the Osiris toolkit, itself a fork of Qt 2.
It’s clean, unassuming, and stupidly fast and lightweight.
MiDesktop is under development, however, to celebrate the New Year, a Development Preview release has been made! You can get packages for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04, or you can also compile from source if your distribution doesn’t have a package. Please note that these are development preview packages, and as such are likely to contain bugs. Please report bugs that you find so we can make it even better.
MiDesktop
MiDesktop is classical computing at its best - no frills, plain but useable.
About MiDesktop
MiDesktop (formerly MiDE) is a fork of KDE version 1.1.2, the last release of the 1.x series. Since then, it's been ported to the Osiris toolkit (which is a fork of Qt 2.3.2).
The goal is to modernize MiDesktop without filling it with a bunch of features and bloat, retaining the essence of 90's and early 2000's computing without the pain points.
Important: MiDesktop is still in the early stages and as such should be considered experimental software, in that it could have serious bugs or security flaws that have not been discovered yet. Use at your own risk!
Building MiDesktop
System Requirements
A Linux system with glibc and an X11R7+ compliant display server such as XWayland or XOrg. Wayback has been tested. XLibre has not been tested. XNest is permitted for some testing but behaves erraneously and bug reports for XNest-specific issues will generally not be accepted.
You will need the following libraries and their development files/packages:
libjpeg
libtiff
libpng
Osiris Toolkit 2.4.4 or newer
CMake
libxcb/libxkb
GCC 12 or newer
gettext
I'm sure I'm missing some stuff there - this list isn't exhaustive and will likely be updated as I have time to test and double check it (as well as make distribution required package lists for building).
Note: CMake may complain about not finding libxcb/xkb and/or libtiff. As long as these are installed and compilation is successful, you can safely ignore these warnings (this is a bug in the CMake build system).
MiDesktopJan1Preview.png
Workarounds for some known issues
Some known bugs can be worked around without too much difficulty.
Firefox (and Firefox ESR)
The issue: Firefox expands to infinity off the edge of the screen.
The fix: In the Firefox window, go to Main menu -> More Tools -> Customize Toolbar
In the lower left-hand corner, check the box for Title Bar. You may need to do this from a different desktop environment first, but the setting is retained.
GDM3 fails to log in to MiDesktop session or logs in and logs back out with "Authentication Error" message and partially frozen afterwards
This appears to be related to GDM3 running in Wayland mode and expecting the session to register, which MiDesktop does not. There is not actually an authentication error as far as I can tell.
Known issues
Some menus on the lower taskbar do not remain open when clicked, i.e. opens and closes immediately
KMenuEdit does not display any menu contents and is functionally unusable at the moment
MiDesktop is unaware of multi-monitor setups.
Scrolling in applications using the mousewheel does not work currently
Firefox will maximize its size infinitely - it appears to not know where the actual edge of the screen is. This appears to only be an issue on multi-monitor setups. On single monitor setups, Firefox works normally
Google Chrome is unable to maximize its window size. This is probably related to the Firefox bug.
No wallet on startup
No sound support
I know I've forgotten quite a few. This software is old, the fact that it works at all on modern Linux is fantastic.
Please submit bug reports if you run across issues.
Hah! I liked KDE 1.x back then. It was the default desktop in things like Mandrake etc.
I liked KDE 3 best though, I still have a build of Trinity that (probably) still works. I use some of the apps, like the old kpdf which is the PDF viewer I use by default in my XFE file manager. (I have an xpdf built against QT 5 to fall back on and also firefox, if even that gets broken)
You know what I'm doing right now... gathering sources to build this
(I got osiris built, but I can't seem to get cmake to find it to start the build of kdelibs... I might have to dig into the cmake plumbing... I suspect something is hard coded to look in /opt/qt1 and I put mine in /opt/osiris)
I'm afraid I'm going to have to give up on this for now. I don't think the cmake tooling is in very good shape. There are a lot of hard coded paths and assumptions of debianisms... it might work on debian if I had their control files that they used to build .debs but it's not going to work for me with the current state, and the very little information that I have.
I got it to find the includes by making a symlink (hard coded to /opt/qt1/include and /opt/qt1/include/qt, not "osiris") but the libraries, even though they are there with ldconfig path pointing to them, are coming up not found. Perhaps they are not named correctly (that's just it, I don't know how they macgyvered things to make it work with osiris vs. qt1). I think I enabled everything in the library, including qt1compat.
We'll see in a few months if there's been much activity in the project.
