If you miss the simplicity or design aesthetic of 1990s Linux computing, there’s some good news. A project to port KDE 1 and its desktop environment to modern Linux is underway, called MiDesktop.
The MiDesktop project was first teased in early 2025 by developer Alec Bloss, who managed to make the KDE 1 desktop environment compatible with modern Linux distributions. It’s using a forked version of the Qt2 framework called Osiris—these days, mainstream KDE and other apps are using Qt 6. It looks and works like the original version of KDE, but it’s running on top of Debian 13 or Ubuntu 24.04 with modern Linux apps.
A Reddit post from the developer explained, “It’s blazing fast and lean, aesthetically functional and distraction-less. Today, packages are available for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04. You can now get a glimpse at what the Linux desktop was like in the late 90s/early 2000s, without all the trouble to get it running.”
This initial development version is functional on Ubuntu or Debian, but there are still many bugs. Several core KDE apps haven’t been added yet, including KEdit, KWrite, KCalc, and others, and they will likely use modified names to avoid confusion with their modern KDE equivalents. Chrome and Firefox have window resizing problems, taskbar menus often disappear after they are opened, there’s no sound, and multi-monitor setups are not functioning properly.
MiDesktop is also using X11, as you might expect, and not the modern Wayland compositor. The post mentioned that “a Wayland port is planned, though that’s going to take a lot of time and effort.” That might be a good use case for Wayback, a translation layer for X11 desktop environments to run under Wayland, which is also in early development.
The post also said, “I’d be remiss not to explicitly note that this is a development preview release, which means that there are bugs and there may also be undiscovered security issues, so be aware that MiDesktop is not considered stable yet. […] Unfortunately development has been a bit slower than I expected, but good results take time. I’ve recently had more time freed up so dev speed will pick up a bit here.”
You can install MiDesktop with the official software repositories for Ubuntu and Debian, which should also work for any operating systems based on those distributions, as long as they haven’t fully ripped out X11 session support. After you install and reboot your PC, a MiDesktop session option will appear in the login screen.
Source: Reddit via Linuxiac
