For it was KDE 1.0 the day it was released in July 1998. Was running Caldera OpenLinux, 1.2 I think. (It was before the now-bankrupt Darl McBride dragged that fine distribution to the dark side, unsuccessfully sued everyone in sight -- including trying to collect money from everyone running any form of Linux -- and made himself rightly and widely hated. But I digress.) I was running whatever that NextSTEP clone thing atop whatever window manager was the default on COL at the time. All the configuration files for pretty much everything, including KDE, were human-readable text files. (I had a huge pissing match with the devs when the KMail address book ceased to be a simple list of names and addresses. Then again, my Firefox bookmarks file continues to be a text file from the earliest Netscape for OS/2. Some of the links no longer work after 30 years. Oops, another digression.)
Little-remembered but not terrible was the commercial Looking Glass desktop that Caldera shipped in some 1.x versions. It looked like Windows 3.0 but did not act like it. Still, it quelled the abject terror of uners who had bought a thick book with a CD at the back and had blown away everything recognizable from their 386sx-16 machines.
Looking Glass: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jSy-9QRTvRs
It was when we all used NEdit, because it worked in a way we understood, but also because when you looked at the "About" menu item it said that it came from Fermilab, which made us feel very cool. Which, of course, we were.<g>
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