Konqi

Konqi arrived in April 1999 as the animated assistant in the KDE Help Center, drawn by Stefan Spatz, and got promoted to full mascot when KDE 3 shipped. He replaced Kandalf, a white-bearded wizard whose resemblance to a certain Tolkien character had become a liability. The Spatz version was a chunky 3D render clutching the blue K logo, and it aged exactly as well as everything else rendered in 2001. In December 2012 KDE ran a redesign contest with one rule that tells you everything about this community: entries had to be drawn in Krita, KDE's own painting app. Tyson Tan won with a concept that went far past a single character. Konqi got a flatter, sharper look, and he also got relatives. Katie, Kori and a whole colour-coded population of dragons, each with antlers shaped like the letter for their role in the project. W for writers, T for translators, S for scientists, A for artists. The lore says they hatched in KDE Valley, a town a wizard founded in 1996. Today Konqi turns up in the About box, in Akademy conference art, on a cake at a meetup in India, inside a costume at a Brazilian free software conference, and in DrKonqi, the crash reporter named after him. A mascot whose most reliable appearance is when your software falls over is a very free software kind of career.