most packages come with compilation instructions. i've never bothered to hack around with KDE, so i couldn't really help too much with that, but the vast majority of open source programs are packed together using GNU's autoconf and automake programs. it would help for you to read up on those a bit, but you don't really need to know too much about them right away.
as far as opening the files goes, it's mostly just text editors. C is the defacto programming language of linux... probably 99% of all linux programs are C or C++. if you want to play around with a software package, you need to download the source. the code that you'll want to change will usually be in a "src" directory. there's not really a graphic interface for programming C in linux, it's pretty much all text editing.
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