The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class is a paradigmatic example of universality in nonequilibrium phenomena, but clear experimental evidences of asymptotic 2D-KPZ statistics are still very rare, and far less understanding stems from its short-time behavior. We tackle such issues by analyzing surface fluctuations of CdTe films deposited on polymeric substrates, based on a huge spatio-temporal surface sampling acquired through atomic force microscopy. A pseudo-steady state (where average surface roughness and spatial correlations stay constant in time) is observed at initial times, persisting up to deposition of ~10 4 monolayers. This state results from a fine balance between roughening and smoothening, as supported by a phenomenological growth model. KPZ statistics arises at long times, thoroughly verified by universal exponents, spatial covariance and several distributions. Recent theoretical generalizations of the Family-Vicsek scaling and the emergence of log-normal distributions during interface growth are experimentally confirmed. These results confirm that high vacuum vapor deposition of CdTe constitutes a genuine 2D-KPZ system, and expand our knowledge about possible substrate-induced short-time behaviors.The Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equationoriginally describes interface motion under conditions of no bulk conservation and exponentially fast relaxation 2 . The height field h(x, t) is measured from a d s -dimensional substrate at location x, with x ∈  d s at time t ≥ 0. ν, λ and D are phenomenological parameters, physically representing the surface tension, the excess of velocity in the growth, and the amplitude of a space-time white noise η, respectively.Although posed 30 years ago, outstanding advances on the understanding of the KPZ class have been made quite recently. Following seminal works on multiple-meaning stochastic models 3, 4 , long-awaited analytical solutions 2,5 , experiments 6, 7 and numerical simulations 7-9 came out to confirm that asymptotic 1D-KPZ height distributions (HDs) are related to statistics of the largest eigenvalues of random matrices 10 , while spatial covariances are dictated by the time-correlation of Airy processes 11 . Noteworthy, both HDs and covariances exhibit sensibility to initial conditions (ICs) 4, 11 , splitting the KPZ class into subclasses according to the ICs. This unanticipated feature was recently observed also in models for nonlinear molecular beam epitaxy class 12 . Similar scenario has been found for the 2D-KPZ case, based on numerical simulations [13][14][15] , although no analytical result is known for 2D-KPZ HDs and covariances and the existing theoretical approaches 16,17 for the scaling exponents disagree with numerical outcomes. In such arid landscape, the rare reliable experimental evidences of 2D-KPZ universality [18][19][20][21] turns to be precious achievements.The short-time roughening of systems exhibiting asymptotic KPZ scaling is also rich in behavior. For example, a transient scaling in the Edwards-Wilkinson 22 (EW) class, might appear whenev...