KDE 3 lives to fight another day as Trinity Desktop 14.1.4 hits the shelves The long-running fork of KDE 3 has dropped its latest update: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4, now with better distro support and a fresh coat of code. Not bad for a project still chugging along 15 years after KDE itself moved on. This new release adds support for the recently released Ubuntu 25.04 and the forthcoming …
> Yeah, would also have revived kde1.x
A few years ago, someone did. KDE 1 on Fedora 25.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161014044730/https://www.heliocastro.info/?p=291
Contemporary report:
https://thenextweb.com/news/kde-restoration-project-wants-make-linux-desktop-look-like-1998
Honestly, I would not hate to use that.
They started work on KDE 2:
https://github.com/heliocastro/kde2
That would be OK too but Xandros did it better, IMHO.
I was a fan of KDE 3 and when they moved to version 4 I hated it. That bloody cashew was the last straw, so I moved to PCLinuxOS and with a few brief exceptions have stuck with it ever since. I did try Trinity once or twice but PCLOS has had on on again off again relationship with Trinity and it was a real PITA to install it at times.
Good for the Trinity crew, have a pint on me.
3.5.10 was the last good KDE for me. That would have been on SUSe something. Not sure what I settled on after that, it could have been the start of my journey with Linux Mint - 7 'Gloria'? I have been a very happy Mint user from there on, with Cinnamon as my desktop. To give Microsoft some credit for something, the Windows desktop* is (was) as intuitive as anything else I've seen.
*W95, W98, cleaned up XP, Vista, Win7, even W10, though I'd stopped using Windows early Win7.
KDE 4.0 did a lot of damage to the reputation of KDE as it was nowhere near release quality; lots of things were missing and it was hugely buggy. It wasn't until KDE 4.3.something that I felt it was good enough to use as my default desktop. Things weren't helped by the presence of a number of GNOME-style massively arrogant developers who refused to listen to any criticism of what they'd produced.
The transition from 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 seems to have gone a lot more smoothly.
There's no way I'd go back to KDE 3 now; there are just too many useful things such as the handling of multiple monitors that I'd miss.
> KDE 4.0 did a lot of damage to the reputation of KDE as it was nowhere near release quality
I don't think it was the quality, although you're right: the quality was bad.
I think the move to "widgets" and "plasmoids" and all that was a terrible idea. It's bogus junk. KISS applies, in spades: keep it simple.
The underlying concept, of discarding a decade's assumptions and replacing it with a conceptually simpler architecture, was a good idea. I just think that the idea chosen was bad.
> There's no way I'd go back to KDE 3 now; there are just too many useful things such as the handling of multiple monitors that I'd miss.
Huh. I am no KDE fan but in some ways I _preferred_ KDE 2-3's multi-monitor handling. E.g. having the panel span all your screens was very handy.
Windows 95 was a design classic. There was only a single thing wrong with it: it was single-threaded. Copy a file and the desktop froze until it was finished. Classic MacOS did the same until MacOS 8, which salvaged the improved Finder from the failed Copland OS project.
TBH what I want is a faithful recreation of the original Windows NT 4 desktop. Maybe with the threaded background copies. That is all I need.
Keep It Simple.
One taskbar, no more. On any edge. One orientation of contents; it's designed for Roman alphabets and they read left-to-right. Therefore, panel contents read L-to-R, _no matter the orientation of the panel_. Other alphabets can adapt. They already do.
Want a dock? Fine, add Cairo or Plank or whatever. There are plenty. Cooperate, don't re-implement.
No content rendered as HTML. Windows 98 only did that so MS could claim to the US DOJ that IE was integral to the OS. It was an ugly hack. Don't copy ugly hacks. Nobody should need to be told that, but the KDE team does.
One menu bar. Make it possible to be global, or in window, or collapsed to a hamburger, but _enforce it_. One help/about option. Ruthlessly remove duplication, all of it. One version numbering scheme. One start menu. One app switcher. Add options, only where absolutely required, but don't duplicate.
William of Ockham had it right:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity."
Do you _need_ an additional feature? Absolutely _require_ it? No? Then remove it.
Apply universally.
For instance, and it's important: store the Start menu as folders & links, nothing more! No database, no config files. One simple universal on-disk structure, then it can be presented in whatever way the user wishes.
"Windows 95 was a design classic. There was only a single thing wrong with it: it was single-threaded."
Begging your pardon, guvnor' but I don't think that's right. Sort of. Windows 95 was multithreaded -- but only for Win32 applications, and only when specifically written to be so.
When Debian didn't jump ship to KDE4 and stayed with KDE3 for a stable release I felt cheated. However I was happy in the end as I didn't go through the pain of KDE4.0 that other distros did. The later versions are actually okay and I wouldn't want to go back to KDE3 now - though at the time I did like it.
Looking forward to KDE6 and Wayland for Debian 13/Trixie.
I switched to Debian Testing a few months back (aka Trixie), and I'm very happy with KDE6. I've not had any major issues at all, although I have switched to 'aptitude' for the updates as it seems to be much better at resolving package version conflicts. In my experience Trixie is good enough to use on my daily driver, so why wait?
I used to be a happy Gnome user, but I found tweaking the desktop to how *I* wanted it was easier under Plasma.
On topic bit:
https://github.com/Ray-V/tde-slackbuilds
Slackware users: Ray V has done his slackbuild for TDE 14.1.4 (see icon)
Off topic bit but then we are ranting about graphical UIs again:
Compare an installation of a Debian Squeeze desktop on a core duo laptop with spinning rust main disk with a current version (stable, SID, Slackware Current, whatever) on the same hardware. Functionality more or less same depending on the software one uses. Speeds very different.
It's almost a Clausius statement for operating systems.
> Slackware users: Ray V has done his slackbuild for TDE 14.1.4 (see icon)
Er. Nice? I guess that is a good thing?
I do not follow Slackware closely, even if it is the first distro I ever tried to install on hardware I owned. So I am not sure what a "slackbuild" is or what that means.
> Functionality more or less same depending on the software one uses. Speeds very different.
OK, but different how? Got some examples? You tease but you don't tell us.
Ooops I wasn't intending to be obscure, just trying to keep it short.
Slackbuilds are the way you can add software to a Slackware installation that is not included in the default (pretty huge) install. It is compile from source, and a SlackBuild script runs the appropriate build commands for you. Details at...
https://slackbuilds.org/
There are scripts such as sbopkg that will handle the dependency resolution for more complex slackbuilds, and there are various binary repositories for the huge packages like chromium or libreoffice. I use the binary repositories for the big things and a few compiles for the little bits and pieces.
The bit about speed was: with Debian Squeeze on a core duo (Thinkpad T60), spinning rust hard drive and 1Gb RAM the subjective impression is that my normalish tasks are as fast as a current release on an i5 with 8Gb and an SSD. [Except no internet on Squeeze!] So ten or a dozen years and standing still.
Icon: off out
> KDE3 is still alive!
> albeit only on openSUSE?
Indeed. Very long term customer support contracts on old versions of SLE mean KDE gets occasional bug fixes.
When I worked there, I proposed merging the projects, or rebasing, or switching. The response was negative: essentially, too much work, and they are happy with their in-house version.
Those screen grabs bring it all back!
SuSE (not sure exactly which version, but pre-Novell) was my first Linux daily driver. Before that I'd dabbled in Slack and Red Hat. I quite liked RPM, but Gnome annoyed the hell out of me. SuSE (as it was styled) had RPM, added the still-wonderful YaST and a desktop that didn't look like it had been crayoned by a child. Welcome to KDE. This was good enough to wipe the disk and install without the crutch of Windows dual boot.
In the end it was the seeming inability of YoU to perform an in-place upgrade with losing non-essential stuff like, er, the GUI and networking, that made me jump first to Lubuntu and then to Mint (Cinnamon or Mate depending on the hardware). And that's great, thanks.
Still, a few years ago I grabbed a Pine64 notebook that came pre-installed with Neon. An interesting choice given the less than stellar hardware specs, but, when it worked, an absolute joy to be back in KDE. I reckon it would have been blinding with Trinity.
-A.
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