Trinity Desktop 14.0.9 Is The Latest For This Decade-Old KDE 3.5 Fork

[reavertm]

There were good decisions as well.
From packaging pov, we very much welcomed uptream switching from autotools to CMake in KDE 4.
And in KDE 5, split of monolithic repos to separate repos. (Gentoo always provided split packages which we were criticised for by upstream as those were hacky methods seding Makefile.am or CMakeLists.txt), eventually upstream "found error of their ways" and followed).
I will also defend the "rewrites" that happened in 4 and small one (split of kde frameworks) in 5, it was necessary imho and result of using now available in Qt features (take QML). I don't expect any major rewrites in foreseeable future, just polish, but then again I don't have insider view anymore.

[cb88]

That's my own experience with KDE 3 and 4.
Besides KDE 3.5.sth was the most mature version of KDE3 when Plasma was introduced. Despite that I remember KDE 3 being crashfest. I was packaging Plasma in Gentoo at that time so my experience with it was rather intimate. And while for sure it was not stable, imho it was not worse than supposedly mature predecessor.
There were performance problems or weird decisions like three relational database servers running on desktop environment (akonadi using mysql embedded server, nepomuk using virtuoso-ose RDB, amarok using another instance of mysql embedded server..). Disabling many of these extra features decreased crashes probability significantly. Gentoo allowed disabling semantic desktop unlike most binary distributions so our users may have been spoiled with good Plasma experience which continues to this day

That's the thing about Gentoo you can end up with a configuration that does not reflect what most users see.... I still use Gentoo on a few boxes and poke around with Gentoo sparc32 bit every now and then. Also, on distros like CentOS or Debian .... KDE 3.5 basically never crashed.

What gets me is it took 6 years to reach a stable desktop on the KDE 3.x series. And instead of continuing to polish that, after having cleaned all the muck off they abandoned it and created a new turd to polish for the next 6 years. The also alienated massive portions of their user base with the horrible changes they made Amarok being a fine example.

[reavertm]

Don't kid yourself... KDE 3.5 has been extremely stable for 12 years, KDE 4 when it launch was absolute trash and crashed ever time you tried to do anything. The main reasons for instability in 3.5 now are upgrades in infrastructure around it. I still bet you cannot run KDE 4 stably on as wide a range of hardware as KDE 3.5 is happy with. KDE 4 was trash on Nvidia and AMD drivers for eons.

Also there isn't really any reason KDE 3.5 can't be ported to wayland... since its all on top of QT to begin with, which is platform independent. Granted somethings like kwin and composition are not.

I think KDE 3.5 ported to QT 5 would be the ideal situations... plasma is useless, I'd much rather have native lightweight applications than the bloat that is in plasma these days.

That's my own experience with KDE 3 and 4.
Besides KDE 3.5.sth was the most mature version of KDE3 when Plasma was introduced. Despite that I remember KDE 3 being crashfest. I was packaging Plasma in Gentoo at that time so my experience with it was rather intimate. And while for sure it was not stable, imho it was not worse than supposedly mature predecessor.
There were performance problems or weird decisions like three relational database servers running on desktop environment (akonadi using mysql embedded server, nepomuk using virtuoso-ose RDB, amarok using another instance of mysql embedded server..). Disabling many of these extra features (sometimes in build systems, against upstream preference) decreased crashes probability significantly. Gentoo allowed disabling semantic desktop unlike most binary distributions so our users may have been spoiled with good Plasma experience which continues to this day

[cb88]

Plasma 4 was much more stable for me than KDE3 . KDE3 was crashfest in comparison. Has anyone here been using TDE to share experience?

Don't kid yourself... KDE 3.5 has been extremely stable for 12 years, KDE 4 when it launch was absolute trash and crashed ever time you tried to do anything. The main reasons for instability in 3.5 now are upgrades in infrastructure around it. I still bet you cannot run KDE 4 stably on as wide a range of hardware as KDE 3.5 is happy with. KDE 4 was trash on Nvidia and AMD drivers for eons.

Also there isn't really any reason KDE 3.5 can't be ported to wayland... since its all on top of QT to begin with, which is platform independent. Granted somethings like kwin and composition are not.

I think KDE 3.5 ported to QT 5 would be the ideal situations... plasma is useless, I'd much rather have native lightweight applications than the bloat that is in plasma these days.

[birdie]

How would changing Ts back to Q's improve anything? Regardless, this was probably to avoid namespace collisions, like MATE did when they forked GNOME2.

It will improve code inspection. TDE hasn't really diverted that far from KDE3.5.10 it's based on however this asinine renaming makes patches huge and no one wants to deal with it.

If they revert these changes patches will become 100 times smaller and manageable.

[Vistaus]

Here's ways to make TDE a first class citizen in modern Linux distros:

1) Revert all the naming changes from Q to T - this is asinine and no one wants to deal with this crap. Also by doing that the code base will be easier to inspect. This is probably the only thing which prevents Linux distros from including it.
2) Think about transitioning from Qt3 to Qt5/6. Qt3 is fast and great but doesn't even support modern desktop features including Wayland.
3) Get rid of artsd
4) Move development to github/gitlab

1) Untrue.
2) They forked Qt 3 and added some features to it (and they are still adding features as we speak). So yeah, the *core* is old, but it's not like they're using plain Qt 3 - they're using TQt3 with added features. Wayland support would be nice, though, if only to secure its future.
3) artsd is not the greatest thing in the world, but not the worst either.
4) This I actually do fully agree with.

[reavertm]

Plasma 4 was much more stable for me than KDE3 . KDE3 was crashfest in comparison. Has anyone here been using TDE to share experience?

[mdedetrich]

Wow this is still being used and maintained?

Mind = blown

[uid313]

Wow, I can't imagine anyone wanting to use this, it is even worse than KDE 4.

[8r34k0u7_57y13]

Here's some ways to change a software package I don't and won't ever use into something that fits better my agenda.

It doesn't need to do a single thing you listed nor would it gain them anything other than massive burden.