Trinity Desktop Environment – a modern KDE3 fork | Hacker News Reader

Trinity Desktop Environment – a modern KDE3 fork

trinitydesktop.org

94 pointshaunter87 comments

I'm kind of surprised by the comments here. I've used TDE for years (on the Q4OS Linux distro). It excels at being a low-resource requirement virtual desktop for teams needing a modern distro/kernel/browser but want it to run as lightly and cheaply as possible. My company uses it on virtual server infra accessed over Nomachine. It runs perfectly well with <1GB RAM and even in 500MB RAM it does well. The DE it's updated worked great on a Pentium III with 128MB back in the day.

The folks installing TDE want, if I am any example: a modern distro, kernel, and up-to-date Chrome or Firefox, and just enough desktop (task bar, apps menu, virtual desktops) to make it useable. IceWM is another option here but TDE is just a bit more comfortable, without all of the bloat that gives you the UX improvements people seem to be asking for here, or the non-mainstream (fluxbox, i3, etc.) that scares the non-technically inclined.

I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.

KDE3 was the last Linux desktop environment I actually liked using, so I try to use this when it’s possible.

Their maintained fork of Amarok 1.x really makes it worthwhile for me.

Also, dcop is probably the best GUI automation tool I’ve used.

Amarok was the first app in Linux that was better than the Windows counterpart. My non-technical friends would ask how could they use it. It was the killer app for the Linux Desktop at the time.

> Also, dcop is probably the best GUI automation tool I’ve used.

Everytime I have to use dbus from the CLI I think to myself, dcop died for this?!

To me the best GUI automation tool (in Linux at least) was Kommander, another KDE app that didn't survived the KDE3-4 transition. A pretty decent 'low-code' tool that unfortunately didn't make it to KDE4.

I used KDE4 up to 4.2, when it supposedly 'got good'. It wasn't bad by any means. But KDE3 was better.

The first few years after KDE4 came out I spent a lot of time on getting Amarok to work on my system. Such an amazing music player. It got harder, and eventually I switched to spotify too. (And even though you have nearly every piece of music at your fingertips, it still pales in comparison to what you could do with Amarok)

Re: Amarok

Have you tried Clementine or Strawberry Player(s)?

Oh wow. After the Amarok team dropped v1 for v2, I continued to compile v1 for years on any distro I installed. Eventually that became extremely tedious. I tried a few remakes (Clementine, Strawberry etc) but none of them kept the column view on the left sidebar! The tree layout sucked!

Unfortunately I discover this a little late because MusicBee now works flawlessly in Wine (with some small tricks) and absolutely blows Amarok v1 away. A few years ago I downloaded an ancient archive of Ubuntu (8.04?) and turned it into a docker image, found a still-online deb repo, installed as many development packages I could find, and managed to compile a static Amarok 1.4. I got it running on my desktop! But it was a disappointment - I remembered it being waaay better than this. I'm pretty sure I had a patch I made to tweak how the left sidebar worked in columns mode too.,

I once wrote an entire application around dcop. Actually it was a tool for plotting your amarok songs on a 2D kde window grid and it allowed you to make little gestures and squiggles to determine what songs amarok would play. It was a pretty fun project.

check Xfce, is the best of gnome2 and kde3.

Sounds like this version finally has FreeBSD ports set up. That's a huge improvement; I suspect a lot of people who like Trinity would like FreeBSD and vice versa.

“How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?” :) https://web.archive.org/web/20190806200601/https://en.wikipe...

I knew about Trinity right from the beginning of project (back then it was available in one of the Gentoo's overlays), but I am genuinely surprised it is still running and they actually introduce new features to the DE and applications. It is remarkable effort.

KDE 3.x was really great, at 3.4, pretty much all the bugs you'd hit were gone, not that earlier releases were mega buggy, but one did encounter bugs here and there.

I dont feel like we have moved 20 years forward, even though plasma is good and all

Anyone who's tried this, does a 2004 desktop on 2023 computers run fast? Does it run super fast like people would predict?

It might spend more time pushing pixels around since 4k is 10x as many pixels as 1024x768, and I'm not sure if single-threaded processese that are memory-intensive are 10x faster.

TQt3 (TDE's Qt3 fork) uses X graphics primitives and the X render extension (if available), both of which are hardware accelerated on modern Xorg via GLAMOR (OpenGL-based 2D graphics acceleration) - at least for the open source drivers which are part of Xorg (i don't know if Nvidia's proprietary driver uses it but chances are if not, they're using their own 2D accelerated graphics anyway), so it shouldn't spend more time pushing pixels around than anything else that uses a HW accelerated API.

I used to loooove KDE 3.5 before the mess that was 4.0, so I was very excited to try this.

Unfortunately it fails with some DCOP error on Rocky 9. :(

Really cool DE, do reccommend trying it out

What makes it cool, or different?

Superficially/aesthetically at least, it doesn't appear very slick or novel.

KDE 3 dates to around 2000. Definitely not novel, but it was pretty slick at the time, and on even remotely modern hardware, it should be extremely fast. It had some great features that are still unmatched even in the latest KDE, like 'pseudo' transparency for terminals and standard (real) virtual desktops.

Not being slick or novel appears to be the primary aim.

Even the typefaces and rendering are… not elegant and polished.

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