KDE 3.5 Continues To Live Through The Trinity Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KDE 3.5 Continues To Live Through Trinity Desktop

While most of the Linux desktop bickering these days come down to Ubuntu's Unity and GNOME 3.x Shell, KDE 4.x used to have its fair share of critics. Most KDE users are satisfied with the latest 4.x software compilations, but the KDE 3.5 packages continue to be maintained through the Trinity Desktop fork...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTE3NTI

[Sidicas]

It's nice, but they broke backwards compatibility with a lot of the older distro releases when the Trinity project got their hands on KDE 3.X.. That, IMO, was a mistake, as some people wanted to use older distros since their hardware's support got dropped and the binary blobs they were using depended on using older distros.

I would have been a very happy Trinity Desktop user if they kept backwards compatibility to a disto release that supported Catalyst 9.3..

So, Trinity really wasn't a decent option for me.. If I'm going to be using the open source drivers I might as well be using KDE 4.X as well anyway.. I lost my MSAA, the nice power management of my Radeon card, and the ability to put my wireless in "Master mode" (ipw2200-ap doesn't support newer kernels). I'll just have to live with it as I would have lost those whether I went to Trinity Desktop or KDE 4.X. network-manager-kde in KDE4 is quite nice and much better than the network management in the KDE 3.X days. Also, the icon previews is *TONS* better and *TONS* faster in KDE 4.X than in KDE 3.X. I can scroll through a folder with large previews of thousands of photos and videos very smoothly in KDE 4.8.4 with 6+ year old laptop hardware. Not sure what they did in Dolphin, but it's pretty damn amazing.

[birdie]

"Continues To Live"?

A one person project for one person? TDE is hardly breathing - and that's very sad.

I stopped caring about TDE when Timothy Pearson had broken KDE3 interfaces, so today you cannot compile any classic unmodified KDE3.x software for TDE except for the applications Timothy has already ported.

That was an insane decision - I do understand he wanted to port KDE3 to Qt4, but now it seems like it's a very tall order for just one person, programming interfaces are broken, and TDE is headed nowhere.

[birdie]

And the way KDE3 applications were ported to KDE3 is just scary:

@@ -82,7 +82,7 @@
     FREQUENCY        = 0x00004000,
     BIT_RATE         = 0x00008000,
     ACCESS_POINT     = 0x00010000,
-    LINK_QUALITY     = 0x00020000,
+    LINK_TQUALITY     = 0x00020000,
     BCAST_ADDRESS    = 0x00040000,
     GATEWAY          = 0x00080000,
     DOWNLOAD_SPEED   = 0x00100000,

You see, LINK_QUALITY has become LINK_TQUALITY, just because it starts with Q!

Also I've found this:

@@ -160,7 +160,7 @@
 
   /* If the vertical lines are scrolling, increment the offset
    * so they move with the data. The vOffset / hScale confusion
-   * is because v refers to Vertical Lines, and h to the horizontal
+   * is because v refers toQt::Vertical Lines, and h to the horizontal
    * distance between the vertical lines. */
   if ( mVerticalLinesScroll ) {
     mVerticalLinesOffset = ( mVerticalLinesOffset + mHorizontalScale)

Untested automatic replacement does awful things to your code.

That's batshit crazy.

[jmcharron]

The opensuse build service maintains a KDE 3.5 repository that I love

[Alliancemd]

When I saw that this guy is just a very mad hater of KDE 4.x and KDE developers and when I saw that he writes HORRIBLE code making the system unstable I stopped even paying attention to this project.
Please, Larabel, don't talk about this crap again

[kudlaty]

If Plasma is too heavy, one can still use the KDE4 applications with a lightweight environment like Razor-qt. This is IMHO a much better solution than this Trinity effort.

[uid313]

So whats the plan with Trinity?
Keep it where it is and just fix bugs?
Or fix bugs and add functionality and improvements?

They broke backwards compatibility?

They're staying with old Qt 3?
Doesn't seem viable.

Yeah, I as said, probably Razor-qt is a better choice.

[Awesomeness]

attractive for use in enterprise environments

Sure, if I had an enterprise I'd be delighted to use a software stack that's maintained by three people, doesn't release monthly bugfixes, and so on.

[uid313]

Sure, if I had an enterprise I'd be delighted to use a software stack that's maintained by three people, doesn't release monthly bugfixes, and so on.

Bus factor