6 ms·

Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

43 points by pantalaimon 6y ago

jsiepkes 6y ago
Super cool people maintain and expand things like KDE 3 and Gnome 2 (Trinity, Mate)! However personally I don't feel the need anymore. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are both quite usable. Which is a stark contrast from when Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came out. They were both nothing more then glorified beta's. The first release of Gnome 3 was basically like the first Windows 10 release with the Metro UI; Totally unusable. Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset.
- makapuf 6y ago
  I think you're talking about win8, win10 was a return to saner defaults on desktop (ui-wise, let's not talk about privacy): start menu, by example.
- oofabz 6y ago
  I use Mate and I think it's misleading to characterize it as a reheated Gnome 2. That's how it started, but the project has come a long way since then. Mate now uses GTK3 instead of GTK2. It supports GPU-accelerated compositing and Hi-DPI displays. Mate is a well-maintained modern desktop environment, not a historical curiosity.
  - notankies 6y ago
    It also plays nicely with tiling WMs; you can replace the default with i3 or Awesome or whatever and enjoy mate-settingsd and having a nice GTK3 panel that looks nice, but also tiling windows.
- RedShift1 6y ago
  Meh, depends on what you define as usable. KDE 3 ran fluently on my 2010 HP EliteBook 8540w but KDE 4 runs like a dog and you get nothing extra for it.
- kick 6y ago
  Did you mean KDE Plasma 5? Plasma 4 was comparatively short-lived (and arguably, far from perfect).
- zokier 6y ago
  > Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset. For Gnome I hear this claim often made (mostly by people who don't like Gnome), but is that actually backed by facts? Unlike Microsoft or Canonical (with their Unity), Redhat never seemed to have any particular mobile/touch aspirations, and so far I haven't heard any mobile adaptations of Gnome anywhere, like we have Plasma Mobile from the KDE camp.
  - nyanpasu64 6y ago
    phosh is not a first-party Gnome project, but it's a shell which essentially runs near-unmodified Gnome 3 apps full-screen on a phone display. I've tried it on a PinePhone, and the apps mostly work (but with some issues related to touch, small screen sizes, and orientation).
  - simion314 6y ago
    Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc. Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI. IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  KDE (Plasma) 5 (i guess you meant that) is usable but i still think KDE 3 was the high point of KDE. After all the flashy stuff was introduced in KDE 4 things went downhill fast. Similarly with Gnome, Gnome 2 was the best series, Gnome 3 was awful. It seems somewhere around the late 2000s both projects got very nice and usable desktop environments, couldn't figure out how to "evolve" next (because apparently software just can't not evolve) and started throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. And unsurprisingly, a lot of it did stick. To its credit, KDE 5 does seem to try to clean up the mess a bit though in that over the years it is the only between the two that doesn't compulsively make me want to remove it from any Linux machine i get my hands on (and can remove stuff :-P). Sadly XFCE seems to be heading down the same way.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      Note that i was never a big fan of KDE in general, i just happen to like KDE 3 more than the other versions (though TBH i haven't used KDE 2 at all and while i do like how KDE 1 looked and behaved - it was the first Linux environment i ever used - it was a bit too rough, though that was also because of Qt1 too) and i used it as a second environment in some computers. But the two main reasons i think KDE 5 is worse than KDE 3 is that as a UI it follows the same pattern as Gnome 3 (and Windows 10's "modern" apps, sadly) for wasting screen space everywhere and it does feel like it has a lot of moving parts everywhere which aren't exactly fitting perfectly with each other even though they are made for each other (i know that KDE 3 was probably also similar, but it always felt solid and stable - i wonder if breaking kdelibs or whatever it was called to a myriad of tiny little libraries that all applications and each other needing to be there anyway made things more brittle, though that might be my bias from whenever i try to install a KDE application in a non-KDE environment and i get a dependency vomit from the package installer). I might sound too hard on KDE 5, but TBH if i absolutely had to choose between it and Gnome and had no other option (or the other option was a tiling WM - which i never liked), then i'd use KDE. It isn't bad, i'd still install it on a computer i do not want to fiddle around with much.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Darmody 6y ago
I see the Plasma team decided to keep the old ugly designs. Look at that Trinity Control Center window. More than a decade after and everything still feels the same.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Doesn't really look the same to me, except that it uses the standard desktop widgets such as buttons, radio buttons, etc.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > More than a decade after and everything still feels the same. ...I thought that was the entire point of trinity?
  - Darmody 6y ago
    I meant Plasma 5. Everything looks almost the same except for some desktop stuff.
rayrag 6y ago
That's the ugliest GUI I have seen in a while. 1995 was 25 years ago. https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/images/4/44/TDE-screen1.png https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/images/4/44/TDE-screen1.png
- Gualdrapo 6y ago
  That could be 2005 KDE actually. Things like that make me thing this can be arguably the biggest waste of effort of all FOSS development, all because "fear of the new" - Trying to keep the huge monstrosity of Qt3 which EOL was more than 10-15 years ago, the whole DE that was built on it and all of their apps, even developing new ones... Just for the appeal of few people with the nostalgia for that kind of GUIs. One could argue KDE5 is as stable or even more than KDE3 ever was, and less buggy - not even mentioning the ability to replicate that interface with a few clicks and some fiddling. But whatever makes them happy.
  - II2II 6y ago
    That being said, Cinnamon and MATE were produced because of the "fear of the new". While it has been a while since I've used MATE, Cinnamon is doing fairly well. It's also worth noting that people have different workflows and tastes. One of the perks of FLOSS is the ability for people to choose what works for them. I would hardly call it a waste of effort because of that.
    - igetspam 6y ago
      I'll take predicable over shiny any day. I've not seen an interface that has increased my productivity in decades. I'm not afraid of new things but the best "new" interfaces I've seen are just minor tweaks to what's been working since win95. I'm waiting for something truly unique that's an actual improvement. Until then, I'm still using xfce with all the candy turned off.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Fear of new UIs is justified. The last time anyone did serious usability engineering and published results and methods was Windows 95 (or at least, that was the last round I've seen). I'm afraid of wasting my time learning totally new interactions that are less useful and get changed again in 1-4 years. I would rather cling to my 'legacy' interactions that keep working for as long as I can, than to keep churning. I was never a KDE person, but GNOME 2 was getting close to having everything right before GNOME 3 won the race to ruin desktops.
pabs3 6y ago
I wonder why this doesn't ship on many mainstream distros.
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  There seems to be an irrational fear of shipping old toolkits (Qt3) Heck Ubuntu even removed Qt4 from their repos, when I wanted to run an older third party app that hadn't been updated to Qt5 yet, I had to install a PPA with Qt4.
  - mixedCase 6y ago
    Not shipping a large amount of complex software with few users that went officially EoL long ago and is maintained by a skeleton crew, is hardly irrational.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The Trinity folks are maintaining Qt3 as well, so that should not be an issue.
    - pantalaimon 6y ago
      Do other Qt3 apps run with their fork?
NotStalin 6y ago
> XML editor What’s xml? (I have a dream - noxml jr)
unsungNovelty 6y ago
I think I remember looking at the project page a while ago and thinking, huh! What is the relevance of this project? While it is always great to see Linux DE's/projects living on, this is just another project which sadly fragments the Linux desktop ecosystem even further. I agree, we need more Linux apps (Before electron apps take over the entire Linux DE), not distro's or DE's (checkout https://makealinux.app/ https://makealinux.app/). And if you are still adamant on creating a new DE, make it interoperable between other DE's. Remember https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ ? Also, things have changed: - KDE 5 plasma is lighter than GNOME. - GNOME became a project with zero regards to the community. But is breaking less since the last few releases. - You have so many "traditional DE's". XFCE, Mate, Solus DE, Cinnamon, Deepin DE. I agree with someone who have said that none of the new GUI have made him/her/they productive. My progression for productivity through DE's has been GNOME for 10ish years, KDE 5 for 1.5, Another 1.5 years in XFCE and now I use i3wm. Looks like you focus more on functionality as you become a mature user and less on the bells and whistles. - Moved from GNOME after using from 3.0 till 3.22 because of crashing. It is better now. - Moved from KDE because every update on my rolling release distro was a panic attack due to the bizzilion dependencies each software depends on. Not to mention it could be a security disaster. just install Okular or Korganizer to see what I am talking about. Krita has been the only exception I have noticed. - Window managing has been the bottleneck in XFCE, it is the best for a rolling release distribution. So now I use i3wm. I only see a gradual transition to Swaywm now since Xorg is breathing it's last few, so I will have to move from i3wm. So I ask again, what is the point of Trinity? What is it bringing? We need to start seeing Linux as the future since big corporates are moving to Linux more. I would like to see Trinity resources going to KDE which is so much better now. But hey, that is just me.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > What is the relevance of this project? People who like KDE 3 being able to use KDE 3 with fixes and stuff. > this is just another project which sadly fragments the Linux desktop ecosystem even further This doesn't really fragment the desktop since any desktop application that works under X11 will work on it. Of course if said application makes assumptions about what is underneath then it might face trouble if said assumptions are not met, but that is really a problem with the application (and in practice usually workaround-able).

43 points by pantalaimon 6y ago

Super cool people maintain and expand things like KDE 3 and Gnome 2 (Trinity, Mate)! However personally I don't feel the need anymore. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are both quite usable. Which is a stark contrast from when Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came out. They were both nothing more then glorified beta's. The first release of Gnome 3 was basically like the first Windows 10 release with the Metro UI; Totally unusable. Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset.

makapuf 6y ago
I think you're talking about win8, win10 was a return to saner defaults on desktop (ui-wise, let's not talk about privacy): start menu, by example.
oofabz 6y ago
I use Mate and I think it's misleading to characterize it as a reheated Gnome 2. That's how it started, but the project has come a long way since then. Mate now uses GTK3 instead of GTK2. It supports GPU-accelerated compositing and Hi-DPI displays. Mate is a well-maintained modern desktop environment, not a historical curiosity.
- notankies 6y ago
  It also plays nicely with tiling WMs; you can replace the default with i3 or Awesome or whatever and enjoy mate-settingsd and having a nice GTK3 panel that looks nice, but also tiling windows.
RedShift1 6y ago
Meh, depends on what you define as usable. KDE 3 ran fluently on my 2010 HP EliteBook 8540w but KDE 4 runs like a dog and you get nothing extra for it.
kick 6y ago
Did you mean KDE Plasma 5? Plasma 4 was comparatively short-lived (and arguably, far from perfect).
zokier 6y ago
> Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset. For Gnome I hear this claim often made (mostly by people who don't like Gnome), but is that actually backed by facts? Unlike Microsoft or Canonical (with their Unity), Redhat never seemed to have any particular mobile/touch aspirations, and so far I haven't heard any mobile adaptations of Gnome anywhere, like we have Plasma Mobile from the KDE camp.
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  phosh is not a first-party Gnome project, but it's a shell which essentially runs near-unmodified Gnome 3 apps full-screen on a phone display. I've tried it on a PinePhone, and the apps mostly work (but with some issues related to touch, small screen sizes, and orientation).
- simion314 6y ago
  Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc. Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI. IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0
badsectoracula 6y ago
KDE (Plasma) 5 (i guess you meant that) is usable but i still think KDE 3 was the high point of KDE. After all the flashy stuff was introduced in KDE 4 things went downhill fast. Similarly with Gnome, Gnome 2 was the best series, Gnome 3 was awful. It seems somewhere around the late 2000s both projects got very nice and usable desktop environments, couldn't figure out how to "evolve" next (because apparently software just can't not evolve) and started throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. And unsurprisingly, a lot of it did stick. To its credit, KDE 5 does seem to try to clean up the mess a bit though in that over the years it is the only between the two that doesn't compulsively make me want to remove it from any Linux machine i get my hands on (and can remove stuff :-P). Sadly XFCE seems to be heading down the same way.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Note that i was never a big fan of KDE in general, i just happen to like KDE 3 more than the other versions (though TBH i haven't used KDE 2 at all and while i do like how KDE 1 looked and behaved - it was the first Linux environment i ever used - it was a bit too rough, though that was also because of Qt1 too) and i used it as a second environment in some computers. But the two main reasons i think KDE 5 is worse than KDE 3 is that as a UI it follows the same pattern as Gnome 3 (and Windows 10's "modern" apps, sadly) for wasting screen space everywhere and it does feel like it has a lot of moving parts everywhere which aren't exactly fitting perfectly with each other even though they are made for each other (i know that KDE 3 was probably also similar, but it always felt solid and stable - i wonder if breaking kdelibs or whatever it was called to a myriad of tiny little libraries that all applications and each other needing to be there anyway made things more brittle, though that might be my bias from whenever i try to install a KDE application in a non-KDE environment and i get a dependency vomit from the package installer). I might sound too hard on KDE 5, but TBH if i absolutely had to choose between it and Gnome and had no other option (or the other option was a tiling WM - which i never liked), then i'd use KDE. It isn't bad, i'd still install it on a computer i do not want to fiddle around with much.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Darmody 6y ago

I see the Plasma team decided to keep the old ugly designs. Look at that Trinity Control Center window. More than a decade after and everything still feels the same.

ubercow13 6y ago
Doesn't really look the same to me, except that it uses the standard desktop widgets such as buttons, radio buttons, etc.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> More than a decade after and everything still feels the same. ...I thought that was the entire point of trinity?
- Darmody 6y ago
  I meant Plasma 5. Everything looks almost the same except for some desktop stuff.

rayrag 6y ago

That's the ugliest GUI I have seen in a while. 1995 was 25 years ago. https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/images/4/44/TDE-screen1.png https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/images/4/44/TDE-screen1.png

Gualdrapo 6y ago
That could be 2005 KDE actually. Things like that make me thing this can be arguably the biggest waste of effort of all FOSS development, all because "fear of the new" - Trying to keep the huge monstrosity of Qt3 which EOL was more than 10-15 years ago, the whole DE that was built on it and all of their apps, even developing new ones... Just for the appeal of few people with the nostalgia for that kind of GUIs. One could argue KDE5 is as stable or even more than KDE3 ever was, and less buggy - not even mentioning the ability to replicate that interface with a few clicks and some fiddling. But whatever makes them happy.
- II2II 6y ago
  That being said, Cinnamon and MATE were produced because of the "fear of the new". While it has been a while since I've used MATE, Cinnamon is doing fairly well. It's also worth noting that people have different workflows and tastes. One of the perks of FLOSS is the ability for people to choose what works for them. I would hardly call it a waste of effort because of that.
  - igetspam 6y ago
    I'll take predicable over shiny any day. I've not seen an interface that has increased my productivity in decades. I'm not afraid of new things but the best "new" interfaces I've seen are just minor tweaks to what's been working since win95. I'm waiting for something truly unique that's an actual improvement. Until then, I'm still using xfce with all the candy turned off.
- toast0 6y ago
  Fear of new UIs is justified. The last time anyone did serious usability engineering and published results and methods was Windows 95 (or at least, that was the last round I've seen). I'm afraid of wasting my time learning totally new interactions that are less useful and get changed again in 1-4 years. I would rather cling to my 'legacy' interactions that keep working for as long as I can, than to keep churning. I was never a KDE person, but GNOME 2 was getting close to having everything right before GNOME 3 won the race to ruin desktops.

pabs3 6y ago

I wonder why this doesn't ship on many mainstream distros.

pantalaimon 6y ago
There seems to be an irrational fear of shipping old toolkits (Qt3) Heck Ubuntu even removed Qt4 from their repos, when I wanted to run an older third party app that hadn't been updated to Qt5 yet, I had to install a PPA with Qt4.
- mixedCase 6y ago
  Not shipping a large amount of complex software with few users that went officially EoL long ago and is maintained by a skeleton crew, is hardly irrational.
- pabs3 6y ago
  The Trinity folks are maintaining Qt3 as well, so that should not be an issue.
  - pantalaimon 6y ago
    Do other Qt3 apps run with their fork?

NotStalin 6y ago

> XML editor What’s xml? (I have a dream - noxml jr)

unsungNovelty 6y ago

I think I remember looking at the project page a while ago and thinking, huh! What is the relevance of this project? While it is always great to see Linux DE's/projects living on, this is just another project which sadly fragments the Linux desktop ecosystem even further. I agree, we need more Linux apps (Before electron apps take over the entire Linux DE), not distro's or DE's (checkout https://makealinux.app/ https://makealinux.app/). And if you are still adamant on creating a new DE, make it interoperable between other DE's. Remember https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ ? Also, things have changed: - KDE 5 plasma is lighter than GNOME. - GNOME became a project with zero regards to the community. But is breaking less since the last few releases. - You have so many "traditional DE's". XFCE, Mate, Solus DE, Cinnamon, Deepin DE. I agree with someone who have said that none of the new GUI have made him/her/they productive. My progression for productivity through DE's has been GNOME for 10ish years, KDE 5 for 1.5, Another 1.5 years in XFCE and now I use i3wm. Looks like you focus more on functionality as you become a mature user and less on the bells and whistles. - Moved from GNOME after using from 3.0 till 3.22 because of crashing. It is better now. - Moved from KDE because every update on my rolling release distro was a panic attack due to the bizzilion dependencies each software depends on. Not to mention it could be a security disaster. just install Okular or Korganizer to see what I am talking about. Krita has been the only exception I have noticed. - Window managing has been the bottleneck in XFCE, it is the best for a rolling release distribution. So now I use i3wm. I only see a gradual transition to Swaywm now since Xorg is breathing it's last few, so I will have to move from i3wm. So I ask again, what is the point of Trinity? What is it bringing? We need to start seeing Linux as the future since big corporates are moving to Linux more. I would like to see Trinity resources going to KDE which is so much better now. But hey, that is just me.

badsectoracula 6y ago
> What is the relevance of this project? People who like KDE 3 being able to use KDE 3 with fixes and stuff. > this is just another project which sadly fragments the Linux desktop ecosystem even further This doesn't really fragment the desktop since any desktop application that works under X11 will work on it. Of course if said application makes assumptions about what is underneath then it might face trouble if said assumptions are not met, but that is really a problem with the application (and in practice usually workaround-able).