6 ms·

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

66 points by signa11 2y ago

pdonis 2y ago
I have been happily using Trinity for more than a decade now. It works well for me and it's much less resource hungry than all the newer eye candy that desktops have been trying to push.
cooloo 2y ago
Kde3 was a great desktop environment. Sometimes i missing konqi with all resource hungry browsers these days.
- jraph 2y ago
  You mean Konqueror, right? Konqi is KDE's mascot. Konqueror was great. I also liked that you could use it as both a file manager and a browser, and that you could switch browser engines. KHTML was also some great work.
  - Arnt 2y ago
    Coolo is from .de, where konqi is a term of endearment for the web browser.
    - sirtaj 2y ago
      I suspect that it's not the same Coolo you're thinking of.
      - Arnt 2y ago
        Oh no. And are you the Taj, then?
        sirtaj 2y ago
        Yes Arnt, I'm the canonical one!
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Let's remind people that Safari was initially a port of khtml. The webkit people target today is derived from the KDE team's work.
    - rahen 2y ago
      So was Google Chrome initially.
  - timw4mail 2y ago
    It still exists!
drewg123 2y ago
Wish there was a FreeBSD pkg/port for this. KDE3 was the last DE I used that worked reliably..
- signa11 2y ago
  not even xfce ? that is kind of surprising.
chrisfosterelli 2y ago
KDE 3 was already old when I got into tech well over a decade ago. It was snappy and efficient though. KDE 4 was beautiful and had fancy widgets but was resource hungry. Glad to see KDE 3 still has love.
- voidr 2y ago
  KDE 4 looked like a cheap Vista knockoff gone wrong and the widgets were worse than useless, I stopped using KDE altogether because I felt the developers completely lost the plot. One of the most arrogant moves was to not have files on the desktop, instead they put together a poorly made widget called folder view, I believe they completely U-turned on that one, not sure how many years it took them though. To be fair, last night I tried putting a shortcut to a picture onto the home screen on my iPad that has better hardware than my MacBook Air and I couldn't figure out a way to do it and iOS has well-paid armies of people working on it.
  - o11c 2y ago
    KDE 4 was completely unusable for the first ... 4 releases I think? 4.4 rings a bell as the ones I actually installed due to not wanting to fight PPAs; 4.6 was the first release I would actually call stable. But even today I miss essential KDE3 features like a proper editable start menu.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    KDE 4 was a disaster for pretty much everyone. I _loved_ KDE 3. It was consistent, accessible enough for newbies, infinitely configurable for power users. The desktop of freedom in all that meant. Then KDE 4 happened. I never used KDE again as my daily driver until Plasma 6. 16 long years mourning what I lost. Sure XFCE and Gnome were totally ok but they lacked something. What is sad, I think, is that during those times, KDE lost a lot of its artistic community who back in the days were releasing hundreds of themes every months. Most were awful but some were gems and anyway the configuration options always allowed you to transform KDE into your thing. It’s slowly coming back but it’s not there yet and it’s not as easy as yesterday.
jraph 2y ago
KDE 3 was great and could easily be my second choice for a DE. But Plasma 5 & 6 are so good I would feel like I'm missing out. Even on old hardware they are quite lightweight. At some point I wanted to try Trinity but didn't find packaging for my distro at the time, but will probably try some day.
- metalforever 2y ago
  They're a complete dog on a spinning disk 2013 era machine
  - jraph 2y ago
    Disabling file indexing probably goes a long way.
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    I haven't tried Plasma 6 on my 2013 laptop with a slow spinning rust disk, but Plasma 5 is fine. Way better than Windows 10 which i rageformatted when it took hours to apply some stupid update and i almost lost a business video call (my laptop is the only PC i have with a camera). I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed which sadly seems far from I/O efficient, not sure why (there is almost a hundred of background processes doing who knows what). Perhaps a lightweight distro would be better since i mainly use it to make calls or try out some graphics code (it is the only Nvidia device i have), but while it takes a couple of minutes to boot up, once it does it works fine so i don't mind much as i'm only rarely using that machine.
senkora 2y ago
> Instructions are also available to build TDE for FreeBSD from source. Thank goodness we still have instructions for patching KDE under FreeBSD. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-does-one-patch-kde2-under-freebsd https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-does-one-patch-kde2-under...
- Thev00d00 2y ago
  Thanks for this, I'm one of the lucky 10000 today!
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    9998 left to go.
tivert 2y ago
> The desktop and its applications were snappy even in a virtual machine configured with only 2GB of RAM and two vCPUs. It's a sad state of affairs that not all desktops can say that.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  It’s a sad state of affairs when you prepend 2GB of RAM and two vCPUs with only.
  - demetrius 2y ago
    It's a sad state of affairs when it's considered ok to get rid of perfectly working hardware just because a new faster one is available.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      Nobody does that? People get rid of old HW mostly because new SW is bloaty and slow so it's cheaper to upgrade your HW than to wait or hope in vain for the SW devs to finally optimize their shit.
      - tivert 2y ago
        > Nobody does that? People get rid of old HW mostly because new SW is bloaty and slow so it's cheaper to upgrade your HW than to wait or hope in vain for the SW devs to finally optimize their shit. Software developers usually get or are given the shiniest, fastest hardware, but that's probably backwards. We should get old, underpowered stuff (and be required to use it by law) and be forced to make do. That pain would force the optimizations, and those would benefit society 1000x over the cost of our annoyance.
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        >We should get old, underpowered stuff (and be required to use it by law) and be forced to make do. Why not both, a fast and a slow one? In Hollywood film making, the colorist uses a $40k professional mastering monitor to make sure the work is accurate, and also a $100 Walmart TV in parallel to make sure the movie will still look good in your average home and not just on the studio monitors. Same should be in SW dev: Develop on fast HW but test on slow HW.
1oooqooq 2y ago
hey old people. something in open source history I don't recall very well and would appreciate links of it is already documented... kde was nice but not "open source" so gtk and gnome came and drove lots of contributors. i think it was around kde3... then Ubuntu and later google dumped lots of money on gnome and some designers just stole the leadership it became a race to the bottom with copying all bad ideas from apple UX. then Ubuntu parted ways and did it's own thing. then they merged and rewrote the thing in JavaScript and release without even a settings application working... and then contributors mostly moved back to kde and 5 was great. now 6 is polishing everything and building on dbus everywhere and designers already started the UX capture but doesn't seem it is going anywhere. anyway, i don't have much reference material for the time most contributors moved from kde to gnome in the name of GPL (noble goal that wasn't used since distros didn't abandon the broken release for the mint fork when they should have)
- nottorp 2y ago
  Don't know about designers but: KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech. That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk. That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now. First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died. Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists. Agree that gnome still looks like Apple envy.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    the license issue was that qt want gpl enough because of the dual license, right? i could find a good write up of the problem then.
  - 2y ago
Mashimo 2y ago
From the comments: > There's a lot of people (my wife included) with memory impairment. When your typical "time to learn some new fancy UI" exceeds "lifetime of fancy UI before CADT replaces it with something new", it makes life hell for you, and for those around you! > Can we please refrain from using CADT? It's a slur. Like all the other personal attacks it has no place in this discussion. You can make your point just as well if not better without it. Thanks. What is "CADT"? Could not find anything useful that fits.
- voxadam 2y ago
  That one had me vexed for a bit too. After a bit of stumbling around the web I think I finally found a definition by HN's favorite browser engineer, Bay Area club owner, and malcontent Jamie Zawinski.[0][1] According to Jamie CADT stands for "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers".[2] WARNING: JWZ's site used to redirect to an unpleasant NSFW meme[3] from the late 90s when linked to from HN. Though, if I remember correctly that's been solved in recent years by HN. In case it hasn't please be sure to copy plaintext links to his site into a fresh tab to avoid the referrer. [0] https://www.jwz.org/ https://www.jwz.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski [2] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
  - aragilar 2y ago
    The modern equivalent would be resume-driven development. I've always found it somewhat ironic that CADT was originally used to describe the GNOME 1.x to 2.x switch, when GNOME 2.x was for a long time quite stable (and which was stable over the KDE 3 -> 4 changeover period), and newer versions of GNOME have tended to have less backwards compatibility and more churn.
    - p_l 2y ago
      GNOME 2.x was also when the roots for events of GNOME 3.x got put in place. The clean rewrite allowed both good and bad things.
okasaki 2y ago
To me KDE 1 and 2 looked great. KDE 3 and 4 were just ugly and unusable. KDE 5 and 6 look ok I guess, but are buggier and perform worse than XFCE, so why would I ever use them? The "Win95 pixel art" era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_1.0.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_1.0.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE-2.0-es-es.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE-2.0-es-es.png The "wtf" era of KDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kde-3.2.3-es-es.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kde-3.2.3-es-es.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_4.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_4.png The "we give up, just make it look like XFCE" era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_5.2_Konqueror_and_Kontact.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_5.2_Konqueror_and_Kon...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jmclnx 2y ago
I never cared too much for KDE3, but KDE4 and KDE5 to me is much better than GNOME. The main reason was KDE3 would set my eyes on fire, GNOME never did (on the same hardware). KDE4 was better with that and KDE5 I have no issues with eye strain. I never used KDE6 so no opinion. FWIW, I still use simple window managers and will continue until forced onto Wayland. Hoping that never happens since I really dislike all Desktop Environments. If I had to use a D/E, it would be KDE. But one comment about Trinity was with KMail, the version with KDE3 was great and I use to use it, but the KDE4/5 versions to me is hard to use. That is when I switched over to Thunderbird.

66 points by signa11 2y ago

I have been happily using Trinity for more than a decade now. It works well for me and it's much less resource hungry than all the newer eye candy that desktops have been trying to push.

cooloo 2y ago

Kde3 was a great desktop environment. Sometimes i missing konqi with all resource hungry browsers these days.

jraph 2y ago
You mean Konqueror, right? Konqi is KDE's mascot. Konqueror was great. I also liked that you could use it as both a file manager and a browser, and that you could switch browser engines. KHTML was also some great work.
- Arnt 2y ago
  Coolo is from .de, where konqi is a term of endearment for the web browser.
  - sirtaj 2y ago
    I suspect that it's not the same Coolo you're thinking of.
    - Arnt 2y ago
      Oh no. And are you the Taj, then?
      - sirtaj 2y ago
        Yes Arnt, I'm the canonical one!
- nottorp 2y ago
  Let's remind people that Safari was initially a port of khtml. The webkit people target today is derived from the KDE team's work.
  - rahen 2y ago
    So was Google Chrome initially.
- timw4mail 2y ago
  It still exists!

drewg123 2y ago

Wish there was a FreeBSD pkg/port for this. KDE3 was the last DE I used that worked reliably..

signa11 2y ago
not even xfce ? that is kind of surprising.

chrisfosterelli 2y ago

KDE 3 was already old when I got into tech well over a decade ago. It was snappy and efficient though. KDE 4 was beautiful and had fancy widgets but was resource hungry. Glad to see KDE 3 still has love.

voidr 2y ago
KDE 4 looked like a cheap Vista knockoff gone wrong and the widgets were worse than useless, I stopped using KDE altogether because I felt the developers completely lost the plot. One of the most arrogant moves was to not have files on the desktop, instead they put together a poorly made widget called folder view, I believe they completely U-turned on that one, not sure how many years it took them though. To be fair, last night I tried putting a shortcut to a picture onto the home screen on my iPad that has better hardware than my MacBook Air and I couldn't figure out a way to do it and iOS has well-paid armies of people working on it.
- o11c 2y ago
  KDE 4 was completely unusable for the first ... 4 releases I think? 4.4 rings a bell as the ones I actually installed due to not wanting to fight PPAs; 4.6 was the first release I would actually call stable. But even today I miss essential KDE3 features like a proper editable start menu.
- pjerem 2y ago
  KDE 4 was a disaster for pretty much everyone. I _loved_ KDE 3. It was consistent, accessible enough for newbies, infinitely configurable for power users. The desktop of freedom in all that meant. Then KDE 4 happened. I never used KDE again as my daily driver until Plasma 6. 16 long years mourning what I lost. Sure XFCE and Gnome were totally ok but they lacked something. What is sad, I think, is that during those times, KDE lost a lot of its artistic community who back in the days were releasing hundreds of themes every months. Most were awful but some were gems and anyway the configuration options always allowed you to transform KDE into your thing. It’s slowly coming back but it’s not there yet and it’s not as easy as yesterday.

jraph 2y ago

KDE 3 was great and could easily be my second choice for a DE. But Plasma 5 & 6 are so good I would feel like I'm missing out. Even on old hardware they are quite lightweight. At some point I wanted to try Trinity but didn't find packaging for my distro at the time, but will probably try some day.

metalforever 2y ago
They're a complete dog on a spinning disk 2013 era machine
- jraph 2y ago
  Disabling file indexing probably goes a long way.
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  I haven't tried Plasma 6 on my 2013 laptop with a slow spinning rust disk, but Plasma 5 is fine. Way better than Windows 10 which i rageformatted when it took hours to apply some stupid update and i almost lost a business video call (my laptop is the only PC i have with a camera). I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed which sadly seems far from I/O efficient, not sure why (there is almost a hundred of background processes doing who knows what). Perhaps a lightweight distro would be better since i mainly use it to make calls or try out some graphics code (it is the only Nvidia device i have), but while it takes a couple of minutes to boot up, once it does it works fine so i don't mind much as i'm only rarely using that machine.

senkora 2y ago

> Instructions are also available to build TDE for FreeBSD from source. Thank goodness we still have instructions for patching KDE under FreeBSD. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-does-one-patch-kde2-under-freebsd https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-does-one-patch-kde2-under...

Thev00d00 2y ago
Thanks for this, I'm one of the lucky 10000 today!
- dotancohen 2y ago
  9998 left to go.

tivert 2y ago

> The desktop and its applications were snappy even in a virtual machine configured with only 2GB of RAM and two vCPUs. It's a sad state of affairs that not all desktops can say that.

wiseowise 2y ago
It’s a sad state of affairs when you prepend 2GB of RAM and two vCPUs with only.
- demetrius 2y ago
  It's a sad state of affairs when it's considered ok to get rid of perfectly working hardware just because a new faster one is available.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Nobody does that? People get rid of old HW mostly because new SW is bloaty and slow so it's cheaper to upgrade your HW than to wait or hope in vain for the SW devs to finally optimize their shit.
    - tivert 2y ago
      > Nobody does that? People get rid of old HW mostly because new SW is bloaty and slow so it's cheaper to upgrade your HW than to wait or hope in vain for the SW devs to finally optimize their shit. Software developers usually get or are given the shiniest, fastest hardware, but that's probably backwards. We should get old, underpowered stuff (and be required to use it by law) and be forced to make do. That pain would force the optimizations, and those would benefit society 1000x over the cost of our annoyance.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >We should get old, underpowered stuff (and be required to use it by law) and be forced to make do. Why not both, a fast and a slow one? In Hollywood film making, the colorist uses a $40k professional mastering monitor to make sure the work is accurate, and also a $100 Walmart TV in parallel to make sure the movie will still look good in your average home and not just on the studio monitors. Same should be in SW dev: Develop on fast HW but test on slow HW.

1oooqooq 2y ago

hey old people. something in open source history I don't recall very well and would appreciate links of it is already documented... kde was nice but not "open source" so gtk and gnome came and drove lots of contributors. i think it was around kde3... then Ubuntu and later google dumped lots of money on gnome and some designers just stole the leadership it became a race to the bottom with copying all bad ideas from apple UX. then Ubuntu parted ways and did it's own thing. then they merged and rewrote the thing in JavaScript and release without even a settings application working... and then contributors mostly moved back to kde and 5 was great. now 6 is polishing everything and building on dbus everywhere and designers already started the UX capture but doesn't seem it is going anywhere. anyway, i don't have much reference material for the time most contributors moved from kde to gnome in the name of GPL (noble goal that wasn't used since distros didn't abandon the broken release for the mint fork when they should have)

nottorp 2y ago
Don't know about designers but: KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech. That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk. That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now. First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died. Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists. Agree that gnome still looks like Apple envy.
- 1oooqooq 2y ago
  the license issue was that qt want gpl enough because of the dual license, right? i could find a good write up of the problem then.
- 2y ago

Mashimo 2y ago

From the comments: > There's a lot of people (my wife included) with memory impairment. When your typical "time to learn some new fancy UI" exceeds "lifetime of fancy UI before CADT replaces it with something new", it makes life hell for you, and for those around you! > Can we please refrain from using CADT? It's a slur. Like all the other personal attacks it has no place in this discussion. You can make your point just as well if not better without it. Thanks. What is "CADT"? Could not find anything useful that fits.

voxadam 2y ago
That one had me vexed for a bit too. After a bit of stumbling around the web I think I finally found a definition by HN's favorite browser engineer, Bay Area club owner, and malcontent Jamie Zawinski.[0][1] According to Jamie CADT stands for "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers".[2] WARNING: JWZ's site used to redirect to an unpleasant NSFW meme[3] from the late 90s when linked to from HN. Though, if I remember correctly that's been solved in recent years by HN. In case it hasn't please be sure to copy plaintext links to his site into a fresh tab to avoid the referrer. [0] https://www.jwz.org/ https://www.jwz.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski [2] https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
- aragilar 2y ago
  The modern equivalent would be resume-driven development. I've always found it somewhat ironic that CADT was originally used to describe the GNOME 1.x to 2.x switch, when GNOME 2.x was for a long time quite stable (and which was stable over the KDE 3 -> 4 changeover period), and newer versions of GNOME have tended to have less backwards compatibility and more churn.
  - p_l 2y ago
    GNOME 2.x was also when the roots for events of GNOME 3.x got put in place. The clean rewrite allowed both good and bad things.

okasaki 2y ago

To me KDE 1 and 2 looked great. KDE 3 and 4 were just ugly and unusable. KDE 5 and 6 look ok I guess, but are buggier and perform worse than XFCE, so why would I ever use them? The "Win95 pixel art" era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_1.0.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_1.0.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE-2.0-es-es.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE-2.0-es-es.png The "wtf" era of KDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kde-3.2.3-es-es.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kde-3.2.3-es-es.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_4.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_4.png The "we give up, just make it look like XFCE" era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_5.2_Konqueror_and_Kontact.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_5.2_Konqueror_and_Kon...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jmclnx 2y ago

I never cared too much for KDE3, but KDE4 and KDE5 to me is much better than GNOME. The main reason was KDE3 would set my eyes on fire, GNOME never did (on the same hardware). KDE4 was better with that and KDE5 I have no issues with eye strain. I never used KDE6 so no opinion. FWIW, I still use simple window managers and will continue until forced onto Wayland. Hoping that never happens since I really dislike all Desktop Environments. If I had to use a D/E, it would be KDE. But one comment about Trinity was with KMail, the version with KDE3 was great and I use to use it, but the KDE4/5 versions to me is hard to use. That is when I switched over to Thunderbird.