12 ms·

Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE)

89 points by doener 2y ago

nosrepa 2y ago
I went to look at the screenshots, saw armarok 1.4.10, got excited thinking they'd brought it back, and then got sad when I realized the screenshot was from 2011.
- onli 2y ago
  Just because I looked that up recently, there are at least three forks based on amarok 1: Exaile (a GTK port), Clementine (a fork towards Qt4) and Strawberry (a fork of Clementine, I don't know the background).
- fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
  They do have a somewhat maintained fork of the amarok 1.4 line that more or less works the way I liked: I've been using when I want to listen to music on my linux desktop. I think it's forked from a bit before the late amarok 1.4 releases. EDIT: here's the latest changelog: https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Changelog_For_R14.1.3#amarok https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Changelog_For_R14.1.3#amarok
- nine_k 2y ago
  Isn't Strawberry [1] a quite acceptable continuation? [1]: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
- neobrain 2y ago
  Actually Amarok did see a revival in the past year or so! https://blogs.kde.org/2024/04/29/amarok-3.0-castaway-released/ https://blogs.kde.org/2024/04/29/amarok-3.0-castaway-release... They've recently pushed out a new release with the code base ported to Qt/Plasma 5 and are now going for Qt/Plasma 6.
  - xolve 2y ago
    Popularity of streaming services like Spotify and closed clients, I hardly use Amarok.
eurleif 2y ago
Turns out it's a fork of KDE 3, with comparable goals to the Cinnamon fork of GNOME 3. I guessed it had some connection to KDE from the logo, but for whatever reason the home page doesn't say anything about KDE. So I went into the FAQ, which does mention KDE, but does so in a way I find odd: >What is TDE? >TDE is the Trinity Desktop Environment. The project was initiated by Matthias Ettrich in 1996 and originally called the K Desktop Environment. >Why the rebranding and renaming efforts? Why not continue calling the software KDE? >The "KDE" name, various logos, and related efforts are trademarked by the KDE Foundation. Since the Trinity project is not affiliated with the KDE Foundation, legally we can't use their trademarks. It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor. But the FAQ page doesn't quite make that claim explicit, or provide justification for it, so I don't know what to think. The Wikipedia page on TDE is also of no help. Does anyone know if there's a backstory?
- ndiddy 2y ago
  The whole project is a fork of KDE 3, including the documentation. The FAQ is based on the KDE 3 FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080212212628/http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase-runtime/faq/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080212212628/http://docs.kde.o...), which is why you see the wording you do. AFAIK there's no bad blood between KDE and Trinity, and the KDE developers let the Trinity developers use their infrastructure when the project was getting started.
- aninteger 2y ago
  > It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor. Certainly that's one interpretation. The other interpretation is exactly what is said and no more. Where did this "imposter" accusation come from?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
jmclnx 2y ago
Many people still love it. For me, KDE 3 was fine but caused sever eyestrain when I used it. I never had an interest on going back. But I am glad it exist, it proves you do not have to make changes "just because", but just change to make it run a bit better, eliminate bugs but keep the same "soul". FWIW, I stick with fvwm, now on v3.
- keyle 2y ago
  I'm curious what caused you eyestrain if you ever found out? Small font or something more?
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    My eyes have minor issues, but the largest contributor were the colors. At the time with fvwm I had no issues at all. KDE4 was better but the issue still existed. KDE5 I can last most of the day. Hoping KDE6 is better. FWIW, Gnome* also never caused issues. I did spend lots of time looking for a color theme for it and in the 4.0 days I found a theme I think was called "happy_eyes", it worked with minor tweaks. For KDE5 I found calm-eyes.
- dartharva 2y ago
  Back then you were probably using CRT or some other low-res monitors which would have given you eye-strain regardless.
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    I wish that was the case, but it carried over to LCD when the CRT monitor fizzed out. Also as mentioned, just about any other environment caused me no issues.
defrost 2y ago
In related tech media reporting: A new version of the Trinity desktop is out, with a new window-snapping feature. And that's not the only way it's snappy. The Trinity Desktop Environment (latest release 14.1.1), or TDE for short, is a fork and continuation of KDE version 3.5, the last release of KDE 3. It's loosely comparable to MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2 after the developers moved on to the radically different GNOME 3. KDE 4 wasn't as radical a change, but it introduced a significantly different design based around customizable widgets called "plasmoids." The Register Thu 2 Nov 2023 (12 months ago) https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/trinity_desktop_q4os/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/trinity_desktop_q4os/
badsectoracula 2y ago
The fact that TDE exist is great and proves that unlike other OSes where you are forced to upgrade everything to whatever the OS developer wants and have no choice in the matter (aside from not upgrading, which isn't a real option because both hardware and software support drops like flies over time) regardless of how this affects your workflow, on Linux you can simply get to have all the latest stuff under the hood (kernel, drivers, etc) while at the same time preserving the workflows you want. Some elbow grease might be necessary - like all the time the TDE developers have put towards their project - but the important part is that it is possible. That said, i do think that TDE would benefit from a couple of more aesthetically pleasing themes in the screenshots - even the original KDE3.5 default theme (preferably with a bit less gradient galore) would be better than the current shots that look like a hodgepodge of themes thrown together.
- Frost1x 2y ago
  I haven’t kept up with Windows over the recent years but it looks like Cairo Desktop exists that allows some degree of shell customization in that world. Many years ago lots of shell options like LiteStep existed (they weren’t the most stable, but they existed). Many were likely hacked out solutions as they hooked in via replacing the explorer library IIRC. So while in Linux it’s intentionally modular, I wouldn’t say it’s the only place it’s possible. Maybe the most practical, for sure. As we move more to service oriented everything though, that becomes increasingly less feasible. I suppose to some degree it’s more flexible because web apps at some point give you all the rendering code locally to muck with however you may want to but the frequency of change in UIs on top of its complexity seems like this world will always be unapproachable for customization, and that’s for services that are using browsers. Forget it if theres some local application doing rendering (like the Microsoft app with Azure services).
  - badsectoracula 2y ago
    The problem with Windows is that you do not have the source code so you rely on excessively brittle hacks. For example when i was using Windows 8 i used to run some program that forced some handle that uxtheme used to close which caused controls to fall back to using the classic win9x theme (which was disabled on the UI in Win8) - and for that to work it had to freeze some system process for a bit, force the handle to close and unfreeze it. That process worked for Win8, it broke on Win8.1 until someone found a workaround but you had to replace some apps with alternatives to work and was completely broken on Win10 (and i guess Win11 too) and was never fixed. Meanwhile if i desire i can download the official source code for Gtk and modify the painting code to be as pixel perfect as i want (and in fact i did exactly that some years ago to make XFCE look like Windows 95 because the available themes looked off :-P). For webapps, yeah you can't do much but personally i prefer local apps where possible anyway - and for the other stuff, if i care enough, Stylus and Greasemonkey are there to help. I do use a custom Stylus theme i wrote for HN for example :-).
o11c 2y ago
This was a lifesaver during the early KDE4 years. Most projects it's wise to avoid .0 releases, but for KDE4 even up to .4 or so it was questionable. Thankfully this catastrophe didn't repeat for KDE5. There are still KDE3 features I miss that neither KDE4 nor KDE5 has ever had. The one that sticks out in my mind is the ability to edit the start menu directly, rather than having to move to a weird parallel world. That does remind me though - why isn't "icons on the desktop" a thing by default anymore? I'll admit I stopped bothering to go edit the defaults for every new install, but why?
- ffsm8 2y ago
  Because very few people used these icons? How many program positions on your desktop can you reliably remember without having to search? Isn't it just about the same amount as you can fit in the menu bar you've got on KDE/unity/gnome? And if you've gotta search, isn't the launcher with fuzzy search quicker anyway?
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Indeed. Menus are searchable, desktop contents rarely are (and if they are, the search results look like a menu anyway).
    - exe34 2y ago
      I didn't need to search for it, I had them in groups and used spatial memory. nowadays I've just given up on desktop environments entirely and just use xmonad and dmenu. I got fed up with people having their own ideas of how my computing experience should be.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    What about an end user, to whom say, you sell a tablet with software they asked you to write. It works like a champ. If they close it, odds are having a shortcut on the desktop they can just tap to re-open it would be most welcome. No?
    - 2y ago
eMPee584 2y ago
KDE 3.4/3.5 was gourgeous.. must have been around 2002 when I had just ditched windows for good and went all in on gentoo linux. Over and over, I had following impressive experience: I would have an intuition of where I would expect a feature to be or how a widget would interact, then while executing on it, quickly retract my expectation ("nah, this probably won't work this way, even though it should..") only to find it actually did work as expected. That was so0Oo amazing xD and it obviously disintegrated completely with the botched release of #plasma KDE4".0". That was when I moved on to xfce.. When I learned about TDE a bunch of time later though, I actually used it for a couple of years. It was still "kool" , even though the aesthetics felt somewhat aged. Back to xfce for a long time now..

89 points by doener 2y ago

I went to look at the screenshots, saw armarok 1.4.10, got excited thinking they'd brought it back, and then got sad when I realized the screenshot was from 2011.

onli 2y ago
Just because I looked that up recently, there are at least three forks based on amarok 1: Exaile (a GTK port), Clementine (a fork towards Qt4) and Strawberry (a fork of Clementine, I don't know the background).
fiddlerwoaroof 2y ago
They do have a somewhat maintained fork of the amarok 1.4 line that more or less works the way I liked: I've been using when I want to listen to music on my linux desktop. I think it's forked from a bit before the late amarok 1.4 releases. EDIT: here's the latest changelog: https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Changelog_For_R14.1.3#amarok https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Changelog_For_R14.1.3#amarok
nine_k 2y ago
Isn't Strawberry [1] a quite acceptable continuation? [1]: https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
neobrain 2y ago
Actually Amarok did see a revival in the past year or so! https://blogs.kde.org/2024/04/29/amarok-3.0-castaway-released/ https://blogs.kde.org/2024/04/29/amarok-3.0-castaway-release... They've recently pushed out a new release with the code base ported to Qt/Plasma 5 and are now going for Qt/Plasma 6.
- xolve 2y ago
  Popularity of streaming services like Spotify and closed clients, I hardly use Amarok.

eurleif 2y ago

Turns out it's a fork of KDE 3, with comparable goals to the Cinnamon fork of GNOME 3. I guessed it had some connection to KDE from the logo, but for whatever reason the home page doesn't say anything about KDE. So I went into the FAQ, which does mention KDE, but does so in a way I find odd: >What is TDE? >TDE is the Trinity Desktop Environment. The project was initiated by Matthias Ettrich in 1996 and originally called the K Desktop Environment. >Why the rebranding and renaming efforts? Why not continue calling the software KDE? >The "KDE" name, various logos, and related efforts are trademarked by the KDE Foundation. Since the Trinity project is not affiliated with the KDE Foundation, legally we can't use their trademarks. It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor. But the FAQ page doesn't quite make that claim explicit, or provide justification for it, so I don't know what to think. The Wikipedia page on TDE is also of no help. Does anyone know if there's a backstory?

ndiddy 2y ago
The whole project is a fork of KDE 3, including the documentation. The FAQ is based on the KDE 3 FAQ (https://web.archive.org/web/20080212212628/http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase-runtime/faq/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080212212628/http://docs.kde.o...), which is why you see the wording you do. AFAIK there's no bad blood between KDE and Trinity, and the KDE developers let the Trinity developers use their infrastructure when the project was getting started.
aninteger 2y ago
> It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor. Certainly that's one interpretation. The other interpretation is exactly what is said and no more. Where did this "imposter" accusation come from?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

jmclnx 2y ago

Many people still love it. For me, KDE 3 was fine but caused sever eyestrain when I used it. I never had an interest on going back. But I am glad it exist, it proves you do not have to make changes "just because", but just change to make it run a bit better, eliminate bugs but keep the same "soul". FWIW, I stick with fvwm, now on v3.

keyle 2y ago
I'm curious what caused you eyestrain if you ever found out? Small font or something more?
- jmclnx 2y ago
  My eyes have minor issues, but the largest contributor were the colors. At the time with fvwm I had no issues at all. KDE4 was better but the issue still existed. KDE5 I can last most of the day. Hoping KDE6 is better. FWIW, Gnome* also never caused issues. I did spend lots of time looking for a color theme for it and in the 4.0 days I found a theme I think was called "happy_eyes", it worked with minor tweaks. For KDE5 I found calm-eyes.
dartharva 2y ago
Back then you were probably using CRT or some other low-res monitors which would have given you eye-strain regardless.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  I wish that was the case, but it carried over to LCD when the CRT monitor fizzed out. Also as mentioned, just about any other environment caused me no issues.

defrost 2y ago

In related tech media reporting: A new version of the Trinity desktop is out, with a new window-snapping feature. And that's not the only way it's snappy. The Trinity Desktop Environment (latest release 14.1.1), or TDE for short, is a fork and continuation of KDE version 3.5, the last release of KDE 3. It's loosely comparable to MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2 after the developers moved on to the radically different GNOME 3. KDE 4 wasn't as radical a change, but it introduced a significantly different design based around customizable widgets called "plasmoids." The Register Thu 2 Nov 2023 (12 months ago) https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/trinity_desktop_q4os/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/trinity_desktop_q4os/

badsectoracula 2y ago

The fact that TDE exist is great and proves that unlike other OSes where you are forced to upgrade everything to whatever the OS developer wants and have no choice in the matter (aside from not upgrading, which isn't a real option because both hardware and software support drops like flies over time) regardless of how this affects your workflow, on Linux you can simply get to have all the latest stuff under the hood (kernel, drivers, etc) while at the same time preserving the workflows you want. Some elbow grease might be necessary - like all the time the TDE developers have put towards their project - but the important part is that it is possible. That said, i do think that TDE would benefit from a couple of more aesthetically pleasing themes in the screenshots - even the original KDE3.5 default theme (preferably with a bit less gradient galore) would be better than the current shots that look like a hodgepodge of themes thrown together.

Frost1x 2y ago
I haven’t kept up with Windows over the recent years but it looks like Cairo Desktop exists that allows some degree of shell customization in that world. Many years ago lots of shell options like LiteStep existed (they weren’t the most stable, but they existed). Many were likely hacked out solutions as they hooked in via replacing the explorer library IIRC. So while in Linux it’s intentionally modular, I wouldn’t say it’s the only place it’s possible. Maybe the most practical, for sure. As we move more to service oriented everything though, that becomes increasingly less feasible. I suppose to some degree it’s more flexible because web apps at some point give you all the rendering code locally to muck with however you may want to but the frequency of change in UIs on top of its complexity seems like this world will always be unapproachable for customization, and that’s for services that are using browsers. Forget it if theres some local application doing rendering (like the Microsoft app with Azure services).
- badsectoracula 2y ago
  The problem with Windows is that you do not have the source code so you rely on excessively brittle hacks. For example when i was using Windows 8 i used to run some program that forced some handle that uxtheme used to close which caused controls to fall back to using the classic win9x theme (which was disabled on the UI in Win8) - and for that to work it had to freeze some system process for a bit, force the handle to close and unfreeze it. That process worked for Win8, it broke on Win8.1 until someone found a workaround but you had to replace some apps with alternatives to work and was completely broken on Win10 (and i guess Win11 too) and was never fixed. Meanwhile if i desire i can download the official source code for Gtk and modify the painting code to be as pixel perfect as i want (and in fact i did exactly that some years ago to make XFCE look like Windows 95 because the available themes looked off :-P). For webapps, yeah you can't do much but personally i prefer local apps where possible anyway - and for the other stuff, if i care enough, Stylus and Greasemonkey are there to help. I do use a custom Stylus theme i wrote for HN for example :-).

o11c 2y ago

This was a lifesaver during the early KDE4 years. Most projects it's wise to avoid .0 releases, but for KDE4 even up to .4 or so it was questionable. Thankfully this catastrophe didn't repeat for KDE5. There are still KDE3 features I miss that neither KDE4 nor KDE5 has ever had. The one that sticks out in my mind is the ability to edit the start menu directly, rather than having to move to a weird parallel world. That does remind me though - why isn't "icons on the desktop" a thing by default anymore? I'll admit I stopped bothering to go edit the defaults for every new install, but why?

ffsm8 2y ago
Because very few people used these icons? How many program positions on your desktop can you reliably remember without having to search? Isn't it just about the same amount as you can fit in the menu bar you've got on KDE/unity/gnome? And if you've gotta search, isn't the launcher with fuzzy search quicker anyway?
- nine_k 2y ago
  Indeed. Menus are searchable, desktop contents rarely are (and if they are, the search results look like a menu anyway).
  - exe34 2y ago
    I didn't need to search for it, I had them in groups and used spatial memory. nowadays I've just given up on desktop environments entirely and just use xmonad and dmenu. I got fed up with people having their own ideas of how my computing experience should be.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  What about an end user, to whom say, you sell a tablet with software they asked you to write. It works like a champ. If they close it, odds are having a shortcut on the desktop they can just tap to re-open it would be most welcome. No?
  - 2y ago

eMPee584 2y ago

KDE 3.4/3.5 was gourgeous.. must have been around 2002 when I had just ditched windows for good and went all in on gentoo linux. Over and over, I had following impressive experience: I would have an intuition of where I would expect a feature to be or how a widget would interact, then while executing on it, quickly retract my expectation ("nah, this probably won't work this way, even though it should..") only to find it actually did work as expected. That was so0Oo amazing xD and it obviously disintegrated completely with the botched release of #plasma KDE4".0". That was when I moved on to xfce.. When I learned about TDE a bunch of time later though, I actually used it for a couple of years. It was still "kool" , even though the aesthetics felt somewhat aged. Back to xfce for a long time now..