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You may remember what a mess the distros made of rolling out KDE 4. Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex was my worst UI experience ever, until Windows 8.
But about a year later, KDE 4 became a beautiful thing. I'm still using it on my main computer right now.
The old KDE 3 holdouts created Trinity Desktop Enviroment, but nice as it was, I think KDE 4 is better.
The problem is that's old tech, and all the distros have moved on to the UX fever-dream that is Plasma 5.
I haven't seen a project to fork/preserve KDE 4 yet.

KDE 3 is still the best DE ever made for Linux. I really wish someone with the know-how, time, and money had kept it going the way the MATE guys did with gnome2.

You mean like the Trinity team?

(But, if you haven't tried KDE5 recently, you should.).

You might like TDE: Trinity Desktop Environment, it is a fork of KDE 3.5.

KDE3 was forked and became Trinity Desktop TDE https://www.trinitydesktop.org...

First of all, thank you KDE Team for your great contribution to the FOSS community. However, I stopped using KDE after the version 4 fiasco. Now I bounce between XFCE/Openbox and TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment). If you used to be a KDE fan, consider supporting the latter. TDE is the default desktop in Q4OS, another very interesting project.

Then fork KDE3 and tell 4+ to go fork themselves.

It's been done: https://www.trinitydesktop.org...

Jokes aside, I was a huge fan of KDE3 and I think the transition to version 4 was wrongly handled. First iterations were buggy and scared away the user base, the Oxygen theme is ugly (OK, that's a subjective reason) and it felt overall bloated. They screwed key applications like Amarok and complicated the desktop experience. I wish a project like Trinity had the same traction as MATE or Cinammon. As for kde/gnome-look.org, it's sad, they bring me a lot of good memories. I do think they still have a chance to reinvent themselves, it's just matter of cleaning up the house and start from scratch, catching up with the new versions and branches/forks.

Right now I'm bouncing between XFCE and Openbox and I'm not looking back.

They did fork it. It's called TDE now(Trinity Desktop Environment):

https://www.trinitydesktop.org...

Been using it since it got stable. Used KDE3 under openSUSE but it just kept getting broken.

KDE4 was a mess. I got sick of being told how much better it was(it wasn't), how much faster and leaner it was(it wasn't), how great it was(it was way too unstable), and how I NEEDED all these new bells and BLING(which I didn't). I gave up trying to make it usable around 4.2 and stayed with KDE3. It just worked, and with a little configuring, TDE just works. Programmers don't seem to get that. They need to write all these new features they want and they think others want/need(when we could care less).

KDE1 was a lot like Workplace shell from OS/2(which I came from when I went to linux).

Some of us just want our computers to work and not have to screw with them all the time to make them work.(typing this on my 10 year old T60p Core2 T7600G laptop - which also just works and works well)

For me kwin crashes for no reason very regularly (10 mins on average); back to i3 for me since Ubuntu 15.10; 16.04 is no better. It also completely sucks when using an NFS home. Every mouse click seems to want to write some pointless logs or state back to my homedir, freezing everything up. I don't have that problem with i3: it just manages windows and doesn't do lots of unnecessary I/O. Still pining for the pinnacle of usability and stability which was KDE3.

You may be interested in Trinity DE, which is a fork of KDE3.5. https://www.trinitydesktop.org...

KDE 4.x got decent. I think that KDE SC 5 series still has some time to go before it gets good. With that said, TDE is a perfectly good option for those of us that loved KDE 3.x (I use TDE on Fedora and Ubuntu). There again, I've also been playing around with MaXX desktop (Linux port of SGI's 4DWM) on some lightweight systems (read Pentium II (IBM Thinkpad 600e) and III (Dell Latitude C400, Inspiron 8100) era) that I mainly use as remote/serial terminals.

Trinity Desktop Environment is what you're looking for, then. It's the continuation KDE 3, just like MATE is the continuation of GNOME 2.

https://www.trinitydesktop.org... for KDE3's design?

Richard Stallman was right about this, with closed source you are at the mercy of the company providing it.

Ok. What if you wanted to still use, say, KDE3? There's Trinity Desktop, but it is not updated regularly due to not having enough interest and/or developer resources. Soon there will be a full year from the last update. So how is this any better? It's open source, right? Sure, you could maintain it yourself, but it would be too complex project for one man to handle. You are still at the mercy of other people.

If more flaws come up, Microsoft will still patch them because otherwise users will flee to alternatives rather than newer Windows versions.

I do not see anything wrong with that. Good that patches are coming. That's commercial software powered by commercial interests. Nothing terribly evil there.

I loved KDE 3.5, and would spend weeks customizing everything to look exactly like I wanted.
It worked perfectly, I had all the right applications and buttons at the right place.

Then you should be quite happy with the Trinity desktop, which is the KDE-approved and-assisted maintenance/improvement fork of KDE 3.5.10. I am. They're up to 3.5.13.2 now, with release 3.5.14 in the works.

I have never fully switched to KDE4 because of many of its limitations, the most annoying being the network, memory and CPU load panel displays. In KDE3 one had the option of displaying absolute values in a pre-defined range. Gone in KDE4; all you can see are wobbly displays with relative values that have, err, relatively low value for their actual purpose.

These days I am really happy for the KDE3 fork http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ and ever since it works on Fedora 19 I can now go back to a functional desktop both at work and at home.

And, yes, the middle click works fine ;-)

For anyone who's interested, the other day I noticed that Trinity Desktop , the KDE 3.5 spinoff, is also still alive. Just got a new release this summer. :)

There is a project to bring back to life KDE3:
http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Although they kind of screwed up at the beginning by trying to do too many changes at once. But I haven't checked recently, maybe its better now.

Trinity. Not everyone likes KDE v4. :P

KDE3 is alive and well in the Trinity project: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Fellow KDE 3 fans should try Trinity Desktop, the team has been doing a great job and figures on releasing 3.5.14 this Fall if all of the blocking bugs are squashed. (I'm not on the team, just a fan of their work.)

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

Is anyone using this one for those who loved old KDE v3.5.x? I was going to use it, but was worried about support, compatiblity, etc. It is not official in Debian too.

Good thing KDE 3.5 got forked and is being actively developed under the name Trinity Desktop

It's there. Just as GNOME2 has forked into a new DE called MATE, KDE3 has forked into a new DE called Trinity

I think it's including that, because a lot of users are frustrated by the way desktop UIs have been developing on Linux. (I'm not making claims regarding us being a majority - just that this reflects the feeling of a sizable number of users.) When KDE threw away the excellent code base they had with KDE 3 and early KDE 4 releases turned out to be horrible (much improved in later KDE 4s) many KDE users went to GNOME. Now with GNOME 3 there is similar frustration with esoteric UI concepts and the like. So with KDE getting better again it may be worth another look. As I said: that might not reflect the way the majority of users think, but it's relevant for a significant number.

Personally - I'll try it again on one of my machines, but for my main PC I'll stick with KDE 3.

It's just little stuff - like the KDE-menu not being disturbed when something is loading in the background, the notifications handling not being as distracting, keeping the desktops separated etc. It just does everything I need and is fast enough.

Could be wrong, but I believe that the Trinity Desktop (it's continued development of KDE 3) relies solely on ALSA regardless of what distro you're running.

You might want to check out the Trinity Desktop environment, then -- it's KDE 3 under continued development by another team. I've been using it part-time alongside KDE 4 (which has some better points & some inferior ones) in SimplyMepis for quite a while with no less luck than I did when I last used KDE 3 in 2008.

I never understood why when things were getting nice and stable both KDE and GNOME would suddenly shitcan all that work. i mean what was wrong with them? They both looked nice, ran fine, were low resource, so what was wrong with what they had? Could they just not live without an assload of bling like OSX and Windows has gotten?

That is soooooo true. Imagine if all the resources would have been put to polishing KDE3 and GNOME2 instead. We might not have the latest whizbang innovation UI, but a good solid, basic desktop. That's exactly what Linux needs, not another broken mess. And those two both have Compiz support so you get some eye-candy spices too.

BTW for those that prefer the KDE way of doing things Vector Linux has a "KDE Classic" edition based on 3.5.10 that is nice.

And there's, of course, the Trinity Desktop, which is a similar project to MATE, but it bases on KDE3.

Now we have MATE from GNOME v2 as a form of dissatisfaction of v3.
We already had Trinity forked from KDE v3.5.
Then there's Razor-Qt as "something almost completely new".
And the pletora of "alternative" desktops we all love: XFCE, LXDE, etc.etc.
Is it actually a problem of fragmentation, or is it that some projects after a few years (and some amounts of donated money) just go into technology decline?
I personally tend towards the second option.

tell them to turn off the Strigi searching in the "Desktop Search" in System Settings

Is that something that's still there in KDE 4.7?

Yes it is. And it's now now even part of Trinity, I.E. the new incarnation of KDE 3. http://trinitydesktop.org/

I thought that KDE4 had improved in its latest iterations.

It has, but it still defaults to having Nepomuk and Strigi both being on and set to index everything in your home directory by default, and storing them in an SQL database using Virtuoso. This ends up taking up about 10% of the space you're currently using in your home directory in the database at ~/.kde/share/apps/nepomuk/repository/main/data/virtuosobackend/soprano-virtuoso.db Then, of course, by defualt it also wants to run MySQL server for Akonadi for storing and index and cache as part of PIM management and store that in ~/.local/share/akonadi/ somewhere, and wants to run another MySQL server process per user that's logged in, too. So if you use "Switch user" and log in as another user, you'll see two copies of MySQL server running -- and it's still like that with KDE 4.7.4.

There's a lot to like in KDE 4 today, but there are still things about it like this that I think are just wrong. Another example: if you right-click on an application in the menu, you can easily add it to the "Favorites" menu, an there are some there by default too. But how do you get something OUT of the Favorites? Well, you just do web searches to find out that you need to edit the text file ~/.kde/share/config/kickoffrc and edit the Favorites list manually. Another: print something, then try to figure out how to see the printer spool in KDE 4. Oops. You need to know to install "printer-applet", and even if you do it's not up to the job; you're better of logging directly into cups via the web interface at http://localhost:631/ than you are with using KDE 4's tools.

KDE 4 still isn't the well-oiled-machine that KDE 3 was. It's nice, it's comfortable, it's even slick, but it's still got some rough edges.

Despite Debian's policy of separating the source-available software from the binary-only software, RMS still doesn't endorse them as free. I think that Debian too is distancing itself from the FSF - they're not making their software GPL3 - particularly illustrated by their working on their version of clang. While it's true that they're working on Hurd, they're also working on kFreeBSD. So essentially, they'd have 3 platforms for their users, all of which hopefully would support apt packages. In fact, coming to think of it, that's the other advantage of supporting Debian.

AFAIK Debian makes its software available via GPLv3 where possible, and there have a clear policy that everything that is packaged needs to be very clear as to what license that software (or even files within the software or documentation) are under. I see Debian trying to work with the FSF where it can, and they had a FSF speaker at Debconf10 in NYC. The Debian develers are very devoted to the principles of software freedom. I have a lot of respect for RMS and historically he's been proven right time and time again, so regardless of often being looked upon as an extremist, he seems to have good forward-looking vision, and I think the Debian developers likewise take him seriously.

I'll have a look at what's going on with Clang, but in the meantime I shoud point out that packages in Debian usually start out being uploaded by an indiviual (possibly directly if the person is a Debian developer, or via a sponsored upload if the person is not a DD the the Debian Maintainers list). In the case of a sponsored upload, the amount of developer discussion and review may be relatively minimal, so I wouldn't look upon a single package in Debian as something to use to make a generalization about the entire distribution.

I am now using the MATE gnome2 fork myself.... I jump ship from KDE 3.something...

And of course, for the KDE3 experience there's the Trinity Desktop.

How about trinitydesktop?

Trinitydesktop is KDE 3.5.x

You can install the packages in kubuntu 11.10 or an older kubuntu, or download an install cd with kubuntu 10.10 including trinitydesktop.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

You might try Trinity Desktop, the fork/continuation of KDE 3.5.x: TrinityDesktop.org.

They forked KDE too. It's called Trinity. The quality is excellent.

As far as I remember, port to Qt4 is planned for the future. You might want to check the project's roadmap, once the wesite becomes more responsive: http://www.trinitydesktop.org/wiki/bin/view/Developers/RoadMap

Interesting, but it doesn't seem popular. Even my Debian's apt-get doesn't have a packages of it. http://trinity.pearsoncomputing.net/debian_installation.html and other distributions, from http://www.trinitydesktop.org/releases/3.5.12/, are broken (404 errors). :(

Most notably in the 4.0 release announcement. It didn't state it was perfect, but it sure didn't give the impression that it wasn't ready for normal users. see: http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0 [kde.org]

They made countless comments leading up the 4.0 release that it wouldn't have feature parity on day 1, and that it wouldn't be for everyone on day 1. Just because they didn't repeat those statements in the release announcement doesn't mean they lied.

In addition, the KDE team had been pimping the 4.0 release for months prior to the actual release date.

The KDE team was bragging that the 4.0 release would feature a lot of new tools under the hood like Solid, Phonon, Akondi, Nepomuk, Plasma, etc. Those tools would help developers make killer KDE apps. They didn't claim that everyone was already ported over. Claiming otherwise is the lie here.

No, he isn't. After taking a step back and looking at the whole debacle of 4.0, it's simply stubborn to claim that it wasn't a total disaster, or at the very least misguided.

You have to have a release for developers to build off of. Would you have preferred that they didn't release? It would have taken that much longer to reach feature parity then. And it wasn't like KDE 3.5 disappeared overnight. No one forced you to migrate any faster than you wanted to. In fact, KDE 3.x series is still maintained by others.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/screenshots.php

As someone else posted below: if you really liked KDE 3.5, you should check out the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is a fork of KDE 3.5 that is being actively maintained. (site seems to be down at the moment but you can check out the google cache in the meantime)

...or implemented what they promised for 4.0?

A very long time ago, when I was still young and naive, I was looking forward to KDE4 because
a) it promised to be faster than KDE3
b) it promised to implement single-sign-on for kwallet

Then it was released and it came with hundreds of completely worthless features (like being able to rotate windows, translucency that only blurs everything needlessly, etc.) and of course lots of bugs but it was not faster and 4.0 also did not provide single-sign-on, the only feature that I was interested in.

I tried KDE4 a couple of times (IIRC the last time it was 4.3 or 4.4) and still no single-sign-on. And I've read they refuse it because "you should have different passwords for the user account and kwallet" which does not make any sense and seems quite strange - why did they promise this feature in the first place? And why can Gnome do it? (at least that's what I've read)

Anyway, I keep using KDE3 (from http://www.trinitydesktop.org/), KDE4 is offering NOTHING that I'm interested in, it's the "Vista" of the Linux world: Optimized for some mysterious "average user" - basically the KDE-team wants to optimize KDE to beginners (plus alzheimer-patients and retards). Maybe somebody should tell the KDE-team that the 80's are over and by now almost everybody who needs KDE has worked with computers for many years, probably DECADES. There are practically no beginners left (except children) and those few that remain are not nearly numerous enough to be called the "average user".

http://en.opensuse.org/KDE3 - Yes, you can install KDE3 on openSUSE 11.2+.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ - Attempting to take up where KDE 3.5.10 left off. Only supporting Debian/Ubuntu and Slack, so far, but it's a start.

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/wiki/bin/view/Developers/RoadMap

Though all that may turn out to be a tad ambitious in the end.

There is a fork called trinity. I don't believe they are planning to use Qt4 at this point, though.

My opinion about KDE is: it could use a good fork of KDE 3.5, which is converted to use Qt 4, and with some of the new composite features added on top of it.

Qt4 port - not going to happen. But the 3.5-series is still being developed, see Trinity desktop

The application suite should be a separate project rather than considered part of KDE, so that for example changes to mail or text editor programs are something independent than changes to the actual desktop and windowing system.

...and this would be different from the current situation how, exactly? If your distribution lumps KDE into few huge packages, blame your distribution, but KDE itself is highly modular. Changes to Kwin have no impact on KMail, for example (other than potentially changing the way the windowing system works, which is obvious). Furthermore, due to the modular nature of KDE, changes to KatePart affect KWrite, Kate and KDevelop (and all applications that use the text editor widget).

If someone is smart they'll keep gnome 2 going just as there is someone keeping KDE 3 alive. While I never used Gnome I never understood this rush to add more bloat and bling bling. I mean if it ain't broke? Linux is quickly losing its title of the lightweight OS with all the bling bling being added, so it is nice to see there are those out there that don't want to start over from scratch and would prefer the stability/features of the older version.

Personally I wish them luck, because having choices is nice. I still have many customers on Seamonkey which prefer it to the direction FF is going, and I'm sure there are plenty of Gnome users (at least from reading all the IT SUCKS! posts on OSNews about Gnome Shell) that would prefer to stay with Gnome 2. That is one thing I'll give F/OSS credit for, if enough people can't stand what the developers are doing you CAN change it by forking. Damned shame we Windows guys can't do that or I bet Win2K would still be supported! Best damned SMB OS I'd ever seen.

Or the fork of KDE3 intent on actually maintaining KDE3

http://www.trinitydesktop.org/