KDE 3.5 Fork Trinity Releases First Major Update

First time accepted submitter Z_God writes "Disappointed with KDE 4's performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Tuesday the first major update of the Trinity Desktop Environment was released providing an alternative upgrade path for KDE users that do not feel comfortable with KDE 4. The Trinity Desktop Environment should provide a fast and familiar experience for all users expecting a traditional desktop environment. Packages are available for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora from the Trinity project site."

Comments

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live KDE 3.5. I love it.

Re:Great!

[Stachybotris]

You know, if I still had my old laptop I'd give this a try. I always found KDE3.5 to be a *Very* friendly way to introduce people to Linux. It was Window-like enough that they could intuit their way around the menus. Then again, the wife's laptop doesn't quite have enough power for the KDE4 environment... Might be worth checking out. If only the site weren't already slashdotted...

Re:Great!

[Samantha Wright]

I certainly respect and will always cherish 3.5, but the new 4.xes aren't that bad either. I'm betting that by KDE 5 and GNOME 4, the K Desktop Environment will have a fairly masterful market share once more.

Re:Great!

[Lord Lode]

Yay, thanks Trinity team!!

Re:Great!

[unixisc]

Somehow, the Trinity link above seems to be a dead link

Trinity 3.5

[loftwyr]

Because some people have trouble letting go...

I'm sure it's a wonderful set (although a bit slow getting to the page) but there has been so much improvement in the toolkits. Why do we have to fight change every step of the way?

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate freedom? A major point of open source is so that if you're dissatisfied with the direction a vendor goes, you can fork and maintain locally. That's what's going on here. You don't have to fucking use it, jerk.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some people have trouble letting go...

I'm sure it's a wonderful set (although a bit slow getting to the page) but there has been so much improvement in the toolkits. Why do we have to fight change every step of the way?

One can still use the behind the scenes improvements in QT while maintaining a usable GUI.
Kudos to the trinity developers. I just whish some developers would fork Gnome 2 and give the kiss of death to the Gnome 3 project.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we have to fight change every step of the way?

Because change is NOT always good.

The desktop should not be a widget, gadget, or any other form of "app" because it's the desktop. It's supposed to take priority. I have never experienced the level of outright frustration as when the KDE Plasma Weather Widget got stuck in a constant crash-restart loop and the KDE Crash Reporter burnt up all my RAM (in addition to stealing focus constantly.) In KDE 3.5 I could've simply killed the widget process. But in KDE4, no, I can;t, because killing the widget process wipes out my launcher, my desktop icons, my taskbar - all the critical system components I need to even do so much as load a damn terminal to kill the widget. Yes, I know, Ctrl-Alt-F2, but having to deal with that in the first place is just the solution that proves there's a problem.

I now run GNOME2. I tried GNOME3, Unity, and even KDE4. And I mean for 2-3 weeks each. I couldn't stand any of them. It's not that each has their little annoyances. I mean, GNOME2 is slap full of those as well. Rather, my issue with the latest generation of WMs is simply that they're growing more and more devoid of choice. Want a launcher on the left side? Good luck! Maybe loading another separate desktop widget system? Why would you want that?! Every little thing I try to do, these new WMs tell me "I can't do that." I'm not using GNOME2 because I love the eye candy (I prefer the LOOK of GNOME3, actually.) I'm using it because every time I want to do something that's not the default, GNOME2 lets me do it. It's the "have it your way" WM. Nothing in the latest generation actually offers that level of freedom-as-in-choice.

When the taskbar and program launcher (preferably a menu) in KDE4 is its own separate process, THEN I'll try it again. Critical system components should NOT be freaking widgets! That is dumb. And I will not upgrade to "dumber and choice-less" just because it looks pretty, else I could just go get a Mac.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Desler]

Why do we have to fight change every step of the way?

Because not all change is good?

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, well I'm going to fork Trinity to make it more like KDE 4!

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not opposed to change, but I invariably want that change to be an improvement. I don't use KDE, but I tried using Unity. It frustrated me at every step. Every time I wanted to do something, I found it either couldn't be done, or that I had to look for nasty workarounds. After a whole hour, I gave up.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Arker]

Kudos to the trinity developers. I just whish some developers would fork Gnome 2 and give the kiss of death to the Gnome 3 project

Gnome 2 is the root of the problem, actually. Gnome 3 is just following the (flawed) decisions and judgements that lead to Gnome 2 to their logical conclusions. If you really want a useable Gnome you need to go back to Tranquilty and fork from there.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Zancarius]

Because not all change is good?

KDE 4.7 is actually quite nice.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Desler]

Good for you? Not everyone agrees, though.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Noughmad]

The desktop should not be a widget, gadget, or any other form of "app" because it's the desktop. It's supposed to take priority.

And by "the desktop" you probably mean "a folder". I don't know about you, but my real wooden desktop doesn't look like a folder at all. Instead, it's filled with post-it notes, pencils, sometimes a notebook, a computer, a phone, a lamp and a Rubik cube. In short, it's filled with gadgets.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[bky1701]

Sure it is. It still is half as responsive as 3 was for me (on older hardware, even), feels clunky and unpolished, and still has not returned some of the features I used KDE 3 for. KDE 4 is a step backwards towards Windows, not a step forward, and I am certain that KDE 5 will be worse.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

WM

I think you mean DE. WMs these days are very flexible.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Fri13]

I love that users can actually continue using their loving software, even if corporation or community what is responsible maintaining the software is heading own direction.

I love KDE4 more than KDE 3.5 and that is because the speed and simplicity with great amount of features and now since 4.7 there is more than what 3.5 had. I have even ran 4.7 on old AMD Athlon 1800Mhz, 1 Gigabyte RAM with Nvidia GT4xxx and it just worked fine without problems. The HDD was bottleneck and when I tried SSD on it by swapping such to it with IDE adapter it just blow my mind out how fast KDE 4.7 has come from 4.0-4.2 versions.

People still don't like to give a change for newer KDE but it is their miss. They have rights to stick with KDE 3.5 if they want but I dont see a point on it so much.

I hope the Trinity 3.5 will get new ideas and features what can be added later then to 4.x or 5.x series if they are great and innovative.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Urban Garlic]

So you probably know this already, but for the benefit of similarly-minded but less-knowledgeable readers, there are many desktop environments for Linux -- open source breeds choice, after all.

We're mostly a KDE shop where I work, but there are users using xfce, fvwm, and xmonad here, and one who swears by gnome, but launches it from KDM, because our system has its big warning banner set up for KDM but not GDM or XDM.

So if they end-of-life gnome2 out from under you, you still have options.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[vurian]

No, killing the plasma-desktop process does not kill all your chance to start a terminal: krunner is a separate process, so alt-f2 will give you the minicli and you can start anything you want.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Arker]

It may be filled with gadgets, but it doesnt crash and burn just because a pencil tip gets broken off.

"The Desktop" is and has always been nothing but a very poor metaphor anyway. Get your damn desktop off my root window! ;)

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate freedom? A major point of open source is so that if you're dissatisfied with the direction a vendor goes, you can fork and maintain locally. That's what's going on here. You don't have to fucking use it, jerk.

Uhh... seems clear he doesn't use it.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[byuu]

One of the worst trends in computing is trying to make real-world analogies to everything. Who cares what the real top of your desk looks like? Your desk is not a personal computer, and vice versa.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[bmo]

>The desktop should not be a widget, gadget, or any other form of "app" because it's the desktop

Former OS/2 user here.

The Desktop should be an object just like any other object in the environment.

I take umbrage with your insistence that the root window is somehow special.

Also, your rant is otherwise so full of holes I will stop there since I would wind up writing a dissertation.

--
BMO - former KDE4 hater.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[SomePgmr]

And that's fine. Some people hate Gnome 3, while I happen to like it. I have no objection to anyone that wants to use older stuff, or new forks of older stuff.

But as is usually the case, the shouting is largely unidirectional. "Zomg, new shit sucks, it's totally unusable, I'm never going to use this, you're all jerks if you like it, get off my lawn."

It's a grating and juvenile process. Every time something gets an overhaul, everyone screams that "new isn't better", as if that's insightful. We all know that, and they are trying to make something better. If something is genuinely broken, file a bug report. If you just don't like it, that's fine too. There's no reason we can't be civil about it.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[X0563511]

He acknowledged that, had you cared to read a few more sentences before jumping to reply.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[vurian]

No, he did not. He talked about ctrl-alt-f2, which goes to a text console, not alt-f2, which opens krunner, aka the minicli, right inside the X11 session. You'd realized that, had you cared to read both his and my post before jumping to reply. Toodle-pip.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[unixisc]

Is the Trinity version# going to be 3.5, or 1.0, or something else? How do they plan to increment it? As for the name, I thought that a name like QDE (for Qt based DE) would have been more suggestive.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Fri13]

The desktop should not be a widget, gadget, or any other form of "app" because it's the desktop. It's supposed to take priority.

Then why you are using a GNOME 2.x where desktop is actually a Nautilus?
You did know that Nautilus is used to draw the desktop? Right?

And you did know that you can run just KWin as it is the window manager and you dont need to load a shell, the plasma? Right?

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Fri13]

Like what features you are waiting/missing?

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd use Gnome 1 if it wasn't for all the crazy eyecandy. It's just unusable with all that dazzle. I switched to X without the stupid window manager/de crap.

Haven't looked forward since.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[armanox]

I think that they've continued the KDE 3.5.x versions, IIRC this was marked 3.5.13 (but since link is slashdotted, can't be sure).

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Lord Kano]

Why do we have to fight change every step of the way?

Because not all change is progress.

I'm one of those people who absolutely despise KDE4. I used several versions and then two years ago, I discovered Trinity KDE. I think it's wonderful. If not for Trinity KDE, I would have gone with xfce or something else, but I lost all interest in KDE with the 4.x series.

LK

Re:Trinity 3.5

[epyT-R]

nothing wrong with fighting BAD change.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Compaqt]

I'm glad Gnome3 is working for you.

From my perspective, what's juvenile is: Desktop developers are paid by companies (Redhat, Novell, etc.) that get paid by companies that do actual work. Those developers then waste that money coming up with Fischer-Price interfaces that hinder people in doing real work as opposed to maybe opening up a single instance of Firefox for 30min, and then shutting down the computer. (Oops, you can't even shut down the computer in Gnome3 anymore, they took that option away.)

Re:Trinity 3.5

[epyT-R]

then do with your feelings like you suggest they do with their software. getting upset at others behavior in this case is pretty emo. you can't expect them not to express this dissatisfaction with the new software while you readily express yours about their expression.

I can understand getting upset when what's being touted as a replacement for an environment you depend on is complete crap. While there is nothing wrong with removing unneeded complexity to gain simplicity, today's trend in software (and gui) design is to eschew any capability/flexibility that prevents it from being simple.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Zancarius]

Your response to me in this thread twice is somewhat interesting.

My points have been that 1) it's personal preference (which you agreed with me on) and 2) KDE 4 has improved. So you imply you don't agree with me, agree with me in one response, and then you continue to seem intent on arguing what, exactly?

I thought about as much. Your responses to other posters resort to ad hominem attacks, name calling, and straw men. I suspect you're perhaps a little too emotionally involved in this debate, even though most of the people (like myself) don't really care a great deal.

Yes, I prefer KDE. It works great for me. You don't like it: That's fantastic! It's great that we have different tastes and preferences, which you have agreed to here. Yet twice you've replied to me with relatively negative responses that are mostly meaningless. To think that I was going to write a reply to the comment I cited in that link (#37924856) praising you for agreeing with my sentiment until I realized that your motives were simply to attack myself and others.

It's a shame.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[mirix]

I wish my desktop was a nautilus :)

Unfortunately they don't live long above their normal depths, shorter still out of water...

Re:Trinity 3.5

[SomePgmr]

I'm running Gnome 3 on an ~7 (iirc) year old machine and it runs just fine. Maybe it's too much for anything older than that... I haven't tried. Oh, and while you probably don't really care, shutdown still works fine.

As for the rest, that's the kind of inflammatory stuff I'm talking about. The fact that you don't like it doesn't mean they're "juvenile". They're trying to do something better, and many of us feel that they have. Apparently that includes the people that sign checks.

So as I said before, go ahead and use something else. Nobody is going to stop you, or judge you. Though it would be cool if you didn't say things that aren't true.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[SomePgmr]

Emo? I've been called a few things, but that one's a first.

So I guess I should clarify... I don't get suicidal or otherwise overly emotional when people piss and moan. Not sure where that came from. It's just the routine we go through every time someone overhauls something.

Constructive criticism is good. Bug reports are good. Even just disliking something is fine (I used to be a kde guy). But the childish tantrums, hateful nonsense and false accusations are both boring and worthless. Some people just don't behave like rational adults, and it's a problem.

So, cranky developer-type that doesn't tolerate wasteful noise drowning out constructive conversation very well? Maybe. Emo... not so much.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Compaqt]

I apologize if Gnome has now added back the shutdown option to the normal user menu.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Bang on. KDE 4.0 was a mess, and virtually everyone bases their opinion of KDE4 on the early versions. KDE 4.7.2 and up is pretty sweet. It works, and it works very very well, on all the hardware I've thrown it at. Stepping back to KDE3.5 is painful.. VERY painful now. It's missing so much. It's like trying to use Windows 3.1.

That said, Trinity is a good idea - Linux is about providing people with options. If people prefer to stick with something that is unsupported and deprecated by upstream, then they can.. they have to take the responsibility upon themselves to do so, but no one can stop them... or should stop them.

Re:Trinity 3.5

[Haeleth]

"The Desktop" is and has always been nothing but a very poor metaphor anyway. Get your damn desktop off my root window! ;)

Damn right. The purpose of the root window is to provide something to click on to display the main menu, and somewhere to place iconified windows. Kids these days with their "shortcut icons" and "widgets" ...

Looks nice.

[Haedrian]

I might give this a try. One of the reasons I stopped using KDE was because it was painfully slow on my poor laptop.

Re:Looks nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of a laptop is that? The only thing in my house that could not run it is an old laptop that even has trouble with Gnome2.

Re:Looks nice.

[Lanteran]

Good luck running kde4 quickly on my Pentium III laptop. Gnome2 still runs fine. Well, still meaning that it would if I still used it instead of fvwm....

Re:Looks nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have a slooooooow laptop then. I run KDE4.7.2 on my low end EEE Netbook and it performs rather well. I don't have speed or performance issues that are any different from any other WM I've tried (Gnome2, Gnome3, e17 etc).

QT 3.x still required?

[IBJamon]

I assume QT 3.x is still required. While it's technically Free software and all that, the subsequent additional freeing (LGPL) of QT 4.x in my mind makes it a lot more relevant. If that's the case, is there hope that this team would attempt to port Trinity to QT 4 in the future? Now THAT would really turn heads, at least in my opinion. I'd use it in a heartbeat.

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[Anonymous Coward]

Porting from 3 to 4 is not hard, it just takes time. Lots of typing. I've done it on commercial applications, without even using the 3->4 porting classes. So let's hope they concentrate on porting to Qt 4.x, I think that would make Trinity a bona-fide fork with a real future, even if no major changes are ever really introduced.

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[TheCycoONE]

They are porting everything to use an abstraction layer (I believe called TQ), which they in turn hope to port to QT 4, but it's a long process.

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[arcctgx]

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

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[Anonymous Coward]

They say that as of this release, they are the new official maintainers of Qt3.
However, I believe they intend to move to Qt4 eventually.

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good idea. Qt is an abstraction, or an abstraction, of an abstraction. Let's add another abstraction on top. Sorry... what was that about "bloated".

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo dawg! We abstracted your abstraction layer of an abstraction layer so now you can abstract your abstracted abstraction, yo!

TFYFY.

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[simcop2387]

Last I talked to the Trinity developers, they are working on QT4 but they were currently taking on other larger dependencies. Mostly HAL for doing device stuff. They are actually very nice on the #trinity channel on freenode.

Re:QT 3.x still required?

[yahwotqa]

Probably not on freenode, or not exactly #trinity:

11:28:18 !! [join/#trinity] me [~myself@unaffiliated/me]
11:28:18 !! Topic for #trinity: Project Trinity - Decentral, Modular, Autonomous A.I.
11:28:18 !! Topic set by unknown [] (Thu May 29 21:24:17 2008)
11:28:18 !! Irssi: #trinity: Total of 2 nicks (1 ops, 0 halfops, 0 voices, 1 normal)
11:28:18 !! Channel #trinity created Thu Jan 21 19:43:28 2010

Someone please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone please fork GNOME 2 and continue it. GNOME 3 and Unity are both unusable, while GNOME 2 rocks.

Re:Someone please...

[RDW]

Someone did:

https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment
http://k3rnel.net/2011/06/22/bluebubble-the-fine-manual/

Not sure how much mileage there is in these, though. Working on upgrading the crippled 'fallback' mode of Gnome 3 to something a bit closer to the Gnome 2 Panel might be more worthwhile in the long run. Meanwhile, there's Xfce.

Re:Someone please...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has already happened - the fork runs under the name of MATE.

Re:Someone please...

[Patch86]

Personally, I'm an XFCE convert. The Xubuntu variant looks and feels very similar to the classic GNOME 2 Ubuntu, it's not overly flashy looking (I don't want my GUI to dazzle, I want it to stay out of my applications' way), and it's relatively hardware friendly. It's not as diligent about being slim as it used to be- but that's not necessarily a bad thing when I'm trying to use it as a full desktop environment on modern hardware.

Although I've never tried GNOME 3. Not a big fan of Unity for normal usage, although it probably suits my small-screen devices (netbooks etc.) well enough.

Re:Someone please...

[Drinking Bleach]

I have to agree that forking GNOME 2 isn't quite as appealing as it might first sound. GNOME 3's fallback mode already works excellently (I use it!), and work really ought to be focused on refining that instead.

Re:Someone please...

[Compaqt]

Question for you: what is the program selection mechanism? Is it a drop-down menu like in Gnome2? Arranged by category (Accessories, Office, Games, Internet)?

Or do you have to right-click on the desktop to get a menu? Thereby implying you have to leave part of the desktop uncovered to work.

Re:Someone please...

[Jesus_666]

Xfce has a program menu just like Gnome 2. In fact, the only difference between the Xfce menu and the Gnome menu is that the Xfce menu contains an entry for the Xfce settings manager. (I use awn on Xfce; it used to be DockbarX but I made the mistake up upgrading the box to Ubuntu 11.10, which is hell if you want to use anything Gnome 2 related).

Xfce is pretty much what Gnome used to be. It's fairly simple but configurable and comes with a handful of dock applets - with all Gnome 2 dock applets being available if you install XfApplet.

Too bad there's no easy way...

[ToiletBomber]

...to get even earlier versions :P For some reason that I can only attribute to nostalgia, I've always wanted to use KDE 1 and KDE 2.

Re:Too bad there's no easy way...

[santosh.k83]

Me too. Loved the GNOME desktop that came with Linux Mandrake sometime around 2001 or 02. Those were the days. Desktops were lean, clean and got out of your way. These days logging into either of the big two (KDE, GNOME) desktops is like walking into a fair; lots of noise and eye-candy, making you gawp and try to find your way around...

Re:Too bad there's no easy way...

[X0563511]

I've not used gnome 3, but KDE 4 hardly feels that way. I get around just as well (if not better) than I did in 3.x

Re:Too bad there's no easy way...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a big fan of KDE1. It was very minimal but it was rock solid and extremely snappy. If you were a console person, it was great. At the time, I was running from my home account on a large LAN. I would set it up for those that asked. The network default was CDE. Needless to say, a well-configured KDE1 blew CDE out of the water. I had many takers. (Ooooooo how I loathed Sun's desktop's attempts.)

KDE2 was something of a slow starter and I never really liked it much. The early releases were extremely sluggish. This was slowly improving but then 3.0 come out. When I think of KDE2, I think of bouncing mouse animations that seem to actually bog down the CPU a bit to do. KDE 3 was not very much different from 2 but it run much better.

Re:Too bad there's no easy way...

[Richard_J_N]

You can! Download an old copy of the Mandrake installation discs. 7.2 will get you KDE 1; 8.2 will get you KDE 2. Having used both in their time, KDE1 is very much a first try, while the final releases of KDE 2 were actually pretty good.

Re:Too bad there's no easy way...

[Anna Merikin]

I remember those years -- Gnome on Sawfish under TurboLinux looked real good. I loved the way it glistened. But it kept crashing, so I went back to whatever KDE was current then, 1.1, 1.2 I forgit.

So I am reminded of this when I try KDE-4. Pretty but dumb and unstable as well.

I will try trinity!

Continue GNOME 2?

[Compaqt]

Great news about KDE3.5.

Now could we get a continuation of Gnome2?

We could call it Old Gnome Users of America.

Re:Continue GNOME 2?

[Chonnawonga]

It's happening. Check out the Mate project. Linux Mint is considering using it in future releases.

Re:Continue GNOME 2?

[Compaqt]

Thanks for sharing. Here's the link for it I found:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATE

I like polish and a good-looking desktop, but functionality comes first, and I basically just want to be able to work, not wonder what the flavor of the week desktop is now.

Re:Continue GNOME 2?

[unixisc]

I like the changed name, since it no longer stands for GNU Networked Object Modelled Environment. Heck, GNUSTEP is more of a GNOME than gnome is.

QT 4 still buggy and slow compared to QT 3?

[IBJamon]

I hate to reply to myself, but it looks like it was started but stalled due to QT 4 bugs and slowness. I found this through the slashdotted project roadmap. Is it really that much worse? Can anyone speak to this?

Re:QT 4 still buggy and slow compared to QT 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.
Qt4 IS that bad. the lead developer has put it off to fix more important problems. its slow, buggy as hell. There is no QA from nokia. it's terrible.

end of discussion :P

I don't see why Qt3 is irrelevant? it works, its fast, it's EXTREMELY stable.

Re:QT 4 still buggy and slow compared to QT 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only use Qt 4 personally, but I've never encountered show-stopping bugs with it.

There was a bug in Phonon that caused me to switch to GStreamer for a while, but they fixed it some time ago.

Can't really say anything about slowness as I haven't had the time to learn Qt 3 or GTK+ as a comparison. (Something is screwed up with GTK's scrolling, though, it seems to lag a lot on my system if I scroll too much... Like in a web browser. Compare uzbl and Arora to see what I mean, uzbl seems to stop responding under heavy scrolling whereas Arora is unaffected. Firefox used to have this, they may have worked around it.)

Re:QT 4 still buggy and slow compared to QT 3?

[BlueLightning]

Totally unsubstantiated claims. And FYI, porting something from Qt3 to Qt4 is not just a matter of switching libraries; painting among other things has to be done in a different way. This is one of the reasons why Plasma was written from scratch instead of porting Kicker in the first place.

Re:QT 4 still buggy and slow compared to QT 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

So instead of just rewriting the paint routines everything had to be rewritten from scratch? lolwut?

Re:QT 4 still buggy and slow compared to QT 3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any specifics? I've used both and to be honest, I like Qt4 much better. It also helps that the Windows port is now free.

good name

[kimvette]

Trinity is a good name for it, because the server got nuked!

Re:good name

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but I'd've liked "Keanu Reeves" more!

Re:good name

[lanner]

The fact that the server got overloaded is a testament to how much us KDE4 users hate KDE4 (and how much the KDE developers apparently hate us).

I've been using XFCE too and will probably switch my desktop here on a day where some upgrade breaks everything horribly, as it has several times in the past. However, I'll check out Trinity and see if it's worthy. I like the way XFCE looks, but there are a number of annoyances that I've not gotten past yet.

Re:good name

[Compaqt]

Let's all take this opportunity to vote with our clicks.

Get in touch with your favorite distro and let them know you want to upgrade to old Gnome and old KDE.

If you were on Ubuntu, let Mint know the direction you want them to go in the future.

Re:good name

[tomstockmail]

The fact that the server got overloaded is a testament to how much us KDE4 users hate KDE4 (and how much the KDE developers apparently hate us).

Not all of us hate KDE4, many of us love it so don't walk around like everyone hates it. Plus the Qt+KDE communities are tightly knitted. If you think that Trinity will still be "KDE 3.5" once it's ported to Qt4, you're very wrong. It will be KDE4 with less functionality.

gone in 3 posts?

[sl4shd0rk]

Nepomuk must be indexing the files on his server right now.

Re:gone in 3 posts?

[Edwin_OS]

ohh you're so right...

Bring back CmdrTaco

[gentryx]

...and stop posting irrelevant stories like this on the front page. KDE 4.0 was horrible, yes, but it's not like KDE 4 development was halted. The latest release is 4.7 and it's much more stable and feature rich than 3.5 ever was.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Zancarius]

...and stop posting irrelevant stories like this on the front page. KDE 4.0 was horrible, yes, but it's not like KDE 4 development was halted. The latest release is 4.7 and it's much more stable and feature rich than 3.5 ever was.

The problem is that Slashdot, like most other communities, tends to hold onto widely accepted opinions even if they aren't currently true (or correct). Like you, I agree: Early KDE 4 releases weren't up to par, but 4.7 is very, very well done. But, because there's this preconceived notion that anything KDE 4 is terrible, the myth is perpetuated ad infinitum.

Of course, there's also the group that wants to run it on 6+ year old hardware, even though there's 1) plenty of light weight projects that will work on old hardware and 2) other OSes like Windows 7 likely won't work well on very old hardware either.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[lpp]

I suppose it's silly of me to comment on this, but really, what is wrong with posting this? Okay, so 4.7 is available. Why does that invalidate someone else's effort to fork the 3.x branch? I think you're getting hung up on version-itis, the idea that a larger version number is inherently better, or in a less confrontational manner of putting it, that the changes in a higher version number inherently represent progress. Major version number changes are not necessarily better. Instead, think of it is significantly different. Yes, the point is to improve the system, but sometimes people disagree with the direction a project is taken on a subsequent major revision. Frankly, when people bitch about it, they are often told "if you dislike it so much, stick with the old version, it still works." Well, this guy took it to heart and is continuing development. As it happens, I think that's pretty freaking awesome.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Desler]

Or, you know, people have different tastes and opinions from you? No, can't be. It has to be just myths and FUD, right?

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[gentryx]

1. I've been using both, KDE 3 and 4 for years. I didn't make the switch because of "versionitis", but because 3.5 wasn't satisfying in various aspects (e.g. the broken menu editor, broken USB auto mounting, poor calendar storage format choices... I could continue this list endlessly).

2. What I'm questioning is not if "Trinity" is a good from a technical perspective, but the relevance of the project itself. People are free to do in their basements whatever they please, but not everything is worth being posted on such a high volume/high profile forum. This is a prime example. The work is irrelevant since the reason why it was started (KDE 4.0 did suck, after all) doesn't exist any longer (KDE 4.7 rocks). You'll never get enough manpower to keep up with KDE mainline. Thus, Trinity will trail behind, with the gap growing constantly. Just look other, larger projects: even Gnome is struggling to keep up the pace. The story just got posted because it triggered the right ./ buzzwords: Linux desktop and KDE 3.5 vs. 4.x.

3. Anyone who's used both, QT3 and QT4 will agree with me that QT4 was a huge step forward. E.g. the widget rendering infrastructure alone is now so much more elegant that it would be a reason to make the switch.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[sqldr]

what always annoyed me is the FUD that anything using 3D hardware is going to be slower. Maybe on a 2nd generation intel laptop model gfx chip, but you'd struggle to buy one. $5 can get you a basic GMA card well capable of it, and once you've offloaded your GFX to something which is -designed- to do that specific job, it's the opposite - it absolutely flies.

As for the "bloat" - people should try running top (or hitting ctrl-esc, since it's KDE). As the above says, QT4 is better than QT3, especially when it comes to memory footprint...

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Tarlus]

This story is extremely relevant to the Slashdot community. No doubt that KDE 4.7 is well-refined. However, KDE 4 and KDE 3 differ significantly in both how they are developed and how they are used. To have the KDE 3.5 forked into an actively-developed fork will not downplay KDE 4's significance nor its own active development. This just gives us users a choice between two considerably different desktop environments. People who like KDE 4 will stay with it, and people who don't like KDE 4 abandoned it a long time ago, so there's no harm done by keeping its predecessor alive under a different name.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, Taco would fix it. Sure. Crappy stories are *new* on slashdot. Heck, if he's gone for another month, I wouldn't be surprised if duplicate stories started popping up now that he's departed. Maybe even a story with a typo in it.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[impaledsunset]

KDE 4.7 is up to par with what?

- Printing is not "up to par". KDE 3.5 used to have a printing system that anyone could envy, in KDE 4.x printing barely works (bug 180051)
- PIM is not "up to par". KDE 3.5 used to have a sync feature, a bit clumsy, but it worked. The sync feature in KDE 4.x is only available in SVN and barely works. And don't get me started with syncing with my phone...

And I could cite you the bug database all day, giving you an example of bugs that make features really uncomfortable to use. I am subscribed to at least a dozen bugs, all that affect my productivity, while in KDE 3.5 I had little or no issues.
- I have issues with network shares.
- I have issues with instant messaging (granted, some of them existed with 3.5, but the fixes were commited right before the KDE 4 fiasco started)
- I have issues with the text editors
- I have issues with using KDE over SSH
- I have issues with performance (maybe I should upgrade my ancient quad-core PC with 8 GB RAM)

Most of these are not fixed in 4.7, which is not available for all distros yet, so even if they were, it doesn't matter. You know, KDE 3.5 was stable, mature and polished. KDE used to be a pain in the ass, but with 3.5 all the issues slowly disappeared. It was already available everywhere, in all distros. KDE 4.7 just got out, and it's filled with issues I cursed KDE 3.3 or 3.4 for. Compared to KDE 3.5, KDE 4.7 is still crap. And slow.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Waffle Iron]

...and stop posting irrelevant stories like this on the front page. KDE 4.0 was horrible, yes, but it's not like KDE 4 development was halted. The latest release is 4.7 and it's much more stable and feature rich than 3.5 ever was.

There's no question that KDE4 is now plenty stable. However, there must be plenty of people like me who: Can't stand the unintuitive way the UI of plasma applets and controls work; and/or strongly disagree with KDE's current "semantic desktop" goals.

After a couple of years of use, I really haven't found anything in KDE4 that's a compelling improvement over KDE3 other than that KDE4 is still actively maintained. What's worse for me, KDE4 has introduced many UI "features" that I find to be very annoying. (Maybe if I was a fan of eye candy, I'd have a different opinion. But I'm not.) If this project fixes the unmaintained code issue, I might go back to KDE3.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, some people are of the opinion that development stopped at KDE 4.0 and no progress has been made since. They formed an opinion 3 years ago and they'll be damned if they're going to be reasonable now. Incorrect use of the term 'FUD' qualifies as FUD, right?

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Desler]

So what? Why do you care? Is your life that pathetic that you really get so worked up that someone doesn't like the same thing as you?

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked up? Are you smoking something?

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[firewrought]

To have the KDE 3.5 forked into an actively-developed fork will not downplay KDE 4's significance nor its own active development. This just gives us users a choice between two considerably different desktop environments.

When you fork, you gain a choice and lose synergies. If Trinity gains steam, how much development effort will it pull away from KDE 4? How much energy will it take from application developers trying to target both platforms? Will Debian divert other packaging efforts to support this new desktop? And how much extra confusion or frustration will this add for Linux users? Choices you don't care about are, in fact, drawbacks.

I'm not arguing for or against the Trinity effort. Forks can bring value to the community, especially when solving a legal dispute, circumventing a stagnant core team, trying out something really innovative, or targeting a specialized set of interests. But fragmentation has a cost, and it's not as simple as saying more choices are always better.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[szo]

well...
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=277010
(granted, after mere 3 month and a huge flamewar, we got a status update!)

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

I have lost count of the number of times I have filed bug reports on the printing issue. In my opinion KDE 4 is still very much beta software and cannot be used in a professional office environment whilst these issues remain unaddressed. Shiny widgets are great but surely not at the expense of basic functionality.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[vurian]

Nothing is taken away from KDE. The trinity people are different people, and they are welcome to do what they want to do: they even do it right inside the KDE svn infrastructure. Their itch, they scratch, it's totally fine. And when I asked them to rename their fork of Krita (because Krita 2.4 is so much better that we all want to forget Krita 1.6), they did, no complaints. Great people, good cooperation. They only need to start showing up at aKademy or Desktop Summits.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

My performance issues in KDE4 went away after I upgraded my computer. I suppose the graphics card was the issue (KDE used to blame NVidia). A Geforce 4 wasn't good enough for resizing windows, but a cheap ass GT210 works without problems.

My problems with KDE 4 (Fedora KDE 4.7.2, 4.6.2, Debian KDE 4.4.5 tested):

- menus randomly close. Easiest noted at start up. Open the K-menu too soon and it will close on you. I think they copied this from Windows 98.
- can't map win+shift+ as expected), but doesn't do anything). Works in KDE3/Trinity.

I don't feel like testing it more until those are fixed. I also had trouble finding a readable panel theme. Light background with black text without any crappy effects or font shading (like in KDE3/Gnome2).

I'm currently running Debian 6 + Trinity 3.5.12. Before I've used KDE3 in Debian 5, Kubuntu, Fedora and Red Hat Linux.

PS. What's up with the ridiculous color scheme sliding animation in Konsole? I thought it would be removed after the first few minor bug fix releases as inconsistent with the rest of the UI, but it's still there.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Klassic plasma theme.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[fast turtle]

There's quite a few of us who prefer 3.5 over the Windification that 4.x has become. For example, in 3.5 I have multiple desktops to organize my work flows but under 4.x they decided to toss the baby out with the bath water and switch to the single desktop paradign. Doesn't help me get work done due to destroying years of customizations to support my workflows.

Simply put, if I wanted to use Windows, I'd damn well install it and throw out my productivity, yet I prefer to get stuff done, meaning that 3.5 still suits my needs. In other words "If it aint broke, then don't fix it!"

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Compaqt]

/.'ers waiting for the return of CmdrTaco ...

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Zancarius]

Here's what you said:

KDE 4.7 is up to par with what?

Here's what I actually said.

Early KDE 4 releases weren't up to par, but 4.7 is very, very well done.

I did not say that KDE 4.7 is up to par completely with 3.x's later releases, but I did state that it's "very, very well done." While I appreciate your efforts at putting words into my mouth, I'm somewhat disappointed that you had to twist my words to do so. Not that I'm surprised; this is Slashdot, after all.

1) I will concede that KDE 4 is not as feature complete as it should be.
2) I have stated before that I prefer KDE over Gnome, and prefer KDE in general.

But perhaps the most important thing is this:

And I could cite you the bug database all day, giving you an example of bugs that make features really uncomfortable to use. I am subscribed to at least a dozen bugs, all that affect my productivity, while in KDE 3.5 I had little or no issues.

You would be willing to spend the time citing a bug database (yes, I know this is tongue-in-cheek) but not at all interested in offering patches/bugs to the KDE project?

Here's the other side of the coin:

- I have issues with network shares.

I don't. They work fine for me.

- I have issues with instant messaging (granted, some of them existed with 3.5, but the fixes were commited right before the KDE 4 fiasco started)

I've never used Kopete, nor do I use a lot of KDE software. I've always used Pidgin. It works fine for my particular case, because I also use it under Windows. Having the same instant messenger across multiple OSes (Arch, Ubuntu, Windows) is of more utility to me than using whatever is "best integrated" with the environment.

- I have issues with the text editors

I don't. Kate works fine for me, and I tend to use Eclipse quite regularly otherwise.

- I have issues with using KDE over SSH

Not part of my use case.

- I have issues with performance (maybe I should upgrade my ancient quad-core PC with 8 GB RAM)

Never had issues with it on a Core 2 Duo with 6 gigs of RAM, and I don't have issues with it on my current system, either. Both had fairly recent video cards, though. Plus, you can turn off the eye candy with a shortcut.

Either way, what this suggests to me is that most problems with KDE are largely subjective and the topic of edge-cases that I've never personally encountered. Yes, these are issues that should be fixed, but you know what they say... patches welcome. :)

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

you're forgetting the overhead for pushing the gfx to the gpu.. yes it shouldn't be that bad, but it is. today's graphic card drivers eat a lot of cpu and the path from X to the framebuffer on the card is a sordid tale of misused apis and horrible code bandaids. thus a simple operation like dragging a window now engages megabytes worth of code and megabytes more of bitmap on the gpu. despite all this apparent 'acceleration', this process creates visible latency even when the system is supposedly idle. compare this to GDI+ on an S3 Virge in 1996... the latter's simple approach and tiny code size makes it fast on everything. ..and just because a piece of code is less bloated than its competition doesn't mean it is more efficient. Run kde3 on a modern system and it flies.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[gentryx]

Uhm, you DO have multiple desktops in KDE 4.x.

Re:Bring back CmdrTaco

[Anonymous Coward]

> Printing is not "up to par"

I print every day from KDE 4.7 with no issues... full control over what my printer can/can't do etc.

> PIM is not "up to par".

Known issue, and being worked on. The latest build of KMail and PIM are working very well now.. still not 100%, but vastly improved.

> And I could cite you the bug database all day,

Meaning what? That there are bugs? Well duh! There are bugs open of KDE 3.5x too... well there would be if they weren't all closed as Wontfix by upstream because KDE3 is a dead product.

> - I have issues with network shares.

I don't. I've got a complicated little LAN with multiple OSes, NFS and Samba, and have no issues at all.

> - I have issues with the text editors

Funny, they work here. I use Kate and it's fine. I also use KWrite.. no issues there either. For docs I use LibreOffice, and OpenOffice.. no probs there either... vi on CLI works fine too.

> - I have issues with using KDE over SSH

Exportind the display over SSH of VNC? Over VNC works perfectly fine.. use it every day. I don't bother with exporitng display over SSH.. had major issues with that on KDE3 so gave up on it a long time ago.

> I have issues with performance (maybe I should upgrade my ancient quad-core PC with 8 GB RAM)

There were performance issues with KDE 4.02 though to about 4.4ish... since then things are working very very well. I'm running it on a dual core AMD with 8GB RAM and a nVidia card.. and it's as fast as any DE. I run KDE4.7 on a miniPC with 3GB RAM and an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU.. no problems. Performs there far better than Windows 7. I run KDE 4.7 on an Asus EEE (1.6GHz, 3GB Ram and crappy Intel video) and it's also fine there... no slowness issues... it works very smoothly.

and Mate?

[KiloByte]

That's KDE, and what's with Gnome? Gnome3 consists nearly solely of regressions, there's barely any functionality left. The primary mode, "gnome-shell" is beyond words, acting as everyone has fat fingers on a 3'' touchscreen, combining worst ideas of iPhone and Windows Phone ("you can't run a program more than once", etc). The secondary mode, "gnome-fallback" is a bad joke too -- no usable panel, no desktop, no messing with the menu (try right clicking... try dragging...). Individual programs are no better: for example, someone had the brilliant idea of taking away the tray mode from RhythmBox. Oh, and network-manager (AKA "no network more complex than single DHCP") is a hard dependency.

There is a fork attempt called "Mate" but it doesn't look that promising yet. I wonder whether it's a matter of time, or if it's time to migrate to XFCE or something. As Linus and ESR said, XFCE feels like a big step back.

Re:and Mate?

[sqldr]

Gnome3 consists nearly solely of regressions

your opinion. not sure what you mean by running a program more than once - try the middle button. gnome 2 didn't have a usable panel. It had a taskbar cluttered with tasks. The taskbar was a bad overly clicky idea from day one. No desktop? You mean icons on it? I usually fill my screen with windows. Why would I want icons -underneath- my windows? You have to drag them out of the way first.

I agree with you about rhythmbox.. sort of. It needs to be a top-bar menu. They got rid of it and didn't replace it with anything else. Then again, it's still rather beta on gnome3 at present.

I believe that the network woes got mostly fixed in 3.2.

If I wanted to go back to a cluttered taskbar, not being able to find windows, and manually creating extra desktops rather than them just appearing for me when I need them, I would use gnome2.

Re:and Mate?

[Anonymous Coward]

"acting as everyone has fat fingers on a 3'' touchscreen" - You've obviously never tried to grab a gnome 3 window border.

Re:and Mate?

[tenchikaibyaku]

You'll be happy to know that this has been improved in gnome 3.2.

Re:and Mate?

[ohnocitizen]

The primary mode, "gnome-shell" is beyond words, acting as everyone has fat fingers on a 3'' touchscreen

WHEN will Gnome finally design a UI to accommodate my tiny tiny fingers? We are stuck waiting for Frodo to fork Gnome and give us GnomeHobbit.

Re:and Mate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you haven't checked out gnome 3 key bindings:
    ctrl + left mouse button: start new instance
    alt + hold left mouse: move stuff around
    alt + suspend = shutdown!

It's not like gnome 2 panel was really working that well, but you're right about the 'fat fingers on a 3" touchscreen' feeling.

What's worse is crashes, take a look at: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell

Re:and Mate?

[Anonymous Coward]

YOUR opinion. And a very incorrect one.

Gnome 3 is missing so many features of Gnome 3 it's not funny. I simply don't have enough time to list the mountain of lost functionality. If really liked dock over taskbars, there are plenty of docks for Gnome/Linux. Try AWM. Other than the workspace manager most of the functionality of GNome 3 was already present in Gnome 2 + a couple of apps like AWN, Gnome-Do and Compiz. So The transition of Gnome 2 to 3 has been mostly about "simplification" aka throwing away features and preference options.

Re:and Mate?

[Anonymous Coward]

rhythmbox have lower left menu instead of a top one. Appears on the notification area when you move over and it's pretty nice. Lots of things over there, like messaging and any "iconified" app.
Much better than in gnome 2 in my opinion, only use screen space when needed.

Re:and Mate?

[arose]

And Gnome 2 was nothing but regressions on Gnome 1, which in turn was only an ideologically inspired copy of KDE, which in turn was nothing but a crappy copy of Windows, which in turn was nothing but a crash-happy Mac clone on top of DOS, and so forth...

Re:and Mate?

[illtud]

That's KDE, and what's with Gnome? Gnome3 consists nearly solely of regressions, there's barely any functionality left. The primary mode, "gnome-shell" is beyond words, acting as everyone has fat fingers on a 3'' touchscreen, combining worst ideas of iPhone and Windows Phone ("you can't run a program more than once", etc). The secondary mode, "gnome-fallback" is a bad joke too -- no usable panel, no desktop, no messing with the menu (try right clicking... try dragging...).

Hear, hear. As a very happy Fedora Core user up until FC14 (and not just on my home machines, we're RHEL at work servers, and FC on dev workstations) I'm very unhappy with Gnome3, and just can't understand this terrible move, I've asked the dev team to stay at FC14 as Gnome3 is just a train wreck for me, I can't believe that the lunatics have taken over the asylum in such a way. It'll get better but in the meantime I'm now fighting my desktop rather than sailing it. Gnome-shell just doesn't cut it for a workstation (I'm sure if I had a 7" tablet it'd be fine) and the fallback mode is so buggy it's atrocious. Maybe a fresh install would help out, but I've nuked my .gnome* and the problems are still showstoppers.

Call me grandad, but I can't believe that they've dumped all "power users" (for want of a better term, I woudn't have put myself in that category before this) for this.

Re:and Mate?

[David Gerard]

Not a huge step back - I'm using Xfce with my favourite GNOME apps and it's not annoying me (which is my primary criterion).

IMPORTANT: If using Xubuntu, install fresh - any Unity infection on the system will mess with Xfce because it uses GTK+.

Re:and Mate?

[Anonymous Coward]

(try right clicking... try dragging...)

Try pressing the Alt key while right clicking and dragging.

incorrect summary

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Trinty's third release since the project started, not its first.

Play on words

[Arancaytar]

Is "Trinity" a deliberate allusion to "Unity"?

Re:Play on words

[Anonymous Coward]

Trinity has been around since 2008.

end of discussion

Re:Play on words

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Its an allusion to 3. As in KDE 3.5.

Re:Play on words

[AliasMarlowe]

Is "Trinity" a deliberate allusion to "Unity"?

No. Unity is merely one third of Trinity.
Its name is one of the few honest aspects of Unity.

Re:Play on words

[Lord Kano]

Is "Trinity" a deliberate allusion to "Unity"?

No. I believe it's a reference to the Holy Trinity.

As I understand it, Mr. Pearson is a devout Christian.
LK

Waste of time...

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE4 is miles ahead of KDE3. Yes it had issues at launch, but that was years ago. I guess the beauty of free software is people can cling to things if they choose. Doesn't mean I can't choose to think it's retarded.

So is this the release schedule? Updates every 5 years? Go for it...

Re:Waste of time...

[Tarlus]

I agree with your right to choose to think it's "retarded".
I disagree with your claim that it is a waste of time.

Re:Waste of time...

[Arker]

KDE4 is miles ahead of KDE3

"Ahead" how? Your statement assumes that there is some sort of objective, linear measure of progress that is universally agreed on as such, and that is far from the case. People that work as 'UI designers' naturally want everything changing all the time to keep themselves in work, but *users* of the software might well prefer that they quit breaking things that work.

Most people I know that use it seem to think that KDE 4.7 has mostly "caught up" with 3.5, a statement based on the same faulty assumption, of course, but still an interesting one.

Oh yeah, it is very well done

[SmallFurryCreature]

So please explain WHY in godsname KDE insists on copying a movie file from a samba share before playing it in a capable player? That is just plain annoying on small files but when you are talking about 20gb files it is just plain silly. This kind of thing is so fucking basic and since the same player can just play from the share with other desktops it is a complete and utter failure on the KDE team to prioritize on basic functionality over bling.

KDE dropped the ball. Polishing a turned over several releases so it shines a bit more still means you got a turd.

You are talking like a stockholm beating, believing your captor is becoming your friend because the beatings have gotten slightly less regular.

Re:Oh yeah, it is very well done

[willy_me]

Just mount via the command line or via fstab. I assume that GUI mounting is done the way it is to allow for better recovery with broken connections. After a week of being annoyed when mounting via the GUI, I setup an fstab entry and never bothered with it again - works great.

Re:Oh yeah, it is very well done

[shutdown -p now]

You miss his point. The player in question can directly stream from an smb:// URL - but the file manager is not aware of it, and assumes that it needs to make a local copy of the file before handing it over to the player.

And, IIRC, didn't this work as it should in KDE 3.x?

Re:Oh yeah, it is very well done

[Compaqt]

>Just mount via the command line or via fstab.

And what then is the reason for the existence of virtual file systems?

Don't you love OSS?

[metageek]

This is one of the best things about OSS. Anyone can fork and when there is a strong need, the fork will happen.

I'm spoilt for choice

I pitty the slaves of a their Master's view of computing (yes, fanboys, I mean you)

Re:Don't you love OSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

These 2 hairy nerds can't maintain millions of lines of code credibly though.

Re:Don't you love OSS?

[savuporo]

The problem with that is, you have all the forks around, and there are great time intervals where there isn't anything moderately stable and up to date to use.

My main working laptop is still on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and it's getting quite long in the tooth with the lack of up to date software features, even at base libraries level. For the time being, i practically have no upgrade path either, so if i want a particular up to date software package i am often forced dget -x/dpkg-buildpackage it from either Debian/sid or Ubuntu newer versions, and pray that they have not pulled in any further dependencies, sometimes just locally modifying the control files or debian/rules to work around these OR resorting to locally build some newer dependency packages too. It's far from productive and convenient.

IMO, this current brownian motion around "new" desktop paradigms is just a waste of everyones time. Neither Unity or Gnome 3 or KDE 4 should have never become the main choice of any desktop distros until all the regressions from their predecessors have been addressed.

This here isn't complaining about "too much choice", its about having A DEPENDABLE choice. Nothing wrong with experimenting with new tech and new ideas, but to use a sorry car analogy : Corolla has always been a no frills sedan.

Re:Don't you love OSS?

[baka_toroi]

So you get to choose among several pieces of shit. Hoozah!

Using Samba as your file server...

[gentryx]

...disqualifies you as a technical reviewer. Sorry. KDE isn't bad just because you can't get it to work with your Windows compatibility network setup.

Re:Using Samba as your file server...

[tibit]

There is nothing fundamentally wrong about using a samba share, sorry. That problem with KDE 4 persists no matter what sort of a share you're using: if it's not visible in the filesystem, there is usually no streaming. It sucks.

Re:Using Samba as your file server...

[gentryx]

Exactly my point: use the file system! Otherwise, you're still free to stream via other means. I use KDE, but stream using xine, which may very well stream from smb shares.

That said, I don't claim KDE was flawless. Clearly a system that copies a 20GB file just to play it once is rubbish in that matter, I'll grant you that.

Re:Using Samba as your file server...

[eldepeche]

Sharing over Samba is quick and easy: there are graphical tools for it, and pretty much every Linux distro has the client tools preinstalled. NFS is balls (forcing me to use the same UID on every machine? Well I guess I can spend a week learning how to configure LDAP or Kerberos...). AFP is capable, so if you only have Macs and Linux, that would work too, although SMB works about as well on a Mac as it does on Windows.

Re:Using Samba as your file server...

[gentryx]

FWIW, sshfs is pretty usable for Unix only setups. Don't know GUIs for it, though.

Re:Using Samba as your file server...

[tibit]

You can mount samba shares directly into the filesystem :)

Bring back 1920x1200

[AliasMarlowe]

Of course, there's also the group that wants to run it on 6+ year old hardware

This is posted from a laptop which is 8 years old, buddy. It runs Lubuntu 10.04 LTS, and rocks with it (LXDE). It was starting to suck a bit with Ubuntu 10.04 (Gnome 2) and with PCLinuxOS 2009 (KDE 3.something), but LXDE purged the bloat and revived the hardware.

other OSes like Windows 7 likely won't work well on very old hardware either.

In what way is that relevant? The laptop of which I spoke came with original XP (pre SP1), which ran OK on it, but sucked in so many ways (starting with the applications). I can't imagine running Win7 on it; probably more like staggering or slithering than running, actually.

So why don't I get a new laptop? Easy: this one has a nice 17" 1920x1200 display. All the new models (even from the same vendor) have nothing better than a shortscreen 1920x1080, if they even have that. The extra 120 vertical pixels are valuable.

Re:Bring back 1920x1200

[Anonymous Coward]

This is posted from a laptop which is 8 years old, buddy.

That doesn't actually earn you any bragging rights. It's an 8 year old laptop...that's so...dull, uninteresting, and mundane.

Re:Bring back 1920x1200

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, there's also the group that wants to run it on 6+ year old hardware, even though there's 1) plenty of light weight projects that will work on old hardware...

The poster wasn't telling you to get a new laptop.

Re:Bring back 1920x1200

[Zancarius]

Gee, I make a single (okay, a couple) posts praising KDE, and every single clown who has an axe to grind with the project feels that they need to speak up about their bizarre edge cases all while attempting to poke holes in my "argument" when my points were essentially (and I'll simplify this so you can follow more easily):

1) I like KDE 4 better than alternatives, because it meshes well with my use cases and my tastes and preferences. This is entirely subjective and debating this is about as stupid as debating which colors in the spectrum are superior.

2) KDE 4 works well on comparable hardware to what Windows 7 does. I'm qualifying that because I know there are people like you out there who would probably try to run it on ancient hardware, and the best way to offer a decent starting point is to point out a reasonable comparison.

I'm pleased that you've found LXDE to work well for your particular case. That's fantastic. I don't use it because it's too minimalistic for my taste. Again, this is subjective. It does work exceedingly well with old hardware; in fact, you'll probably find that with older hardware, you have no other choice but to use something like LXDE. I don't think the KDE project misrepresents themselves as being a superior choice for antiquated hardware.

other OSes like Windows 7 likely won't work well on very old hardware either.

In what way is that relevant? The laptop of which I spoke came with original XP (pre SP1), which ran OK on it, but sucked in so many ways (starting with the applications). I can't imagine running Win7 on it; probably more like staggering or slithering than running, actually.

Look at the blockquote. Now, look at the parts of your comment I've emphasized. Here's a hint: You've answered your own question. The reason for comparing KDE to Windows 7 is precisely because hardware that works well under Windows 7 is likely to work well in KDE. If you weren't able to extract that from what I wrote, then I'm afraid there's not much else I can do to explain it to you.

Does anyone here use this?

[pecosdave]

Do any of you happen to know if KAudio Creator still works in Trinity? I've yet to find a CD ripper that actually works anywhere near as well as KAudio Creator for ripping tons of disk at a time, I open an instance for each drive and it works beautifully. All the rest of the rippers I've used are buggy as hell or more complicated than I want to deal with for the size of collection I have to rip (what's with K3B skipping the first track? It's been a known bug for a long time). I might throw Trinity on the system just for that if it's still around.

Re:Does anyone here use this?

[shish]

Unless someone has seriously messed up, then all apps work in all desktop environments

ooooooh . . . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

i'd LOVE to fork Trinity!

*ducks*

Damn!

[halivar]

After my release-day copy of KDE 3.5 just finished compiling, too! Of all the luck...

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to try it! Thanks for the great work Trinity team!

Konqueror

[unixisc]

Will Trinity use the latest version of Konqueror as its default browser, instead of the still unready Rekonq? And will they use the most updated versions of KOffice and other K apps? I hope they don't start forking all those apps, but do what they can to get them running on Trinity. Oh, and hope that KPackage is a lot better.

When KDE 5 is out, it'll be running on Wayland. If Trinity doesn't merge back, I hope that they too take advantage of Wayland.

I do love kde 3

[Anonymous Coward]

just say'en (or repeating) " if it ain't broke don't fix it " seems how i keep hearing that i not understand it. you know becaus of the kde3 - kde4 shinangians. ( i still have debian on all my machines because of it )

Re:I do love kde 3

[Lord Kano]

just say'en (or repeating) " if it ain't broke don't fix it " seems how i keep hearing that i not understand it. you know becaus of the kde3 - kde4 shinangians. ( i still have debian on all my machines because of it )

I used to be a Mandriva user. I stuck with Spring 2007 just because I didn't want to give up KDE 3.5. For me, the deciding factor to move to Ubuntu was Trinity KDE. I would still be using Mandriva 2007 if not for Trinity.

LK

What are the differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

For those not in the know, could someone tell us what the differences are between KDE 3.5, KDE 4 and Trinity? How is this going to affect for example someone who comes from a Gnome or Windows background who maybe wants to switch?

Step back from what?

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE provides a traditional desktop GUI in the "spirit" of windows 2000 or xp. There is no missing functionality in that respect. If a traditional desktop environment is what you want, then XFCE does everything that KDE 4 or Gnome 3 does. Only faster and more responsively. As a long-time KDE 3 user who tried to adapt to KDE 4 and failed (several times), I can honestly say that XFCE is a full and mature replacement. I can't speak for xubuntu, but I can tell you that XFCE on arch linux is rock solid stable and fast.