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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."
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.
Why do we have to fight change every step of the way?
Because not all change is good?
Nepomuk must be indexing the files on his server right now.
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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.
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.
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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.