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New Release of the Trinity Desktop Environment
mescobal writes: A new release of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is out. TDE is "a computer desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems with a primary goal of retaining the function and form of traditional desktop computers" which translates into a fully functional KDE 3 style Desktop. Something is missing in the new generation of desktop environments, since some people (perhaps more than "some") feel at home with Gnome 2 or KDE i3. They have repositories for Debian and Ubuntu-based distros. I'm now using it on Ubuntu 15.04, amazed about how well-planned things were in the previous generation of DE. We may have gained some things with Gnome 3 and Plasma 5, but we lost a lot of good features too. TDE brings them back.
The real issue with UI lately is the 'mobilization' of the desktop, to its detriment. Windows, osx, and linux all suffer from it now. At least the latter allows the user to run alternatives.
Unfortunately, even if you install a real desktop, you still suffer from the 'mobilization' of the web.
So many websites have now been redesigned for touchscreens to the point where they're utter crap on a desktop machine.
I really can't wait until this 'mobile' fad is over, and the 'UX designers' find some other fad to chase after.
That's what I was thinking... they gave me a Mac Mini at work about 4 years ago. I gave it a real try - several months, but couldn't get over the UI, and couldn't understand why people claimed to like it so much. So I powered it down and worked on my old Linux box. Then Ubuntu switched to Unity, and I was like "this again? I went back to Linux to get AWAY from this."
I think anyone can get accustomed to just about any UI, and I think we're mostly hung up on how things worked before, but unless those new "paradigms" actually prove advantageous to work, then it's not just a fear of something new or disliking a learning curve - why should I learn something new when it gains me nothing?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
There was a time when people thought Linux would become a contender on the desktop. That basically hasn't happened, and it's not going to happen in a big way. Thus linux users are starved for good native apps (kinda a chicken and egg thing going on too).
Now if you ditched KDE and Gnome and simply went with a full on clone of OS X, suddenly a whole ton of apps would come to Linux, whether it be running OS X apps as-is or whether you convince developers to do a simple recompile for Linux. Whether you like OS X or don't like it, the reality is this would boost Linux, bring apps, and give a shoe in for a possible desktop future for Linux.
And the reality is, OS X is actually quite good. Apple developers have always quite liked developing for the platform, users apparently like it, so nobody would be terribly upset.
Or you can keep running with the failed KDE/Gnome wars.
I never noticed. Of course, I never used KDE or Gnome or some other crappy "modern" window-manager. fvwm has all I need and excellent customization possibilities in addition.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've got to say that the Mac desktop peaked with Snow Leopard. I'm running Yosemite on my Macbook and it's really not all that impressive. I remember upgrading from Leopard and seeing a massive speed boost. Now it gets just a little more sluggish with every upgrade. The major feature upgrade? The fucking Apple Store.
perhaps you should do some research instead of relying on a headline otherwise it shows your ignorance.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Don't forget the removal of all gradients and everything shiny or glossy. Gotta keep those UX designers doing something, right?
Honestly, though, I barely notice any functional or speed difference. I have a Mac Mini I bought a while ago as an inexpensive dev box, which I'm using to port my game to OS X. I actually see the lack of significant changes as a *good* thing, and hope it continues. It means that Apple considers the desktop functionality and design to be stable, and has no need to radically alter the paradigm like MS tried to do with Windows 8.1, or to make a "unified" desktop for multiple devices like with Ubuntu.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Have you any idea how dumb that sounds?
Bollocks. Learning from mistakes is fine - in the lab. Releasing shit is inexcusable.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Key missing feature: simplicity.
For better or worse, "activities" is a confusing concept. It takes an abstract concept (the desktop) and another level of abstract concept ("workplaces") and adds YET ANOTHER level of abstract concept (an "activity") which fully requires the first two levels. The main session is itself an activity, which starts to become really mind-twisting unless you already know what an activity is.
KDE also has two different concepts for application: that of a traditional application and that of a "widget". This puts extra burden on users to get a global overview on how the system works.
They are other important "features" missing too. But I think simplicity is the main drawback, and for both activities and widgets, it's debatable if they pull their weight, so to speak.
Why should I have to fight with package dependencies and fiddling with config files every time some clique of nerds decides one DE is better than another? It soon became tiresome. Now that I've been on OS X for 3+ years I've never looked back. Its DE doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water every 12 to 18 months.
OS X doesn't suffer from the 'mobilization' of the desktop. I use OS X on a daily basis and not one thing that's going on in iOS-land has adversely (or even noticeably!) affected my existence. Perhaps you could elaborate on what you mean?
I actually see the lack of significant changes as a *good* thing, and hope it continues.
Amen! The constant chopping and changing (often for no apparent reason) on Ubuntu drove me nuts. The same with Windows, which I have to use at work (thank goodness for Classic Shell). Whilst I'm no particular fan of the Dock on OS X one good thing about it is that it hasn't significantly changed in 15+ years. Windows has done more damage with throwing out the Start Menu than Apple ever has by having a crappy dock instead of a decent task bar.
Woah. I can't remember the last time a website actually got slashdotted.
You do not think it is worthwhile to invest a few hours into a tool that you are going to use literally for thousands of hours?
You are right, that is hilarious. Human stupidity is really boundless.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
OS X doesn't suffer from the 'mobilization' of the desktop
That isn't quite true. It is suffering from 'mobilization', and also 'socialization'.
Snow Leopard (10.6) was the best release ever. Since then it has been going steadily backwards, albeit slowly.
I remember reading one of their '200 new features in the next release' that mentioned Facebook 46 times. That was when I knew it was all going to be downhill.
Apple got an early lead in the race to the bottom by taking away great things like expose, but then they seemed to falter a bit.
Linux and especially Microsoft were, as usual, late to the party, but have since caught up with Gnome 3 and Windows 8 respectively.
We'll have to wait and see who manages to get to their 'Hitler' version first.
For the love of god, not this shit. Linux is all about CHOICE. Who fucking CARES what the default desktop is? It's for people literally too lazy to bother trying to find their best match. Besides Unity and GNOME3 for the tasteless brainwashed, there is always KDE4/5. If KDE4/5 is too bloated to taste, there are Cinnamon, MATE (essentially GNOME2), Trinity (essentially KDE3) , Xfce, and LXDE. Enligtenment has its partisans too. If every one of those seem too heavy and in-the-way, you can use one of the large variety of old standby (and plenty of newer) window managers that are less than full-blown desktop environments. Some of the better-known and wiely-used ones are awesome, Blackbox, dwm, Fluxbox, FVWM, IceWM, ratpoison, twm, and Xmonad. That's far from an exhaustive list.
So, in other words, you can't come up with a SINGLE EXAMPLE of a missing feature. I figured you would fail. No one has yet come up with a list of these mysterious missing features in KDE4/5 that were present in 3. I think I can recall some configuration settings that were in 3 and are missing in 4/5, but again those are not really "features".
Simplicity is not a feature. It is an attribute; one which in fact implies fewer features.
it has been going steadily backwards, albeit slowly.
I thought that Adam Sandler mesured the velocity and arrived "At a Medium Pace".
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Releasing shit is inexcusable.
Indeed - I still remember when KDE 4 was released as "production ready". Then I dragged my background out of the screen. Then users unleashed. Then one of KDE developers said: "Who needs users, anyway?" (not sure if he used the word "anyway", though...)
The KDE team backed up by stating that the users were all wrong - that the release was just for developers. As if all the previous news and blog rants were nonexistent, and as if they did not specifically tell the users that they're done with KDE 3 maintenance and that they should better jump ship while it is hot...
That faithful year I moved on to Gnome. Then Gnome people did the same. Now I am using Cinnamon and haven't looked back since.
People are just not aware of the immense power they have with a system that lets them change parts of it and still get it working the way they want. ;-)
Oh, yes - sorry, Ubuntu users.
Thanks for your kind words! (b***s***).
I beg to differ, because I foresee - not actually, but it will come - the day when I take a smartphone with me all the time, and plug it into a dock at home or work, to continue where I have left off.
Currently I am not there, though I own a lenovo ('S') with docks at home and at work, so that I can carry this (still in a backpack) to wherever I go, including holidays, to always have with me what I need and want, with actual relevant data in the cloud.
This suits me totally, except of the size of the current machine and its weight. Once a smartphone is powerful enough (8 GB of RAM, multicore @ 2 GHz, uHDMI - am not a gamer) and allows me to apt-get like my desktop, I'll be the first person to buy it.
When I'll be on the road, in a bus or train, it'll be a normal smartphone, and when docked it will be a normal PC with monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers connected to the dock. And, no, I don't consider clutching any smartphone against my ears when phoning as comfortable, so when docked, a basic free-hands phone application will be my piece of the cake.
Logically, a unified interface would be the DE of choice, adapting to the screen size intelligently, not just scaling up icons to a threatening size like Unity. Not like Plasma 4 with almost nothing visible on smaller screens due to just non-scaling ('Search and Launch'). While I hate the old 'Metro' interface, it goes the first steps into that unified direction: On Windows Phone 8.X it is a usable interface, and it tries to become usable also on a large desktop screen. I can only hope that Plasma 5 will go into that direction, too, and just be much better.
How in the world will "mobile" go away? .... people are not going to return to physical keyboards anytime soon
Yes they are, or they have never abandoned them. Typing (as opposed to just looking and reading) is just awful on a touchscreen. Also, the fad for smallness is going away already. The marketing droids will represent keyboards to the next generation as a "new idea", as they did analog watches.
I have a 4k monitor, with 125% scaling enabled.
The website where I order food recently managed to increase the amount of whitespace and lack of content to such an extent that now generally 10 rows of food fit on the screen.
10.
The rows are (pre-scaling) at least 140px high, even if no images are included. It's ridiculous.
Of course it doesn't help that determining the dpi of the user device wasn't well-supported in the past. Responsive CSS should really use min-resolution instead of relying on pixel counts:
http://stackoverflow.com/quest...
The workaround for the whitespace plague of course is creating and always applying some user CSS code for frequently visited sites.
You are stuck in an argument from 2006. Keyboards will not go away - as you imply, they are needed for real work. But the consumer world has moved on - you absolutely do not need a keyboard for consumption, or even social media. The "fad of smallness" already was under attack when Zoolander parodied it in 2001. The iPhone began the re-biggering of mass market cell phones, and they seem to have settled on a 5-6 inch form factor given their current capabilities.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I never noticed. Of course, I never used KDE or Gnome or some other crappy "modern" window-manager. fvwm has all I need and excellent customization possibilities in addition.
Huh. I like to try out new things. Often the old things are better, but when declaring something as crappy, it's more authoritative to have first hand experience. That's why I keep a sacrificial machine around. It's actually fun, and sometimes you find out that the "smart guys" are full of it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
of Gnome 2 or the older standard desktops.... without being particularly slick and pretty. Xfce has the most customizable desktop because you can easily create launchers for apps, files, and urls. And you can define panels and dock those launchers into the panels..... something that Gnome never really offered.
Cinnamon is prettier and Unity is more "space-age" in its appearance. But when it comes to functionality, Xfce gives me what I need.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Hmm, I don't remember the KDE 4 people saying that the early releases where production ready. I do remember that the KDE people use another version system. x.0, x.1, x.2 are all releases that aren't ready yet. This was the case with KDE 1.x, 2.x and 3.x. You were better of waiting for the x.3 or even x.5 release to have a production ready release. But KDE did not start as a GPL project and they didn't use the same version philosophy as GPL projects. From the nineties I still remember an interview with one of the developers that people had to wait for a x.5 for a stable release, but where welcome to test x.0/x.1/... releases to help fix bugs.
The big problem with KDE4 was that major Linux distribution ditched KDE3 for KDE 4.x where x
I never had problems with KDE4, but of course, the first KDE4 I installed was 4.8 which was production ready and remained stable throughout every update.
The biggest problem I have with the desktop environments is that they just seem to bring an update to their project: Gnome 2 to 3, KDE 3 to 4. But in reality it is a completely different program. It would have been better if Gnome 2.x was just the latest Gnome. They should have chosen a different name for Gnome 3. Maybe Shell DE or whatever. This way people could still install Gnome 2 a long side the latest product of the creators of Gnome. Currently is it impossible to install Gnome 3 next to Gnome 2 since one updates/upgrades the other.
The KDE people had to name KDE 4 just Plasma. So you could still choose to install the latest KDE (3.5) and give Plasma a try. Now KDE4 was an upgrade of KDE 3.5, but it was not production ready. You could have a system with Gnome, Shell, KDE and Plasma. Two DE made by the Gnome team and two DE made by the KDE team.
It seems that they wanted to keep the current user base by not changing names, but instead of keeping them they alienated their user base with confusing decisions. I personally like the Gnome Shell idea, creating workspaces on the fly. I love it. But Gnome 3 came only usable (bug free and enough features) starting from 3.10 for me. I remained on an old Debian old-stable for my daily work. That shouldn't have been necessary. They could have simple given Gnome 2 to the community. Gnome 2.13, supported by the community (not by fedora/red hat). Bug fixes where enough for me. I didn't need extra features, nobody did I think. And there was this add on system anyway that could add some features if you really wanted. Making it compatible with never versions of Glibc or the Kernel, that was all that was necessary. And I think that could be easily achieved by the same team of people that are now doing lots of hard work with a fork of Gnome 2.x without needing to choose a non related name like Coriander or was it Cinnamon?
Now we have these DE that are forks from 'finished' DE of the Gnome and KDE team that have names that most linux users never heard about, and that very little mainstream Linux distribution care about. If you want to DE of your choice you have to be lucky that there are repositories for your version of the distribution and have to be knowledgeable enough to know how to add those repositories and how to install those DE's without messing up your system.
I got a UHD monitor and what I really miss is a simple way to say "This application is stupid, tell it that my screen is 1920x1080 and scale it 200%." Same thing with browsers, though they could optimistically render images at full resoulation if the image file has higher resolution than the display size.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Its DE doesn't throw the baby out with the bath water every 12 to 18 months.
You only say that because you have only been using OS X for 3+ years (assuming the 3+ means less than 4). It's possible you haven't noticed because after only 3+ years, you aren't familiar enough with the Mac to notice when something goes missing.
Workspaces arbitrarily changed from a useful grid to mandatory linear layout. Ditching a working file search for Spotlight that only allowed results to be sorted based on name, kind or "last opened". Dropping features during a crusade to eliminate features requiring filesystem metadata then turning around and going full metadata without reimplementing the lost features. Replacing mDNSresponder with discoveryd for no good reason since discoveryd didn't work, the proof being that they switched it back a few updates later. All of a sudden refusing to display users' custom icons is another one.
If you stay on the Mac, you will find Apple is constantly throwing out the baby with the bathwater, replacing what works with what isn't ready and leaving users with no recourse because Apple only supports the most recent couple of OS X versions with security updates.
OS X doesn't suffer from the 'mobilization' of the desktop.
Bullshit! There are some things Mac does quite well ( having quick look would be awesome on my Windows / Linux machines ), and others that suck. It is no different than any other OS.
I started to use a Mac at OS/X 10.9 since they are so heavily used in academia. 10.10.x switched over to the iOS shit-tastic flat look on everything. It is atrocious to try and differentiate between UI elements now on a default install. Thankfully there are more than a few UI enhancements ( free even ) that can be installed to make it not look like a flat sheet of paper on the screen.
I won't even get into the blur crap they slapped all over the UI after they copied it from iOS land either....
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
I've said for a while now: Computer UI's, Web Design, Audio, Useability and reliability all peaked in 2007-2008. Since then we have all been treated to a increasingly farcial "beta" of the Tablet/iDink industries attempt to turn computers into Fischer Price toys. Future genertions will look back on the last ten years as a stagnation point of software on all fronts.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Can you give any examples of how recent versions of OS X suffer from mobilization?
Expose didn't get taken away, it just got renamed to "Mission Control" and got merged with Spaces (which was a good idea) in OS X Lion. They also made it work with multitouch trackpad gestures (i.e. you can activate it by swiping up with 3 fingers). That was probably iPhone-inspired, but it was done in a way that was very suitable for a desktop/laptop environment.
The only thing I can think of that got a bit of a negative reaction was the flat design that was introduced in Yosemite. But this has nothing to do with mobilization, it's just a coincidence that both the mobile and desktop OSes moved towards a flat design at the same time.
so, do you sell your car when you get tired of the color or no longer like the wheels?
Maybe you should paint the car with one of the very many colors that are available and put some nice wheels on it to match. Sounds like someone doesn't like to get their hands dirty. Maybe Linus isn't for you.
Actually 99% of the population do sell or (wish they could replace) when they tire of some aspect of their car and pay mechanics to get their hands dirty, others like being weekend mechanics while others grew out of it and found other things to keep us busy
Same with computers an IT products
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you