Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

[Posted November 8, 2011 by corbet]

KDE.News looks at the 3.5.13 release from the Trinity Desktop Project. "For people who prefer the KDE 3.5-style desktop, a new version of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) has been released. Trinity is a continuation of the KDE 3.5 Desktop Environment with ongoing updates and new features." The release has a new control panel for monitors, a new compositor, and a number of new applications.

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Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 16:31 UTC (Tue) by troy.unrau (guest, #73654) [Link] (1 responses)

I appreciate that this news is coming from the KDE news site directly. When the KDE 4 product was released, most of the developers jumped on the new architecture immediately, but it was clear that if people wanted to continue to maintain or further develop KDE 3, that the KDE team would support their efforts. Now this is the spirit of open source at its finest.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 22:27 UTC (Tue) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]

I sure hope they get to cooperate and share new code and bug fixes with KDE4, because some of the greatest software that come with KDE actually had the same goodies and bugs in both KDE3 and KDE4. The ones that come to mind are Kate and KWin. Best KDE programs are far from being rewritten from scratch in KDE4.

At this point in time though, I consider KDE4 satisfying and I wouldn't replace it with another desktop (be it a free-software one, or Windows/OsX). Surely, there are still regressions over KDE3 (SystemSettings seems more untidy than KControl was, the new NetworkManager interface behaves worse, etc.), but long standing bugs do get fixed, Plasma is finally stable and I like the new panel more than Kicker, Dolphin does a great job, GwenView and Kate get new features, etc.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 16:43 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

They should team up with MATE desktop project and develop 'Retrograde Linux'.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 17:53 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (2 responses)

"""
They should team up with MATE desktop project and develop 'Retrograde Linux'.
"""
More aptly named, "Slackware" </joke>

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 19:14 UTC (Tue) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] (1 responses)

...but a bad one.
Slackware is quite up to date and rocks :-)

Alex

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 2:56 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

I think you meant Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Except that GNOME 2.32 (the basis for MATE) is too advanced for that. :-)

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 19:13 UTC (Tue) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

Actually call it "Functioning Linux" or "Usable Linux"

Or "Linux without a crack addled UI for iPads"

Sure it's a joke, and it would be funnier if it weren't so true.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 8, 2011 22:28 UTC (Tue) by davi (guest, #18853) [Link] (1 responses)

I hope it be packaged for the next Debian release.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 1:19 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The Debian KDE/Qt team are focusing on KDE 4 so if you want Trinity in Debian you will need to start working on it or just use their PPA.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 8:00 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (27 responses)

From what I understand, they are just supporting the old KDE3 codebase. It would be great if we could get it ported to QT4/5. I really like features like seamless scaling and QT5 performance optimizations but I dislike KDE4 desktop itself.

I'm sure, a lot of other developers also feel that way.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 8:58 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (1 responses)

They actually are working on their own Qt3/Qt4 compatibility layer (probably the main incentive being not to have to package Qt3).

But from what I hear it is too straigtforward (a passtrhough for Qt3 calls and some just-in-time workarounds for Qt4 calls). It's probably the best they can do with their current manpower, since it allows existing apps to run with Qt4 with little/no modifications, but as it stands it is less performant than Qt3.

A proper port to Qt4 requires some refactoring, and that in turn requires a lot of manpower. Maybe they can make do with the compatibility layer while they slowly port apps one at a time, but a slowdown in the meantime is a tough sell, especially for a project like that which attracts low-speced machines.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 16:08 UTC (Wed) by rxu (guest, #81284) [Link]

Indeed. It is called TQt, and it fully supports Qt3 right now.
There is indeed an ongoing port to allow TQt to work with Qt4, but it is stalled due to lack of manpower.

It'd be great if people could help... Maybe we could even have a Qt5 port ;)
(Assuming Qt4 gets done first...)

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 21:58 UTC (Wed) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link] (24 responses)

"I dislike KDE4 desktop itself"

Which parts of KDE4 desktop do you dislike compared to KDE3? Since I'm a happy case of a user that migrated from KDE3 to KDE4, I'm genuinely interested in what the unhappy think on this.

I already suggested in a previous post that, from a user perspective, lots of things in KDE4 are a direct continuation from KDE3. The most visible differences between KDE3 and KDE4 are actually Plasma and its KWin integration. Also the KDEPIM applications have got a rewrite too, but otherwise lots of things are very similar.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 22:58 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

How do you put directories "on the desktop" with KDE 4 ?

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 9, 2011 23:09 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> How do you put directories "on the desktop" with KDE 4 ?

You have two options: place one or more "Folder View" widgets on the normal desktop containment, or change the containment type to Desktop Folder (or similar) in the desktop settings dialog. The former approach lets you arrange views of as many directories as you want; the latter recreates the KDE 3.5 desktop style, with icons from one directory of your choice directly on the desktop background.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 3:04 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (21 responses)

KDE4 is just flaky and unusable. It has a lot of flashy stuff, but useful things suffer.

For example, you can rotate desktop widgets. Looks cool on Youtube, but in reality nobody wants to do this (not in the least because rotated fonts look like krap).

Or another example - a desktop ball widget which bounces around the desktop. For me it bounces so fast that I can't catch it to make it stop.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 9:41 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (20 responses)

Those are examples of useless things, sure. They don't in any way back up your argument that it is "flaky and unusable".

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 15:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (19 responses)

Well, it still is and KDE4 distinctly lacks in polish. It feels like a work-still-in-progress even after 3 years.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 16:16 UTC (Thu) by ean5533 (guest, #69480) [Link] (18 responses)

You still haven't provided any evidence of your claims. Can you give any real examples of why KDE4 is "unusable"?

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 20:52 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (15 responses)

Well, apart from a few blatant bugs (like screensaver not locking the screen or buggy taskbar) - how can I check which application claims a certain global keyboard shortcut?

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 21:00 UTC (Thu) by ean5533 (guest, #69480) [Link] (8 responses)

No idea, I'm not a KDE user. However, a quick google search indicates that the way to do it is under System Settings --> Input Actions (or run khotkeys).

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 21:24 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (7 responses)

There's no "Input Actions". There's "Shortcuts and Gestures" setting. Ok, we open it and what do we see?

https://picasaweb.google.com/101124040654278670402/Bugs#5...

So I'm supposed to check through a list of about 20 applications to check which one has grabbed the shortcut. Very semanticly desktopy.

Oh, and several shortcuts are not listed there. For example, clipboard daemon grabs ctrl-shift-ins shortcut (which I already use extensively in JetBrains IDEA) and it can't be configured anywhere.

Then there's my taskbar: https://picasaweb.google.com/101124040654278670402/Bugs#5... There are several bugs there - window captions are squashed and incorrectly positioned (taskbar works fine for the first several windows and then starts to behave incorrectly).

Then there's an icon telling me that I have pending updates. Except I don't - I update my system using "apt-get dist-upgrade" and KDE doesn't understand it.

Then there's a problem with shortcuts - I can't change their icons. So shortcuts for bash scripts on the taskbar all look the same.

Then there's a bug with taskbar positioning - I put it on the top of the screen and KDE stubbornly places it in the CENTER of the screen during the startup so I have to drag it back to the top each time I reboot my computer.

...and so on and so on....

KDE just isn't polished. And why would it need to be polished? After all, only its developers use it to fiddle with all the semanticy thingies.

My taskbar doesn't work correctly, but I can share it on the network so other users can access it remotely.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 10:41 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (3 responses)

Thanks for replying with some concrete issues - could have done without the additional snarky comments however.

several shortcuts are not listed there. For example, clipboard daemon grabs ctrl-shift-ins shortcut (which I already use extensively in JetBrains IDEA) and it can't be configured anywhere.

That's not a global shortcut, it's just defined locally for any KDE application that can paste. However, you can go to "Standard Keyboard Shortcuts" and disable it there, and it will apply to all KDE applications. I've just tried several non-KDE applications with this setting changed, and none that didn't grab Ctrl+Shift+Ins themselves did anything. So I'm not sure what's going on on your system, could be a bug.

Then there's an icon telling me that I have pending updates. Except I don't - I update my system using "apt-get dist-upgrade" and KDE doesn't understand it.

This is a distro-supplied utility, AFAIK it is not part of KDE. Besides, if you don't want the notification, disable it (for Apper you just right click, configure, set "check for updates" to "never").

So you list some legitimate issues here, but no crashes or anything else that would fall into the "flaky" category. The taskbar one appears somewhat obvious though, and I've seen that here once (although now that I try to reproduce it on 4.7.2 I can't seem to do so, perhaps that's why no developer has fixed it yet...).

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 16:51 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

>That's not a global shortcut, it's just defined locally for any KDE application that can paste.

Nope. It's intercepted by clipboard app to show the clipboard ring. I can trigger it from IDEA which is decidedly NOT a KDE application.

>So you list some legitimate issues here, but no crashes or anything else that would fall into the "flaky" category.

Well, with that attitude my software is perfect. After all, it doesn't crash. Oh, and when it crashes it doesn't take out the whole building. So that's OK.

>The taskbar one appears somewhat obvious though, and I've seen that here once (although now that I try to reproduce it on 4.7.2 I can't seem to do so, perhaps that's why no developer has fixed it yet...).

And that proves my point.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 17:45 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (1 responses)

Nope. It's intercepted by clipboard app to show the clipboard ring. I can trigger it from IDEA which is decidedly NOT a KDE application.

What do you mean clipboard ring? If you mean Klipper, just close it, that will determine if that's the source of the problem. It does not behave that way on my system, FWIW.

Well, with that attitude my software is perfect. After all, it doesn't crash. Oh, and when it crashes it doesn't take out the whole building. So that's OK.

I didn't say it's OK that these issues exist and I definitely didn't say it's perfect. You said "flaky and unusable", I took issue with that description.

And that proves my point.

No, it does not.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 12, 2011 18:53 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

What do you mean clipboard ring? If you mean Klipper, just close it, that will determine if that's the source of the problem.

In the interest of balanced criticism here, it should be noted that Klipper was awful in KDE 3 as well. It was one of the first things I removed from the taskbar after having popped up for the tenth time wanting to open on my behalf some URL or other I was merely copying.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 10:57 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

Your taskbar problem is one that I just started running in to. I've been running KDE for several years, but a few weeks ago I started running microsoft communicator via citrix and it appears that something that is happening with this software opening and closing windows is reserving spots on the taskbar that do not get freed up again later. I did not have this problem while running a handful of other apps via citrix over the last year or so.

given that citrix is a closed source app, I haven't tried to generate a bug report on this. If you can trigger the problem with some other app, I would be very interested in finding what it is to have some chance of tracking it down.

If what you are seeing is similar to the problem I am having, there is probably one app you are running that adds itself to the taskbar (either when it starts or when it pops up a new window) and that spot doesn't get freed up when the application/window closes. can you identify what app is triggering this?

as for changing icons. if you right click on the shortcut and go to 'edit launcher', in the window that comes up, click on the icon and it will pop up a new window to let you select a different option (I assume that by shortcut you are taking about an icon on the taskbar here)

with your task bar positioning, my guess is that somehow you are not ever getting the change saved after you reposition it. next time you reboot your system, try logging in, making your changes, and then log out and log back in. I've found that sometimes the desktop changes don't get saved until you actually logout, so if you reboot the machine without going through an official 'logout' it doesn't save some things.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 16:48 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I'm not using anything unusual, apart from IntelliJ IDEA and JIRAClient - both are Java applications and I'm using a stock OpenJDK JVM for them. No other closed-source software. I don't understand what triggers it, but it happens pretty regularly.

>as for changing icons. if you right click on the shortcut and go to 'edit launcher', in the window that comes up, click on the icon and it will pop up a new window to let you select a different option (I assume that by shortcut you are taking about an icon on the taskbar here)

Well, there's no such option for me. I can change icon for the file type, but of course it changes it for _all_ bash scripts.

>with your task bar positioning, my guess is that somehow you are not ever getting the change saved after you reposition it. next time you reboot your system, try logging in, making your changes, and then log out and log back in.

Does not work and it would still be a bug in any case.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 13, 2011 20:56 UTC (Sun) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link]

> with your task bar positioning, my guess is that somehow you are not ever getting the change saved after you reposition it.

I had a problem like that once, where I added an icon to the panel, but after restarting the desktop, it was gone. IIRC, the cause of the problem turned out to be that while quitting the desktop, some process would crash rather than exit normally; whereas if I had compositing turned off (Alt+Shift+F12) when quitting the desktop, the crash wouldn't happen (and the settings would be saved correctly). So, it's possible that the bug here was actually in the i915 video driver and/or Mesa.

(Incidentally, I've noticed a different bug with the panel: with the panel in pop-up mode and positioned at the bottom of the screen, the area where you need to put the mouse pointer to make the panel pop up will initially be near the top of the screen instead of along the bottom edge; but when you pop up the panel for the first time after starting the desktop session, the activation area moves to its correct location.)

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 21:23 UTC (Thu) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link] (5 responses)

At our insistence you came back with valuable examples :) Please come up with more.

I see your point with the shortcuts, the SystemSettings application does not show all global keyboard shortcuts, only the ones of KDE4 applications (I know my old Amarok has reserved some, but they don't show up there). So yes, I don't know any way of finding a global shortcut; was there one in KDE3?

I don't know about buggy taskbar and screensaver, but please report bugs. For the global shortcuts I'll put a bug myself (but unfortunately I wouldn't know how to also make the fix).

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 10, 2011 23:47 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

Yes, there was a way to do it in KDE3.

Here are other examples of braindeadness in KDE4: http://lwn.net/Articles/466857/ And that's just in KDE desktop. I have scores more of examples in other applications (like Amarok) or Krita.

It seems that KDE developers have actually given up on doing anything useful. From my point of view, many man-years were spent on intrusive technology that actually has no positive impact while other 'boring' parts of the system were being neglected.

We still don't have a single 'killer case' for the whole Semantic Desktop initiative. Right now it just provides file search functionality and eats quite a bit of RAM.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 5:26 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

Ok, so I will bite. What is, according to you, braindead in Krita 2.x compared to 1.x?

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 12, 2011 6:48 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

And? Can you by now tell me why I've given up doing anything useful and what's so braindead in Krita compared to 1.x?

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 13, 2011 7:01 UTC (Sun) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Nothing? So much for "scores of examples". Calling people's work "braindead" is neither polite nor respectful, "Cyberax". Claiming to have scores of examples but not providing them is not informative.

In the meantime, yes, I know that we've got about a hundred known bugs, which we are trying to fix. But I also know that professional artists use Krita to earn their living with.

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Nov 11, 2011 22:41 UTC (Fri) by alecs1 (guest, #46699) [Link]

Here you have the global shortcuts one: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=286375

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Dec 4, 2011 19:56 UTC (Sun) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm using KDE4 on Debian Stable and while it's otherwise OK, the K-button menu is usability-wise just awful.

I boot & shutdown the computer daily. Shutting down the machine from the KDE4 menu works like this:
1. click K-menu button
2. move mouse a large distance to right + a bit up
3. move mouse up to select Shutdown
3b) If mouse went a bit left, over Recents icon, restart from 2)
3c) if mouse went a bit right, out of menu, restart from 1)
4. Click
5. Move mouse to the center of screen and click Shutdown
(or wait the countdown)
6. Cancel redundant KWallet popup that never came on front

Bug 6) is hopefully fixed in newer KDE4 releases. The cases 3b) and 3c) are really annoying. If I click to get K-menu open, why the heck it closes without a click?

Secondly, I have *a lot* of applications installed that I use rarely. So I don't remember what are their names (so that I could just type their name) or in which submenu they are.

Instead of just moving mouse over the submenus like I could do in KDE3, now I need to click open each of the submenus and their submenus, and then click back buttons to get back. This is really tedious. Several dozens of clicks to launch some rare app instead of just moving mouse a bit and doing a single click. A real design win.

While "lots of apps" is probably a corner case, for many people shutting down the computer isn't.

Btw. Note that from keyboard the shutdown works OKish, one can use Ctrl-Alt-Del and arrow keys. The dialog coming up with that just looks crap, icons are half outside the buttons and clipped by dialog borders (this may be affected by the dialog layout being buggy in regards to sizing caused by localization).

If many of the KDE apps weren't so nice, I would use XFCE, maybe even without compositing to get a bit more speed. :-)

Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive (KDE.News)

Posted Dec 4, 2011 20:00 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

it sounds like you should right click on the K icon and then click "switch to classic menu style"

this option made me much happier when I noticed it.