Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

By Joe Brockmeier
May 20, 2024

As the shiny new KDE Plasma 6 desktop makes its way into distribution releases, a small group of developers is still trying to preserve the KDE experience circa 2008. The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), is a continuation of KDE 3 that has maintained the old-school desktop with semi-regular releases since 2010. The most recent release, R14.1.2, was announced on April 28. TDE does deliver a usable retro desktop, but with some limitations that hamper its usability on modern systems.

TDE got its start in the wake of the rocky launch of KDE 4.0 in 2008. The final KDE 3 release was 3.5.10 in August 2008. That final release was followed up in April 2010 by TDE 3.5.11, which brought modest improvements, bug fixes, and made it possible to install TDE alongside KDE 4. The project broke from the 3.5.x versioning with R14.0.0, announced in December 2014. ("R" stands for "release".) One of the highlights of that release was an upgrade to TDE's fork of Qt 3, TQt3, which added multi-threading support.

Since then, the project has not had another major release, but has continued with incremental updates with bug fixes, small feature enhancements, and work to keep the desktop up-to-date with mainstream Linux distribution releases. None of the major Linux distributions have an official TDE spin or include its packages in their official repositories, so a large part of the project's work is creating packages for popular distributions. TDE packages are available for Arch, Debian, Devuan, Fedora, Mageia, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Raspbian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu. Instructions are also available to build TDE for FreeBSD from source. R14.1.2 comes with a handful of new themes, minor feature enhancements for TDE applications, and a number of bug fixes. It also adds support for Fedora 40 and Ubuntu 24.04, and drops support for several distributions that are at end-of-life.

Obviously, the target audience is the user who loved KDE 3 and has no desire to switch to later KDE releases or alternate desktops. What might make it compelling for other users is its low resource usage, themes, and extensive configurability. The desktop and its applications were snappy even in a virtual machine configured with only 2GB of RAM and two vCPUs. Users can tweak the user interface and behavior of TDE down to the most minute details. Want Windows 95-ish buttons and title-bars, a purple and gray color scheme, and drop-shadows for windows? All of that is possible. A violation of good taste, perhaps, but possible. TDE also works nicely with other old-school applications that have tray icons, like Claws Mail, that don't integrate quite so well with recent desktops like GNOME 46.

Applications

TDE comes with a full suite of classic KDE applications, including the Konqueror double-duty file manager and web browser, Konsole terminal emulator, Okular document viewer, Kontact "personal information manager" (PIM) suite, DigiKam photo manager, and others. These applications are, with a few enhancements and bug fixes aside, largely as they were when KDE 3 was current. Most of these applications have continued to evolve within the KDE project, and have more modern counterparts as part of the KDE Gear set of applications that work on Plasma. Most, but not all. In some cases, TDE resurrects applications that would otherwise be lost to the dustbin of history, though the relevance of some of those programs today is questionable.

For example, the collection includes KPilot, an open source replacement for the Palm Desktop software for Palm Pilot devices. KPilot has long since been dropped from KDE as unmaintained software, but if any users are still depending on a Palm Pilot to organize their affairs, they can rely on TDE.

The Knmap front-end for nmap might be more relevant to a wider audience. That application seems to have disappeared from the KDE library of software, but it's still chugging along in the Trinity collection. One of my old favorite applications, the Basket free-form note-taking tool, is also available and works well with other TDE applications.

Showing its age

For the most part, TDE is a usable desktop, but it does show its age beyond its retro look-and-feel. Though the Trinity web site claims compatibility with newer hardware, it had some significant issues with a high-resolution (HiDPI) laptop display and external monitors over Thunderbolt connections. For example, on a 13" laptop display with 2256x1504 resolution, TDE's user-interface elements were too small to use comfortably. Current GNOME and KDE releases can be scaled up on HiDPI displays to provide a more usable interface, but TDE lacks this feature. Trying to change the display to use a lower resolution caused things to go haywire, with inverted colors and artifacts that made the desktop completely unusable.

TDE's System Settings application is outdated in some areas, or missing functionality entirely. Trying to use the network settings utility pops up an "unsupported platform" warning, and provides a list of supported distributions: the most recent of which is from 2015. The backend for the network settings is the knetworkconf package, a collection of Perl scripts that are far out of date for managing networking on current Linux systems. Network configuration is still possible with NetworkManager, but it isn't integrated into TDE. Users have plenty of configuration options for mice, but no trackpad options at all.

Some of the applications are in need of modernization or replacement to be useful in 2024. Konqueror is still a decent file manager, but it doesn't handle modern web sites well at all. The Kopete instant-messaging application offers to connect users to networks and protocols that are either dead and gone (AIM, Yahoo, Windows WinPopup) or well out of mainstream use (Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime). Support for more recent protocols, such as Matrix instant messaging, is not to be found. The vintage version of Amarok that is included still lists internet radio services that are defunct, and it immediately crashes when trying to play AAC files.

While on the topic of modernization, it is worth noting that TDE only has support for X11. Porting to Wayland seems to be considered a problem for the distant future.

With the exception of hardware support, however, these problems are not show-stoppers. Most users will simply choose Firefox or another browser, which works just fine along with TDE. It would be interesting to be able to use Kopete with Matrix, but there are plenty of Matrix clients available. Likewise, users have no shortage of music players to choose from.

In some ways, running TDE is like driving a lovingly restored classic car from the 1950s or 1960s. The commitment and effort toward preserving a cultural artifact is impressive. Its visual appeal and handling are satisfying for a specific audience, and it can be a lot of fun to take out for a weekend spin. It may not be a suitable option, though, for most users who want a desktop that will keep pace with the times. It is perfect for stalwart KDE 3 fans, making use of aging hardware, or for users who want to spend a little time reliving an earlier era of the Linux desktop.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 20, 2024 15:34 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (7 responses)

> Obviously, the target audience is the user who loved KDE 3 and has no desire to switch to later KDE releases or alternate desktops.

It is not a lack of desire. Trinity Kontact/Kmail is still far more usable than KDE5 Kontact/Kmail.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 20, 2024 21:22 UTC (Mon) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (6 responses)

My wife is retired from being a journalist, a teacher, and a lawyer. She's smart but she hates UI changes and she hated having to wipe and reinstall Windows every few months due to malware.

So she switched to KDE 3 and then Trinity, and in twenty years has never had any malware.

She loves Trinity's UI and KMail. She loves Firefox and LibreOffice. They all just work - reliably, fast, and well. Believe me, she *really* does not want some faddish UI that changes every few years.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 21, 2024 9:20 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

There's a lot of people (my wife included) with memory impairment. When your typical "time to learn some new fancy UI" exceeds "lifetime of fancy UI before CADT replaces it with something new", it makes life hell for you, and for those around you!

We went straight from Windows XP to 8.1, precisely to do our best to avoid UI churn! The switch from 10 to 11 is still causing grief ...

Cheers,
Wol

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 21, 2024 10:53 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Just to add, design, Design!, DESIGN!!!

When said fancy new UI seems not to have clear design principles behind it, it makes it even harder to learn.

Muscle memory is important. There's a reason emacs/vim is a religious war. I'm not going to come down on either side, but when you're concentrating on work, you expect your fingers to "do the right thing" without thinking. And when two programs have conflicting ideas on what the right thing is, that's a massive disruption to your productivity as you have to stop and think "what is the right thing to do here?".

Cheers,
Wol

no need for slurs

Posted May 21, 2024 13:57 UTC (Tue) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Can we please refrain from using CADT? It's a slur. Like all the other personal attacks it has no place in this discussion. You can make your point just as well if not better without it. Thanks.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 21, 2024 21:25 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a "Classic Shell" extension(?) for Windows that provides an interface that's similar to Win95(!). That's nearly 30 years of keeping a very similar interface.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 22, 2024 6:01 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I use that, now called Open-Shell, but it’s only part of a consistent UI. That would mean all applications work in a broadly similar way, with standard dialogue boxes for saving a file, printing, and so on; consistent controls and colour schemes; and a unified way to configure the system and install software. Perhaps only unpopular or brand-new platforms can achieve this. Windows is getting further away as each major application wants to invent its own user interface to load and save (with Microsoft Office one of the worst offenders). You can make your program an app so it can be installed and managed through a central App Store, but then you grant a veto to Microsoft or Apple.

xfce is modern and stable too.

Posted May 30, 2024 20:17 UTC (Thu) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

XFCE is very stable and very conservative.
UI never changes, it is very solid after upgrades (from ubuntu 16 to 22 without reinstall).
And it is up-to-date for tools (sensors, bluetooth...)
No need to live in the past. :)

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 20, 2024 16:34 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (6 responses)

> Though the Trinity web site claims compatibility with newer hardware, it had some significant issues with a high-resolution (HiDPI) laptop display and external monitors over Thunderbolt connections. For example, on a 13" laptop display with 2256x1504 resolution, TDE's user-interface elements were too small to use comfortably.

That's a shame. I would've hoped it could handle exotic dot pitch better than that since KDE3 existed in the era of high end workstation CRTs and things like the T220, and sidestepped the entire content-consumption HDMI race to the bottom.

But maybe it's for the best. Those Keramik widgets are now a reasonable size on screen.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 20, 2024 17:23 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (5 responses)

Does it respect ye olde X11 dpi setting? That was the natural way to support higher pixel density, but as I recall GTK summarily dropped support for it and fixed it at 100 -- just in time for high-res displays to become affordable. (not sure about Qt)

I guess that Qt 3, while it's old, is not so old that it uses X11 server-side fonts. Which leads me to another question: how does TDE perform over an X11 remote session? Many newer applications end up painting the window pixel by pixel and can be unusable over X11, even on a fast local network. Does the older toolkit work better over the traditional X11 remote protocol?

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 21, 2024 18:10 UTC (Tue) by Elv13 (subscriber, #106198) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem isn't so much about the bitmap/framebuffer rendering as it is about "damage" area, animations, composition and accelerated rendering. Almost nothing from this millennium uses the X11 server side GUI primitives. If you use a simpler theme without too many fancy elements and damage area is exposed properly, then SSH+X/VNC/RDP/SPICE is pretty quick regardless. In Qt4/Qt5 era, you had a few rendering backends to pick from. Raster and X11 perform better depending on the scenario/protocol. In later Qt5/QtQuick, Qt6/QtQuick and GTK4, the "default" moves toward GPU accelerated rendering. It allows fancier effects, but in practice the problem pixel density. Qt 96 DPI, classical CPU rendering is faster. At 500, the GPU becomes far better (and much more power efficient). Animation and "smoothness" is important for devices with touch screen, not so much for keyboard and mouse. Since all DEs at least attempt to handle touchscreens properly, the accelerated rendering is here to stay. Accelerated GUIs perform terribly over the wire. The better way to enable them is using the GPU video encoder and turn them into a compressed video stream, which obviously is quite convoluted.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 22, 2024 7:40 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)

I guess the ideal would be to send the GPU commands over the wire to be executed on the remote end. But you'd have a protocol strongly tied to the particular hardware in use, unless you wanted to restrict yourself to OpenGL or Vulkan or whatever. And even then the software isn't written with the assumption of high latency -- it will be much too "chatty" and too likely to make synchronous calls expecting a result before proceeding. You'd have to batch up the operations somehow.

Maybe the compressed video stream you mention could actually be a list of graphics primitives the GPU has recently executed. If both sides of the remote desktop have identical hardware this "compression" could be done by the video hardware itself transparently to the software. It wouldn't be in any way a standardized protocol, and could no longer be decoded if the hardware on the other side changes, but that hardly matters for something ephemeral like a remote desktop stream. This kind of exists for GPU-intensive applications ("NVIDIA Quadro GPUs support an RDP bypass functionality allowing OpenGL applications to be fully accelerated with remote use.") but I was thinking of your ordinary desktop applications where you want a pixel-perfect, low-latency remote display.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 22, 2024 10:58 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

If you're doing this, you might want to base your command stream on virtio-gpu commands with the Venus extensions; you'd need to come up with a replacement for VIRTIO_GPU_CMD_RESOURCE_ATTACH_BACKING, but this gives you everything you need to run Vulkan remotely - and if you can run Vulkan, Zink gives you OpenGL "for free".

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 22, 2024 10:19 UTC (Wed) by sune (subscriber, #40196) [Link] (1 responses)

From Qt 4.4 onwards, Qt started doing 'alien widgets' which is 'widgets unknown to the windowing system', which is basically Qt painting the entire thing itself.

For at least QtWidgets applications it might still be possible to get 'old behavior' back even with qt6:

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qwidget.html#native-widgets-vs-ali...

It is a thing that makes apps look and feel better and faster on 'local setups' but at the cost of x11 forwarding.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 22, 2024 21:17 UTC (Wed) by louai (guest, #58033) [Link]

Qt also still has the native X backend: https://github.com/qt/qtbase/tree/dev/src/plugins/platfor...

You need to enable the configure option and then export QT_XCB_NATIVE_PAINTING=1, see here https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/plugins/platfor...

That should be significantly faster over remote X connections. I backported this from Qt4 to Qt5 many years ago for exactly this use case.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 23, 2024 10:11 UTC (Thu) by tsr2 (subscriber, #4293) [Link]

Trinity kept me sane after Debian switched to a KDE 4.4 that was not production ready. I eventually had to give up and moved to Linux Mint/MATE. It's kind of nice that Trinity is still out there, but I don't have the motivation to revisit my GUI choice.

Maybe a lifeline for X2go?

Posted May 23, 2024 11:15 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] (1 responses)

> While on the topic of modernization, it is worth noting that TDE only has support for X11. Porting to Wayland seems to be considered a problem for the distant future.

Very interesting for remote access using X2go while keeping an up-to-date underlying distribution.

For those who haven't encountered it, X2go is an excellent remote access solution that is extremely good at compressing graphical output for use of a remote graphical login down a bandwidth-restricted internet connection. But as local desktops advance and move to Wayland and/or hardware acceleration, the number of desktop environments it works with are dwindling.

I will be building a VM to try this out when I have time.

Maybe a lifeline for X2go?

Posted May 23, 2024 11:45 UTC (Thu) by yaap (subscriber, #71398) [Link]

You can use x2go in single application mode. This single application can be a terminal, and then any application will use the x2go virtual display (usually X display ":50"). With this, as long as the local application are X compatible, what you use as desktop is not relevant: you bypass the desktop completely. This gives a "root less" experience, with the terminal and apps only, but no remote desktop. They may not be enough for some, but I find it ideal.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 24, 2024 5:35 UTC (Fri) by logang (subscriber, #127618) [Link]

I have fond memories of ksirtet, a really nice Tetris clone in KDE3. I remember the new version in KDE4 being unplayable. It was a very disappointing transition.

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 30, 2024 21:01 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

> Support for more recent protocols, such as Matrix instant messaging, is not to be found.

That’s the problem of libpurple, which is missing support for Matrix. https://github.com/matrix-org/purple-matrix is unfortunately just an unusable disaster (I would really love to use it with bitlbee, but I just cannot).

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted Jun 1, 2024 23:36 UTC (Sat) by bonkmaykr (guest, #171776) [Link]

Good read. TDE definitely is a little janky, but I like that it just works once you've got yourself comfortable, and I can rely on it just like how we relied on our old desktops back in the day. Some of its my affinity for retro computing in general but I feel like TDE is practical as a modern desktop as well. And since it's true to KDE 3.5 I don't have to worry about major UI changes I may not like in the future.

I'm not on the Wayland Master Race bandwagon as X11 works just fine and from what I can tell Wayland has severe growing pains and poor compatibility with existing Linux standards. I had tried Wayland on my existing KDE 5 installation, hoping it would fix the endless issues with lag when I plug in my 2nd monitor with a different refresh rate from my primary one. It ended horribly. A lot of that has to do with the fact I'm on NVIDIA hardware, but also, I need X11 for its superior screen capture. So I switched to TDEーafter all, computers back then had wacky monitor setups all the time because of CRTs, and sure enough it handled it flawlessly. I was turned away from TDE before due to the aforementioned color garbling issue when modesetting but it seems like that has been fixed and/or was specific to my old monitor.

I still like KDE Plasma but TDE is actually more reliable for my case. I would rather have a desktop that's fluid and responsive than a desktop that gets frequent updates. I like the older file browser and Amarok player too, classic Amarok isn't too far behind from modern Amarok, and while it doesn't integrate into a nice little panel widget, I like the Winamp-style pop out window it has and I use it a lot.

I think everyone should at least try to daily-drive Trinity, it's been worth it for me.

old protocols

Posted Jun 18, 2024 13:16 UTC (Tue) by heindijs (guest, #172010) [Link]

I just wish they stripped out the old defunct messaging and other protocols and replace them with newer ones. They server 0 purpose and would make an otherwise decent application like Kopete plain useless