Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support [LWN.net]

Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

Posted May 20, 2024 15:34 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
Parent article: Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

> 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.

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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. :)