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Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

wiki.trinitydesktop.org

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?

I still find it extremely buggy. I've been hearing these "KDE 5 is fine now" for the past few months in comments, podcasts, blog posts, etc. Yesterday I gave in and decided to try the latest release. After logging in, KDE greeted me with a plasma crash. In the next few hours of light usage, some more crashes followed. It's working as it always has been for me, since the early days of 4. It's pretty much dead for me n…

The KDE bug reporting process is a huge pain, too. I discovered that Konsole crashes when unlimited scrollback is enabled and /tmp becomes full. Submitting the crash report requires answering a pop quiz, and if any of your answers are unsatisfactory then you get a message that your report is not useful. Navigate that gauntlet and then you are asked to create an account and write a bug report, and your crash dump becomes public.

Good software needs a really easy way to report bugs and get back to work. And people to triage the reports. I do not work for KDE, but the bug reporting process treats me like I do.

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#32
post #10

That's the ugliest GUI I have seen in a while. 1995 was 25 years ago. https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/images/4/44/TDE-screen1.png

That could be 2005 KDE actually. Things like that make me thing this can be arguably the biggest waste of effort of all FOSS development, all because "fear of the new" - Trying to keep the huge monstrosity of Qt3 which EOL was more than 10-15 years ago, the whole DE that was built on it and all of their apps, even developing new ones... Just for the appeal of few people with the nostalgia for that kind of GUIs. One c…

My car doesn't require me to learn new pedal placements every year, my steering wheel doesn't randomly turn into a pair of levers, the speedometer doesn't one day decide it's too old school and rearrange itself. I would never put up with random unrequested changes to my car. Or a hammer, or a screwdriver. Why should I put up with random changes to my computer? These are all just tools I use to do my real work.

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?

I still find it extremely buggy. I've been hearing these "KDE 5 is fine now" for the past few months in comments, podcasts, blog posts, etc. Yesterday I gave in and decided to try the latest release. After logging in, KDE greeted me with a plasma crash. In the next few hours of light usage, some more crashes followed. It's working as it always has been for me, since the early days of 4. It's pretty much dead for me n…

> After logging in, KDE greeted me with a plasma crash. In the next few hours of light usage, some more crashes followed.

This has been my experience since KDE 4 too pretty much 4 out of 5 attempts i made to check out KDE, including trying KDE Neon (which included weird visual glitches that i never saw before in any desktop environment).

Though FWIW my latest attempt is openSUSE Tumbleweed running on my GPD Win 1 (which isn't exactly a mainstream device, though it does have an Intel integrated GPU which has open source drivers, which helps a bit) and it seems to work fine there. I do very light use of it however, mainly launching games and such - normally i'd be using Window Maker, but GPD Win 1 needed a very recent kernel to boot and also RandR to be configured to rotate the screen (the 'native' screen is actually in portrait mode but the computer uses it in landscape) and i didn't want to bother with that at the moment i installed it so i grabbed the first non-Gnome-based rolling distribution that had official support for some form of desktop environment that i expected to have a GUI application to setup rotation... which basically meant KDE :-P.

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#35
post #12
post #2

Super cool people maintain and expand things like KDE 3 and Gnome 2 (Trinity, Mate)! However personally I don't feel the need anymore. Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are both quite usable. Which is a stark contrast from when Gnome 3 and KDE 4 came out. They were both nothing more then glorified beta's. The first release of Gnome 3 was basically like the first Windows 10 release with the Metro UI; Totally unusable. Not that surpri…

> Not that surprising since both Gnome 3 and Win 10 were created on a "tablet first" (or at least "tablet prominent") mindset. For Gnome I hear this claim often made (mostly by people who don't like Gnome), but is that actually backed by facts? Unlike Microsoft or Canonical (with their Unity), Redhat never seemed to have any particular mobile/touch aspirations, and so far I haven't heard any mobile adaptations of Gno…

Look at GNOME, notice the giant paddings, title bards see look at the checkboxes,scrollbars etc.

Also is not a secret that GNOME developers considered at least touch screens if not tablet when designing the GUI.

IMo an informative video on GTK and Qt , it explains what issues you can have with GTK, is about the subsurface application(created by Linus Torwalds that moved to Qt because GTK is bad and even Linus could not get good answers from Red Hat guys) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE (Plasma) 5 (i guess you meant that) is usable but i still think KDE 3 was the high point of KDE. After all the flashy stuff was introduced in KDE 4 things went downhill fast. Similarly with Gnome, Gnome 2 was the best series, Gnome 3 was awful. It seems somewhere around the late 2000s both projects got very nice and usable desktop environments, couldn't figure out how to "evolve" next (because apparently software…

I agree for Gnome, but how is KDE 5 worse than KDE 3?

Note that i was never a big fan of KDE in general, i just happen to like KDE 3 more than the other versions (though TBH i haven't used KDE 2 at all and while i do like how KDE 1 looked and behaved - it was the first Linux environment i ever used - it was a bit too rough, though that was also because of Qt1 too) and i used it as a second environment in some computers.

But the two main reasons i think KDE 5 is worse than KDE 3 is that as a UI it follows the same pattern as Gnome 3 (and Windows 10's "modern" apps, sadly) for wasting screen space everywhere and it does feel like it has a lot of moving parts everywhere which aren't exactly fitting perfectly with each other even though they are made for each other (i know that KDE 3 was probably also similar, but it always felt solid and stable - i wonder if breaking kdelibs or whatever it was called to a myriad of tiny little libraries that all applications and each other needing to be there anyway made things more brittle, though that might be my bias from whenever i try to install a KDE application in a non-KDE environment and i get a dependency vomit from the package installer).

I might sound too hard on KDE 5, but TBH if i absolutely had to choose between it and Gnome and had no other option (or the other option was a tiling WM - which i never liked), then i'd use KDE. It isn't bad, i'd still install it on a computer i do not want to fiddle around with much.

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That could be 2005 KDE actually. Things like that make me thing this can be arguably the biggest waste of effort of all FOSS development, all because "fear of the new" - Trying to keep the huge monstrosity of Qt3 which EOL was more than 10-15 years ago, the whole DE that was built on it and all of their apps, even developing new ones... Just for the appeal of few people with the nostalgia for that kind of GUIs. One c…

My car doesn't require me to learn new pedal placements every year, my steering wheel doesn't randomly turn into a pair of levers, the speedometer doesn't one day decide it's too old school and rearrange itself. I would never put up with random unrequested changes to my car. Or a hammer, or a screwdriver. Why should I put up with random changes to my computer? These are all just tools I use to do my real work.

To be fair, it is very difficult to find car without touch screen today. Or with power switch that physically cuts power to the engine, fuel pump and ignition. Or without GPS tracker...

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#38
I think I remember looking at the project page a while ago and thinking, huh! What is the relevance of this project? While it is always great to see Linux DE's/projects living on, this is just another project which sadly fragments the Linux desktop ecosystem even further. I agree, we need more Linux apps (Before electron apps take over the entire Linux DE), not distro's or DE's (checkout https://makealinux.app/). And if you are still adamant on creating a new DE, make it interoperable between other DE's. Remember https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ ?

Also, things have changed:

- KDE 5 plasma is lighter than GNOME.

- GNOME became a project with zero regards to the community. But is breaking less since the last few releases.

- You have so many "traditional DE's". XFCE, Mate, Solus DE, Cinnamon, Deepin DE.

I agree with someone who have said that none of the new GUI have made him/her/they productive. My progression for productivity through DE's has been GNOME for 10ish years, KDE 5 for 1.5, Another 1.5 years in XFCE and now I use i3wm. Looks like you focus more on functionality as you become a mature user and less on the bells and whistles.

- Moved from GNOME after using from 3.0 till 3.22 because of crashing. It is better now.

- Moved from KDE because every update on my rolling release distro was a panic attack due to the bizzilion dependencies each software depends on. Not to mention it could be a security disaster. just install Okular or Korganizer to see what I am talking about. Krita has been the only exception I have noticed.

- Window managing has been the bottleneck in XFCE, it is the best for a rolling release distribution. So now I use i3wm. I only see a gradual transition to Swaywm now since Xorg is breathing it's last few, so I will have to move from i3wm.

So I ask again, what is the point of Trinity? What is it bringing? We need to start seeing Linux as the future since big corporates are moving to Linux more. I would like to see Trinity resources going to KDE which is so much better now. But hey, that is just me.

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear of new UIs is justified. The last time anyone did serious usability engineering and published results and methods was Windows 95 (or at least, that was the last round I've seen). I'm afraid of wasting my time learning totally new interactions that are less useful and get changed again in 1-4 years. I would rather cling to my 'legacy' interactions that keep working for as long as I can, than to keep churning. I w…

Gnome 2 was nice, but it also lacked serious usability features that were present elsewhere. Windows exposé (overview), a global menu, and window tiling/snapping were just a few. They could have continued to extend the desktop with these features, but chose to reevaluate the desktop instead. Part of the reevaluation was GTK 3, and part of it was CSS for Shell, I think. I agree it could have been better. I don't agree…

Gnome 2 had "expose", though you had to run a compositor to use it.

There was a patch for a global menu but IIRC the Gtk developers blocked that feature so it never went anywhere. Does Gnome support a global menu nowadays?

Window snapping was supported as well - many window managers support that for years.

Also note that Gnome 2 allowed you to use any window manager you wanted, so even if Metacity (the default one) didn't do the trick for you, you could use some other window manager (and it wasn't uncommon for people to do that).

Re: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.9 Release Notes

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My car doesn't require me to learn new pedal placements every year, my steering wheel doesn't randomly turn into a pair of levers, the speedometer doesn't one day decide it's too old school and rearrange itself. I would never put up with random unrequested changes to my car. Or a hammer, or a screwdriver. Why should I put up with random changes to my computer? These are all just tools I use to do my real work.

To be fair, it is very difficult to find car without touch screen today. Or with power switch that physically cuts power to the engine, fuel pump and ignition. Or without GPS tracker...

The underlying tech might be different but the interface is mostly the same. After all you can have a Windows 95-like environment without actually using MS-DOS as your kernel.
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