Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support

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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.