Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support
lwn.net
lwn.net
Thank goodness we still have instructions for patching KDE under FreeBSD.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-does-one-patch-kde2-under...
kde was nice but not "open source" so gtk and gnome came and drove lots of contributors. i think it was around kde3... then Ubuntu and later google dumped lots of money on gnome and some designers just stole the leadership it became a race to the bottom with copying all bad ideas from apple UX. then Ubuntu parted ways and did it's own thing. then they merged and rewrote the thing in JavaScript and release without even a settings application working... and then contributors mostly moved back to kde and 5 was great. now 6 is polishing everything and building on dbus everywhere and designers already started the UX capture but doesn't seem it is going anywhere.
anyway, i don't have much reference material for the time most contributors moved from kde to gnome in the name of GPL (noble goal that wasn't used since distros didn't abandon the broken release for the mint fork when they should have)
KDE is based on Qt which was a commercial library back then. It was licensed for free under the GPL (not LGPL!) or you could buy a commercial license from Trolltech.
That caused all kinds of licensing problems (not only for commercial applications, but if you did a Qt GUI app your only choice was the GPL, no other license) which drove people towards gtk.
That's ancient history, but the Qt situation isn't much better now.
First Nokia bought Qt and relicensed it as LGPL, because they needed it to be used by as many people as possible to gain users for their mobile platform. Then Nokia couldn't decide what mobile platform to use, then Elop happened and Nokia basically died.
Today Qt is still partially LGPL but was spinned off as Digia that is trying very hard to make money out of it. To the point of threats on the page that lets you download the LGPL version, commercial only plugins, and unaffordable pricing for small companies and hobbyists.
Agree that gnome still looks like Apple envy.
Qt was never an independent publicly traded company before. Independent maybe, but not publicly traded. It was technically publicly traded while being a Nokia asset, but not independent :)
Regardless of the name (a Meta by any other name would still stink of Facebook, an Alphabet by any other name would still stink of Google), does their site still look like you'd better hire a lawyer before you touch their intellectual property?
As opposed to Windows envy that apparently drives pretty much all the others, including every single version of KDE.
Some 15 years ago Gnome rewrote things from scratch and that made people angry, but looking back at it now, it seems like it was worth it.
I use both MacOS and Gnome, and I can easily say that Linux with Gnome is years ahead of MacOS. Nothing beats the polish of Gnome and it's extensions. It is less cluttered, snappy and doesn't get in the way.
The only thing keeping Gnome back is it's developer documentation. It is hard to find good detailed information about available APIs, everything is hidden somewhere deep in C code which is not searchable without Gnome Gitea account. If they want to see the year of the Linux desktop having Gnome at the center of it, they have to improve in the developer documentation area a lot.
No offense, but Nokia was dying long before Elop joined. He just made sure to burry it in Microsoft's back yard. By 2008 it was clear iOS and Android will be the dominant platforms, and Elop joined Nokia towards the end of 2010 when it was already a sinking ship.
Even if Elop were to be the most competent CEO in the world he could not save Nokia from its inevitable downfall at the hands of Apple and Google, no matter what he did with Symbian or MeeGo or whatever Linux based touch OS they had in their toybox.
The world had already standardized on iOS and Android so Nokia coming to the market with a new touch OS platform after 2011 and convincing users and developers to jump ship from Android and iOS, would have failed to get traction either way, same how Windows Mobile failed.
I believe you missed that part.
i could find a good write up of the problem then.
It's a sad state of affairs that not all desktops can say that.
Software developers usually get or are given the shiniest, fastest hardware, but that's probably backwards. We should get old, underpowered stuff (and be required to use it by law) and be forced to make do.
That pain would force the optimizations, and those would benefit society 1000x over the cost of our annoyance.
Why not both, a fast and a slow one? In Hollywood film making, the colorist uses a $40k professional mastering monitor to make sure the work is accurate, and also a $100 Walmart TV in parallel to make sure the movie will still look good in your average home and not just on the studio monitors.
Same should be in SW dev: Develop on fast HW but test on slow HW.
People are busy with work, life, etc, and life is too short, and sometimes going the quick and convenient way of having a system that can run Chrome/FF and Youtube/reddit out of the box, saves you time that you can spend with your loved ones or doing hobbies you like outdoors, instead spending hours/days faffing around learning and fiddling with niche obscure SW, just to feel triumphant that you found workarounds to running modern bloated SW on ancient obsolete HW people throw in the trash.
Not promoting wastefulness here, but sometimes there are points of diminishing returns, even for techies on a budget. I just try to see if LinuxLite or Lubuntu can save the system. If it's too slow even for those then it goes in the trash, I'm not wasting time with obscure linux tools I'm not familiar with just to potentially save some worthless e-waste that's not even a museum piece. I know there's some tinkerers out there who can get to run youtube on a Pentium 3 for shits and giggles, but that's where I'd keep it, at tinkering/entertainment, since I'm not a masochist to actually recommend people daily drive such a thing or do that myself, just to prove a point against obsolescence.
For example I tried to donate and find a new home online for my old Core2Quad PC from 2007 with 6GB of ram and 1TB mechanical HDD, and nobody would take it off my hands saying it's far too outdated to be usable today despite that not being true with some lightweight Linux on it, but people aren't looking to run and learn some new unfamiliar OS, they want Windows and Chrome and all that shit they're familiar with and would rather spend money to get something they see as usable instead of taking for free something they see as unusable. So I threw it in the trash.
Then, using an external player for Youtube isn't rocket science. Several people do that with Newpipe for instance.
On Chromium/FFox, yes, it can be done, 1GB it's the lower limit if you set up ZRAM and add some flags to the desktop shortcut. OFC, Ublock Origin it's a must.
UBo, LXDE and Ungoogled Chromium with some custom flags (I can set an /etc/profile.d/chromium.sh guide with ease for any user) can make a Core Duo or Celeron notebook usable with just 2GB of RAM as today that machine can be handled as the new 'low end', kinda like a Pentium IV with SSE2 in 2008-2010.
1GB of ZRAM would be usable enough with ZRAM and just keeping two or three tabs open, something not unusual for the typical user. Even for a researcher. Also, both Chromium and Firefox have automatic tab suspending options, so in the end the CPU usage can be much lower and the RAM one would just be paged (and most JS bytecode or JIT will be GC'ed in the spot for sure, as there's no point on keeping objects for suspended tabs).
Who's this "WE"? Not me I think.
And "back in the day" computers were very expensive warranting the time investment into keeping them going, while now they're disposable commodities. Is it worth it to most (western) people who's labor costs are around 20$-80$/hour to spend hours/days figuring out Linux and several quirky tools and hacks that even tech workers never heard of, just to get a PC working that people wouldn't even take for free? Answer this.
Why not spend all that time in more meaningful endeavors instead of keeping alive a piece of junk. It's cool if that's your hobby, but for most people it isn't.
Everyone did; any experienced user had to seek lighter alternatives at some point.
>Why not spend
Tell that to a musician I know which uses a netbook and it can use Mastodon thru https://brutaldon.org under his old laptop he uses for music production, where audio software works but modern JS crawls it's machine lot.
Ha! No. For some users, their PC is just a tool, a white good, like their washing machine or their car. Do you think every car owner also knows how to change oil, brake pads or fix fender benders? No, they pay a profesional service to take care of it and once they see it doesn't run like they want it to, if they have the money they sell it off or take it to the junkyard and buy a new one, not keep it going forever through endless fixes and tinkering.
If a new washing machine is $200 do you spend $70/hour on a handyman to fix your broken one? Same with computers.
>Tell that to a musician I know
Exceptions that prove the rule. Without any context and what exactly a "old and slow" laptop means and what a person's income is we can talk here all day, as that skews from person to person.
If someone is broke AF then it's normal they'll keep their HW going for as long as possible if and less $20/month means skipping on food. But if someone makes a healthy income, they'll chuck the 6 year old laptop in the trash/ebay once it starts to be too slow for their standards and get a new one, instead of spending precious time learning about installing Linux and alternative foss apps, when they'd rather spend their precious time tinkering with their Harley or going to the beach and spend $1000 on a new laptop that works the way they like it out of the box.
CWM and GNUinos makes it possible.
People today expect to use every modern website be it Youtube or the shitty ones like Reddit without hickups, listen to Spotify, etc.
Typing HTML comments from a 20 year old terminal-like device is a nice flex today, but not a useable daily driver for most real world users.
https://opensourced.me/#desktop-audit-and-benchmark-comparis...
The main reason was KDE3 would set my eyes on fire, GNOME never did (on the same hardware). KDE4 was better with that and KDE5 I have no issues with eye strain.
I never used KDE6 so no opinion. FWIW, I still use simple window managers and will continue until forced onto Wayland. Hoping that never happens since I really dislike all Desktop Environments. If I had to use a D/E, it would be KDE.
But one comment about Trinity was with KMail, the version with KDE3 was great and I use to use it, but the KDE4/5 versions to me is hard to use. That is when I switched over to Thunderbird.
Konqueror was great. I also liked that you could use it as both a file manager and a browser, and that you could switch browser engines.
KHTML was also some great work.
KDE 5 and 6 look ok I guess, but are buggier and perform worse than XFCE, so why would I ever use them?
The "Win95 pixel art" era:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_1.0.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE-2.0-es-es.png
The "wtf" era of KDE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kde-3.2.3-es-es.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_4.png
The "we give up, just make it look like XFCE" era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KDE_5.2_Konqueror_and_Kon...
But Plasma 5 & 6 are so good I would feel like I'm missing out. Even on old hardware they are quite lightweight.
At some point I wanted to try Trinity but didn't find packaging for my distro at the time, but will probably try some day.
I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed which sadly seems far from I/O efficient, not sure why (there is almost a hundred of background processes doing who knows what). Perhaps a lightweight distro would be better since i mainly use it to make calls or try out some graphics code (it is the only Nvidia device i have), but while it takes a couple of minutes to boot up, once it does it works fine so i don't mind much as i'm only rarely using that machine.
One of the most arrogant moves was to not have files on the desktop, instead they put together a poorly made widget called folder view, I believe they completely U-turned on that one, not sure how many years it took them though.
To be fair, last night I tried putting a shortcut to a picture onto the home screen on my iPad that has better hardware than my MacBook Air and I couldn't figure out a way to do it and iOS has well-paid armies of people working on it.
4.4 rings a bell as the ones I actually installed due to not wanting to fight PPAs; 4.6 was the first release I would actually call stable.
But even today I miss essential KDE3 features like a proper editable start menu.
Then KDE 4 happened.
I never used KDE again as my daily driver until Plasma 6. 16 long years mourning what I lost. Sure XFCE and Gnome were totally ok but they lacked something.
What is sad, I think, is that during those times, KDE lost a lot of its artistic community who back in the days were releasing hundreds of themes every months. Most were awful but some were gems and anyway the configuration options always allowed you to transform KDE into your thing.
It’s slowly coming back but it’s not there yet and it’s not as easy as yesterday.
I couldn't help but notice the movement which did wonders for my concentration on work.
I already had an Apple laptop, so when I got a new desktop I built it to be a hassle free hackintosh. As much as a hackintosh could be hassle free.
In the mean time I've switched my desktops to Apple as well so now I'm complaining when Cook doesn't take his dried frog pills in time.
That’s by design. Those well-paid armies are working against you.
The 4.0 release was otherwise painful though as it was a slow, constantly crashing mess of bugs. At around 4.3 it became stable enough to serve as the primary desktop but IIRC that took years and I saw a lot of friends adopting Gnome or XFCE.
There's a first for everything, and this is the first time I ever heard anyone say anything approving about KDE 4.
> and had fancy widgets
Hang on... You're saying this is a good thing? You liked the widgets? You wanted them?
Later on I became a fair bit more partial to reliable tool choices in order to actually get work done.
> 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!
> 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.
What is "CADT"? Could not find anything useful that fits.
WARNING: JWZ's site used to redirect to an unpleasant NSFW meme[3] from the late 90s when linked to from HN. Though, if I remember correctly that's been solved in recent years by HN. In case it hasn't please be sure to copy plaintext links to his site into a fresh tab to avoid the referrer.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
I've always found it somewhat ironic that CADT was originally used to describe the GNOME 1.x to 2.x switch, when GNOME 2.x was for a long time quite stable (and which was stable over the KDE 3 -> 4 changeover period), and newer versions of GNOME have tended to have less backwards compatibility and more churn.