On Friday 12 of October 2012 01:33:00 Robert Xu wrote: It looks very funny: "and there's this tqt thing that is really REALLY really slow." ... when everywhere I tried it, is Trinity significantly faster than KDE4 :) (Newer than KDE 4.6 I have not tried, I did not find any interesting reason why to try it ... among other, I do not know about newer packages for Squeeze.) Slavek --

I wrote, "Although the claim is true..." I suspect download data is a poor reflection of the acutal user base. Darrell

In that spirit, here are some raw numbers from the package archives alone: Month Unique visitors Number of visits Pages Hits Jul 2012 7203 30044 2148392 2171289 Aug 2012 7512 33376 3775045 3796052 Sep 2012 7689 38260 2296008 2312371 Regarding my earlier comments on whether anyone has tried KDE4 recemtly, I downloaded a KDE 4.9 testing LiveCD with OpenSUSE 12.1. While the boot sequence was slow and the default graphics are as bad as I remembered, the killer was that the entire virtual machine locked up as soon as I clicked the Kicker menu icon. I think I'll wait until OpenSUSE officially releases a LiveCD with KDE 4.9 before trying again. :-) Tim

<snip> Quick update. I burned the image to a CD, which resolved the crashing issue. While I note that KDE4 has drastically improved since the early days, it still is not something that I would choose to use over TDE/XFCE. Even after "reverting" to folder view and other KDE3-esque settings, I found myself not only using many more mouse clicks than under TDE but also it seemed like I did not have full control of the environment. Setting a screen saver? Not intuitive (actually I was not able to find the control at all within a reasonable time). Opening a terminal? All the lines were cut in half. Run a custom command? Could not find a way to launch the minicli from a menu. Press the power button (e.g. to power off)? The screen corrupts itself. In short, I think KDE4 needs a lot more work to be useful for people like me who want to hybrid an old-school terminal and modern GUI experience. Tim

Am Montag, den 15.10.2012, 14:29 +0200 schrieb Darrell Anderson &lt;humanreadable(a)yahoo.com&gt;om>: I think it is still possible to build kde4 without akonadi/nepomuk/strigi. the result, however, would be quite useless: no kdepim (which relies entirely on akonadi now), missing basic functionality all over the place elsewhere. so, not a viable option. looking at kde forums/lists gives the impression, that akonadi/nepomuk and kdepim have reached a usable state now (from 4.9.x), with nearly all features that were present in 3.5.10. even address completion in email composer has been reported to work now, provided nepomuk running correctly and already having indexed everything :) I plan to give it a go during the next weeks and write a short conclusion. Werner

On 16 October 2012 16:11, Darrell Anderson &lt;humanreadable(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote: Razor Qt is this: Panel Desktop Application launcher Settings center Sessions A very, very, very basic desktop. I wouldn't really consider it an environment. I achieve the same thing available here with Openbox and a few other programs.

Thanks. Will be interesting to read subsequent reports. Darrell

I believe the answer to your question depends upon perspective. As a developer I would want to reduce duplicity and overhead --- when palatable. As a user I want consistency in my environment. I understand that the Trinity version of KOffice is getting a little long in the tooth. I also agree that OpenOffice/LibreOffice probably is a better replacement for many users. Yet as we have discussed in the past, the Trinity version remains useful --- but must be advertised appropriately. We should not mislead users by claiming that Trinity KOffice is a powerful or market-competitive office suite of apps. We advertise KOffice as a lightweight office suite that is suitable for home and small business users with modest needs. With that focus we reduce maintenance on the package to bug fixes. Don't build expectations and there won't be any. :) If KOffice were to be abandoned, there are a handful of apps in the collection that could be saved. Or, as requested in enhancement request 464, we split KOffice into individual packages. That move reduces maintenance and retains the smaller apps. We do need to address a few issues such updating ODT support and possibly abandoning ruby support. Unless or until we form a serious collective effort to improve Trinity for the enterprise, we should be realistic that most Trinity users are and will be home users and small business users. From that perspective retaining KOffice seems palatable to me. Large-scale enterprise administrators will opt for an enterprise office suite such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice. We need not delude ourselves. Likewise for other apps too even if they like Trinity as the basic desktop. Yet from the focus of home and small business users, I see no reason that Trinity KOffice need be abandoned. I can't discuss kio slaves because that is over my head. :) I agree with the sentiment, but people well versed in coding kio slaves need to step forward and promote those discussions among the developers of the leading desktops. Regarding other aspects about KDE4, we don't need to rehash those arguments. Yes, finally KDE4 is looking like the desktop environment promised and envisioned years before the developers abandoned KDE3. I'd like to see some limited integration, such as webkit for Konqueror, but otherwise I myself am not interested in anything further. Other than such limited integration, I much rather want to see the bug tracker attacked in a serious way to render Trinity the best damn small desktop environment of all. I agree we should shed some weight by evaluating the source tree. That is a goal listed in the R14 road map. We should not panic or go hog wild. As Trinity and KDE4 can be installed concurrently without conflict, I see no reason to rush into decisions. That is, users who need or want apps from Qt4/KDE4 need only install and off they go. I also believe that any serious pruning decisions should be post R14. We have an etherpad for collecting post R14 ideas. Unless a slew of skilled people join the development team, we cannot keep pace with innovations in KDE4, and I have no illusions of us backporting major segments of code for apps such as krita, kdenlive, okular, etc. People who need or want those apps will have to use them from KDE4 because Trinity does not offer anything like that. Conversely, I don't believe the Trinity user is focused on those types of apps or wants significant changes in how they use desktop software. We stay focused on those users, regardless of how small the community. The Xfce folks are doing just fine for those GTK fans who dislike the changes in GNOME, yet I'd be much surprised if the Xfce user base is anything close to the size of the GNOME or KDE4 user base. Despite the improvements, and after more than four years of active development, I remain amazed that many people using KDE4 still long for the KDE3 desktop. This not nostalgia, these people miss the way certain things are done. Thus there is a niche to fill and serve. I believe then that our post R14 evaluations are two fold: 1) how to retain a desktop environment built upon the KDE3 style and 2) which apps to retain and which to abandon. As a post R14 topic, I believe we address both questions nicely if we move toward splitting all modules to individual component apps. For the most part this is a packaging issue but we would need guidance for all packagers in order that all packagers provide the same package set. From that point we more easily decide which components to abandon, which to retain in maintenance mode only, and which to continually improve. If app usage will drive Trinity's future, then split apps into individual packages. This provides end-users significant flexibility when they want to mix and match apps from different desktops. We still need to provide a fundamental desktop, one that is robust, stable, and highly functional. In that light I don't see much change with tdelibs or the other core modules, but I envision even tdebase being split. Trinity fills a nice segment of the free/libre desktop collection. Many of the KDE4 developers recognize that and have no issue with people using or maintaining Trinity. They are content to leave us alone to scratch our own itch. As long as we don't mislead users and we remain active with maintenance, I believe that segment will be well served for a long time. In short we keep tending our garden and we find peace in that. :) Darrell

Considering the nature of the Phoronix web site, I imagine readers and forum participants are bleeding edge types. Anything determined to be "old" by such people means obsolete and a waste of time. "Old" things are not "shiny." Doesn't matter to such people that old things remain functional. Shiny is all that counts to them. :) All people do things that to others are deemed a waste of time. The old adage prevails that one person's junk is another person's treasures. We live in a big world but many people won't accept that. Here is another 3.5.13.1 news announcement: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Update-to-Trinity-KDE-3-5-fork-bring… Despite us not saying a thing about KDE4 in the press release, both writers raised the topic. Reviewers seem unable to let that dog sleep. All we can do is keep avoiding the topic and remain focused on our reasons for using Trinity. Darrell

My 486 with 16MB RAM running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 with the Norton Desktop 2.0 in many ways runs circles around modern desktops. I have the same environment on a partition on a PI system and the desktop just screams compared to any modern desktop. Darrell

That is the plan with the next release: R14.0.0. Darrell