I've done it!

Finally, more than 3 months after discovering Trinity, I've bitten the bullet. I've nuked KDE4 and installed Trinity. My desktop now feels like it's mine again. The upgrade wasn't entirely smooth. It took a bit of effort to make sure KDE4 was completely wiped and a fair number of Gnome packages seemed to be collateral damage in the Trinity installation. I don't think anything important went. After installing trinity, I no longer had a graphical login and startx gave me Gnome desktop. I tried "dpkg-reconfigure kdm-trinity", which failed because kdm-trinity wasn't installed! After installing kdm-trinity, the desktop looks good and seems much more responsive than KDE4. The only other glitches so far were kmail complaining about corrupt indexes and not finding my incoming email settings. After the indexes were rebuilt and I replaced the missing incoming account, it seems to be working well. I haven't been using Trinity long enough to be entirely confident, but it's looking nice and I'm sure I won't go back to KDE4. Neil Youngman