[tde-users] Re: TDE's Backstory and purpose

On 5/18/24 3:06 PM, Chris M via tde-users wrote: What's the backstory? The best person to ask is Timothy Pearson. He forked KDE 3.5 to TDE. The first release was TDE 3.5.11, then 3.5.12, and 3.5.13. There never was a 3.5.14 release, instead the first of the R14 series was released. The Wikipedia article has a short but fair summary of the history. Not mentioned in the article are reasons why the original core group of developers and maintainers stuck together. One of the reasons is the changes from Qt3 to Qt4. Most if not all of the core group did not like the look-and-feel of Qt4 -- the beginning of flat interfaces and dull colors. The technical members of the group did not like the way Qt4 functioned. There was some discussion about migrating TDE to Qt4, but the technical effort would have been too much. There was effort to provide some support for Qt4, somewhat part of the original reason behind the tqtinterface package. With the so-called EOL of KDE 3.5 and the premature release of KDE 4, the main backstory is a notable amount of contempt, hatred, distrust, and anger among satisfied KDE 3.5 users. For a few years TDE had some news coverage and then most of the click-bait news folks stop following TDE. There also was a couple of periods with little TDE development and hence, little news coverage. Through the years I have read many pundits declare that somehow TDE is not secure. I doubt anybody will offer an argument that Konqueror as a web browser is secure, but just about any web browser can be reasonably secure by disabling JavaShit -- oops -- JavaScript and other modern data mining and tracking "features." On the same note, I don't think anybody has designed a file manager that is in the same class as Konqueror. KDE Dolphin is a fine file manager, but not in the same class. Throughout the years of reading such claims about security, I have yet to read anybody actually auditing code to show how valid their claims might be. There is very much a prevailing attitude that Qt3 itself no longer is secure, mostly because Qt3 is not new and shiny. With respect to why distro maintainers do not offer TDE as a primary desktop, there is significant political inertia with both KDE and GNOME. Always has been. Embracing TDE would be seen by some as kicking sand in the face of KDE developers. The Xfce and MATE folks often get included in distros, but there has to be somebody willing to maintain the packages. The TDE developers do a decent job creating distro packages, but many distro maintainers still do not offer TDE as part of their mainstream collection. Possibly why TDE falters some with mainstream adoption is TDE remains somewhat a black sheep. One reason is 14 years later, long after all of the spitting and feuding ended, TDE remains a usable and viable desktop and keeps improving. Most people predicted TDE would fade away, much like a lot of free/libre software. Many folks do not like that TDE remains healthy. Many do not like that TDE retains a somewhat old school traditional desktop design rather than everything acting like a smart phone or tablet. Another reason for the black sheep label is living in /opt purgatory. TDE is not easily installed into the common /usr directory because of potential conflict with KDE. The MATE folks resolved that problem nicely by renaming all of their binaries with a "mate-" prefix. I think TDE could do likewise with a tde- prefix. Installing TDE in /opt creates various issues and the complexity of the starttde shell script attests to the hoops to jump through to avoid conflict. There remains a strong following of other desktop environments despite the political popularity of KDE and GNOME. I think TDE could gain similar momentum enjoyed by Xfce and MATE. Much like why many to most TDE users prefer TDE rather than KDE, Xfce and MATE users are former GNOME users who dislike what happened to GNOME. One challenge is there are many more KDE developers who can create and offer new kinds of software. A rebuttal to that notion is many people using "old school" software have little to no need or desire for such software. I think the Xfce and MATE developers made one mistake. Rather than maintain GTK 2 they adopted GTK 3 and their software suffers because they do not control GTK development. To the TDE developers credit they did not make the same mistake. I used both Xfce and MATE for a few years, but adopting GTK3 nonsense ended my dance with them. I use KDE 5 and TDE. I invested serious sweat equity to trim KDE 5 to essentials, much like TDE. KDE 5 can be tamed but most people are not going to invest such effort. For me, one of the cornerstones was being able to continue using the Oxygen icon theme. Seems the KDE developers have been trying hard for a long time to abandon Oxygen preferring the new fad of flat icons. I use Oxygen with both KDE and TDE and that helps provide me a consistent environment with both. I stopped having any hopes for KDE 4 the day Akonadi was forced on PIM users. I still refuse to use KDE PIM tools except for KAlarm, where the maintainer sanely changed Akonadi to a plugin. I do not know how long I will continue using KDE. I have seen changes from 5 to 6 that remind me of the 3.5 to 4 days. For example, the KDE developers ripped support from the System Settings to fine tune mouse settings, somehow believing that every user now uses libinput. With respect to response, I find KDE 5 reasonably snappy, unlike KDE 4. Yet TDE is wicked fast compared to KDE 5. I think that feature is something that could sell TDE to many people. TDE seems ideal to keep a lot of dual core systems functional. Helping with that are little things such as preloading Konqueror. I still scratch my head that after a decade and a half the KDE folks still do not preload Dolphin. I never grew warm and fuzzy about KDE 4, but mostly I am content with what KDE 5 has become. Unlike the KDE 4 days, I stopped my feuding with KDE. A new breed of developers took over from the uncomfortable KDE 4 days and this new breed of developers are much better listening to users. TDE has a place in the free/libre world. Secure? Probably. Fast? Undoubtedly. Functional and useful? Yes. All of those are good reasons to keep TDE alive. Kind of like the old John Cameron Swayze Timex advertisements of "takes a licking and keeps on ticking." I guess I am showing my age. Possibly the biggest draw for me is I am an old fart and I detest change for the sake of change. Might explain why I drive a 36 year old pickup truck and a 21 year old car. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. TDE is nothing like Windows 98. Firewalls belong at the edge of a LAN or are an operating system function rather than as a desktop function.