[tde-users] Re: How dead is Trinity and is it worth contributing to?

On 7/1/24 12:47 AM, Riley Bell via tde-users wrote: I think historically much of the development discussions were on IRC. Probably mastodon these days. I suspect many development discussions are private (offline). Visit the commit history page if you want to review development activity: https://www.trinitydesktop.org/patches/ Applications depend much on who builds the packages for each distro. The support for Qt4 was dropped a long time ago. In the early TDE days there was some thought about providing support for Qt4. That was how the tqtinterface package was born. Most people familiar with the history of KDE and TDE are familiar with the KDE transition first to Qt4, then 5, and now 6. To their credit, each time the KDE developers do better, but generally with each Qt transition KDE does not become ready for the masses until about version X.4. Considering the number of people involved with TDE, there is no plausible way to migrate to Qt5/6. The amount of coding required is not supportable. Some people might argue that such a migration would essentially create a KDE clone rather than maintain TDE, a fork of KDE 3. Even if possible, does Qt5/6 offer anything that TDE needs? My memory is vague but I seem to recall that Qt4 introduced changes that were not compatible or wanted with a fork of KDE 3. For example, run a distro with KDE 4 and notice the observable differences with theming. This trend has continued with developers opting for flat interfaces. I use both KDE 5 and TDE. While KDE 4/5 improved through the years and these days requires much less RAM, TDE is notably faster and more responsive than KDE. For me, the TDE GTK 2 and 3 engines have been broken for some time. To be fair, GTK support is troublesome in KDE too. Through the years there have been heroic efforts to get GTK software looking better in KDE, but the result is always the same -- sort of looks okay but not really native looking. Qt5 support in TDE is a bit flaky too. Look through this list where I asked about running non KDE Qt5 software in TDE. The solution more or less is install a package called qt5ct, but even then Qt5 tools do not look "quite right" in TDE. Perhaps better than GTK, but still not quite right. All that said, I can't code in C++. So on most days I accept what is. I wish I could code C++ because I would be up to my eyeballs in code trying to improve TDE. If you can code then I am certain you will be most welcomed.