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

said deloptes via tde-users: | Felix Miata via tde-users wrote: | > I suppose this means you were a Kubuntu user until TDE was forked | > (began existence) from KDE3 ~14 years ago. | | Most of us used KDE3. I have used KDE2 first, tried Gnome2 around 2001 | and went back to KDE2 right before it released KDE3, which was a big | improvement to KDE2. Since then (2002) I've been using KDE3. I had some | issues with internationalization, which I fixed after I finished my | thesis at the university. | After KDE4 release (Jan.2008) many of us were so disappointed that | Timothy Pearson decided to start the TDE project together with just a | handful of other developers and maintainers. The rest of us just | followed, because there was no way out of the desktop disaster that was | imposed to the users back then (Suddenly KDE4 was not usable and Gnome | was ugly and fragile, while KDE3 was left behind). I think one of the | reasons was also the attitude of the new KDE4 developers. | Especially in the past few years we observe a growing number of people | willing and ready to contribute. I think there were about 5-6 | contributors around 2011 and now there are 20-30. It is still not enough | to make a big progress, but my impression is that things are moving | forward much faster. Especially Slavek and Michele deserve a lot of | respect for what they have been doing all those years. I installed KDE-1.0 the day it was released. Wrote a book about it. (https://www.amazon.com/Practical-KDE-Dennis-Powell/dp/078972216X) Recompiled it daily, or at least several times a week, for years. The devs got the snotty attitude during the kde-2.x days, but the product was good. KMail was great. It was a pretty replacement for XFMail. It's still great. Occasionally a little cranky, but sorted easily enough. Like many of us, I stuck with KDE-3.x when KDE-4 was the disaster it was and that KDE has continued to be. The only thing well-maintained is the attitude, now with added big announcements never realized (example: Plasma Bigscreen, announced years ago but still not good for anything.) The current KDE philosophyseems to be making everything as unnecessarily complicated as possible. my favorite example is adding an application to Kicker. in TDE, you drag it to Kicker. The end. In current "Plasma," you have to jump through all kinds of hoops that are not guaranteed to work and that run the risk of destroying the entire panel. I personally do not want to have to back up my system before daring to try to add an application to the launcher. It is sadlly funny how from time to time someone installs TDE and immediately complains here that it is not something else. If something else worked better for me, I would use something else. But in my experience, TDE is unsurpassed at running non-TDE applications, so if I need some non-TDE app I can run it with no problem with TDE. No problem running current Kdenlive, for instance. This could be a kind of diminished expectation -- I started with DOS-2.1 running PowerMenu. I now have, on tablet and phone, mail and messaging applications in which I had to turn off things like "suggest reply." Yes, there are other desktops that have more bells and whistles, and if ringing and whistling are what one is after, TDE is probably not for that person. But it is difficult not to get a little cross when we hear "why isn't TDE more like . . ." even as it is a little annoying when newbs arrive shouting about the flavor-of-the-month Linux distribution, which probably won't exist in a year or two. If TDE stopped being developed, that would be a tragedy, because it would mean that in five years or so I might have to start thinking about a new desktop. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/