On 1/12/25 1:35 AM, deloptes via tde-users wrote:
> Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:
>
>> someone trying to fit kde1 codebase on top of forked qt2 codebase ;)
>
> It seems like in the museum we have a new field called software
> restaurators :).
>
>
It's also a reflection on how good the original developers were is desktop
design to be able to squeeze good performance out of tightly written code
running on 386 class processors and less than 4MB of RAM. Before Moore's Law
gave of GHz processors, GBs of RAM and TBs of storage. KDE3/TDE and
Gnome2/Gtk+2 all benefited greatly from that pedigree. The 2007 KDE Conference
welcoming kde4 and Gnome3/Gtk+3 have shown us all the downsides of the new
crop of desktop developers (kids with crayons...) that thought porting to a
new toolkit was the way to the next Great, Ghee-Whiz Linux desktop.
That misguided design path destroyed any chance of seeing Linux as a Desktop
in business and set that goal back by nearly two-decades. Eighteen years after
the 2007 Conference we are just now beginning to see stability in the Qt6
based Plasma/KDE Frameworks and Gnome4/Gtk4. While better, and closer, neither
ever obtained that Great new, Ghee-Whiz Linux desktop. Instead they have
showed us how you cripple a desktop with mismatched dialogs for more than a
decade as some functionality was porter while other apps and utilities
languished for more than a decade before ever receiving attention.
And all the time TDE/KDE3 remained a remarkable set of desktops, written from
the ground up with the Qt3 toolkit that provided seamless integration of a
full suite of all the apps that most would ever need.
And today on GHz processors, SSD storage and GBs of RAM, TDE/KDE3 perform like
never before with a tiny footprint on the hardware leaving the rest for your use.
The "lessons learned" (or should have been learned) where there for all to see
in KDE4 when openSUSE provided 4.0.4a as the default desktop in the openSUSE
11.0 release of June, 2008. Sadly, from my interaction with the Gtk4 devs and
the Plasma devs, I'm not sure those that are there really understand what a
5hit-5how of problems and disappointment the past 18 years of releases from
the two major Linux desktop providers have really been.
And for sure, there are still a few of the old-guard developers there that do
the best they can to steer development in the right direction. But, there is
no question they are sadly outnumbered by the kids-with-crayon devs...
I'm not sure I recall kde1 that well. I may well have run it on Mandrake
before the turn of the century, but I do remember kde2 -- and it was a solid
stepping stone to KDE3, which with TDE will forever remain the best two
desktops I've run in 25+ years of doing this.
</nostalgia-off>
I'll check out the link and see how far the kde1 project is along. Probably
all fits in a 100KB tarball and can be built start to finish in less than 45
minutes :)
src links
found under yt video (14 min, not most interesting in itself)
qt1/kde1 for Slackware at