[tde-users] Re: Complete TDE install

On 5/21/24 12:56 PM, Felix Miata via tde-users wrote: Perhaps I am an outlier. That would be nothing new in my life. :) There is no strict technical requirement against installing to /opt, but doing so renders TDE a second class player. No other DE is installed this way. A bug report was filed long ago: https://bugs.trinitydesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1934 Installing to /opt was understandable in the early days of forking TDE. KDE was and still is the 800 pound canary that is more popular than TDE -- both by users and politically in the free/libre world. There is no way TDE developers and users would win a spitting contest about which DE should be installed to /usr and /opt. The result is TDE users are told to "know their place" and sit in the back of the bus. From Paul Sheer's Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition: "/opt is reserved for the installation of add-on application software packages." While not a technical issue, I don't think installing TDE to /opt suggests an add-on application. LibreOffice perhaps, but DEs are primary applications and should be installed to /usr. Except that 800 pound canary still exists. Installing to /opt requires work-arounds and tap dancing with environment variables, such as $PATH. This is noticeable in starttde. Even the current starttde is not robust with configuring $PATH. Although declared compliant on the TDE web site, TDE is not really XDG compliant. There are related bug reports. Related, discussed some weeks back is getting non KDE Qt5 software to blend with TDE. There are no such issues with non KDE Qt5 software in KDE or other DEs. The root cause usually is the Qt5 software developers never heard of TDE or don't think TDE is relevant. Another example is /usr/bin/xdg-open. Notice TDE is not listed as a DE option. In the end TDE tends to receive a poor grade by tech savvy users. The MATE developers resolved the dilemma early in their forking from GNOME 2 by renaming potentially conflicting binaries with a 'mate-' prefix. TDE could be developed the same with a 'tde-' prefix. Since most people today are mouse point-clicky users, most would notice no difference with respect to the TDE menu and respective *.desktop files. Users comfortable with the Alt+F2 Run dialog would notice the change (typing 'tde-konsole' rather than konsole), but MATE users have grown accustomed to this many years ago, probably because GNOME binaries use a gnome- prefix. So too would TDE users adapt. Since my return to TDE I have run into several of these issues. I have submitted bug reports and feature requests, but most of any such effort would be more readily resolved if TDE was installed in /usr conflict-free. I use both KDE 5 and TDE and for some years also used MATE and Xfce. There always have been conflicts and work-around hoops to jump through because TDE is not respected as a regular DE in /usr. I stopped using MATE and Xfce when the developers adopted GTK3, but I use KDE 5 and harbor no ill feelings about KDE like I once did during the early days of KDE 4 (and I remember the spitting contests we had with KDE developers in the mail lists). Both KDE 5 and TDE work for me, except they do not work well together without sweat equity. Users who primarily only use TDE are unlikely to run into any of these issues. My desire is not to create community conflict or launch a coup. I have been around computers for more than 40 years. I was involved in the early days of TDE. I believe returning TDE to /usr, along with related adjustments, would render TDE more palatable to distro maintainers and raise TDE popularity. There are people who believe TDE is cute, quaint, nostalgic, or nice, but they also believe TDE is obsolete and irrelevant to modern users. As recent discussions indicate by the yet unread LWN article, at least one editor or author probably thinks this way. I don't believe any of that. Conversely, returning TDE to /usr and improving XDG compliance improves credibility. No more sitting at the back of the bus. Anyway, nothing is going to happen until the lead TDE developers give the word. :)