First off, let me thank Tim for taking on the project of keeping KDE 3.5 alive and to everyone who has helped in whatever capacity in this endeavor. I'm a refugee of KDE 3.5 who feels like he came back home again.
I first adopted KDE full time during the 3.4 series which is when it matured enough to capture me due to eye candy and finally having hardware capable of a full desktop environment. This would have been late 2005 as I recall. I was quite satisfied with KDE3 especially once I learned all the neat things one could do with it that just blew me away (and I know that I barely scratched the surface).
As the maintenance stopped on KDE3 and the rumblings of how fantastic KDE4 would be, I waited in anticipation. I tried some live CDs from the 4,1 release until Debian included 4.2 in its Sid archive. I did my best to make do and like it and stuck with it on my main desktop until late last year when I installed a dual port card and set it up for zaphod heads for two independent desktops and KDE4 turned itself inside out and proved unworthy of the setup. GNOME was a bit better but far from perfect. I found that XFCE handles the setup quite acceptably.
In early 2010 I gave Linux Mint a try on my main laptop and was impressed with their implementation of GNOME and moved to Ubuntu 10.4 Until I opted to go back to Debian Wheezy late last year with XFCE. XFCE and GNOME were acceptable but never quite as complete as KDE3 and while I knew of the Trinity project, I didn't investigate it until late last week. I have since installed it on two Squeeze boxes (one a desktop and the other a laptop I keep in my pickup) and my main Wheezy laptop.
Overall I am pleased and impressed with the effort. I can tell that improvements have been made. One chin scrather is why I get two WiCD icons in the system tray, but I'll figure that one out later.
Keep up the good work!
- Nate >>