On Monday 23 Aug 2021 17:00:39 Γιώργος Κωστόπουλος wrote:
I installed lately at one of my systems, a fresh
Devuan installation
with KDE (stable ver. Beowulf, x64, fully updated).
OK. I closed it and opened Konsole -> went root (su
-) and I tried apt
(apt install tdebase-trinity).
This time TDE installed properly, but KDE installation was removed
altogether (with the exception of some packages (like SDDM)).
Just out of curiosity, is it possible to install TDE
alongside with KDE?
I am still using Trinity R14.0.4, installed over Debian Jessie around April
2017, and my Trinity installation most definitely did NOT remove KDE. In fact,
I would have been very unhappy if it had done so, because I use some KDE4
programs inside TDE, for example, Konqueror-KDE4, KMail-KDE4, and Gwenview-
KDE4. The fact that I can get the best of both worlds, and choose, in
Trinity, whether I use the Trinity version of a program, or the KDE4 version,
is in my opinion one of the great things about Trinity. I have both the
Trinity version and the KDE4 version of many programs all in the TDE menu, so
I can choose which I use. For example I always use KolourPaint-Trinity and
KWrite-Trinity.
When I installed Trinity R14.0.4 over Debian Jessie around April 2017, I did
it MANUALLY, using dpkg lots of times, and searching through the listings
somewhere on the Trinity website or one of the repositories, until I had found
and installed everything needed to satisfy all dependencies. The whole
process took perhaps about 12 hours. I certainly would not have allowed the
Trinity installation to uninstall KDE4.
I can choose to boot into KDE4 instead of Trinity at the TDM menu, if I want
to, but the last time I did that was probably several years ago. *The
remainder of this paragraph might be partly off-topic, but it is on-topic for
why I occasionally need to be able to boot into KDE4 instead of Trinity, so
I'll mention it here.* Everything I need to use works in Trinity, with just
one exception, that I have not had to use in the last year or two. The one
exception is programs that use a special part of OpenGL, that lets you rotate
an image of a 3-dimensional object in 3 dimensions, by dragging it with the
mouse. A Debian package that uses this is geomview, and when I try to open
Geomview in Trinity, the window just flashes into view for about a second, then
vanishes again. Opening geomview from a Konsole window instead of from the
TDE menu results in an error message about a Segmentation violation. However
Geomview works properly in KDE4, and the only reason I ever have to boot into
KDE4 rather than Trinity is to use Geomview, or a specialized non-Debian
program called SnapPy, that also uses the special 3-d rotation part of OpenGL.
I encountered another indication that there is a problem with OpenGL in
Trinity some time ago, when, if I remember correctly, I did TDE Menu | Trinity
Control Center | Peripherals | Information | OpenGL, which, if I remember
correctly, caused TDE to crash or freeze, which normally NEVER happens. I am
not going to test that right now, because I don't want a crash at the moment.
If the Trinity interface to OpenGL could be fixed so that Geomview runs
properly in Trinity, I would probably never have to boot into KDE4 instead of
Trinity. From my notes from around 2010, I think Geomview and SnapPy DID work
in KDE3.5, but they might occasionally have caused a crash of KDE3.5 at some
random moment. There was some instability there, but nevertheless, Geomview
and SnapPy were sometimes very useful. Both Geomview and SnapPy work properly
in KDE4, WITHOUT causing the occasional crashes, at some unexpected random
moment, that those programs used to cause in KDE3.5. Some parts of OpenGL do
work in Trinity, for example, Gwenview uses OpenGL, but Gwenview does not use
the 3-d rotation part of OpenGL. I guess I might be the only Trinity user who
ever needs to use programs that use the 3-d rotation part of OpenGL, because I
have never seen the issue mentioned in the mailing lists since I started
subscribing to the lists around April 2017, and I only need to use those
programs occasionally, and I can work around the problem by booting into KDE4
instead of Trinity, so this issue will clearly be of very low priority for the
developers. *Sorry this paragraph is partly off-topic, I never mentioned this
OpenGL issue before because it is of such low priority, I just mentioned it
here because it is a reason to need to be able to boot into KDE4 instead of
Trinity, although only rarely for me.*
I can no longer use online banking in any browser available in Debian Jessie,
and I could also not install Telegram Desktop in Debian Jessie, so I did a
fresh install of Debian Buster on a spare machine, just for those two
purposes. I selected KDE as the only desktop. The Buster version of KDE
seemed even more unsatisfactory than the late Jessie version of KDE4. In
particular, the main menu was transparent, which was absurd, and made it very
difficult to read. So I decided to install TDE on that machine too. I
remembered some discussion from the TDE mailing lists, that there might be
problems with systemd, but only if systemd is running as the 1st application.
From looking at various posts on the TDE mailing lists, I decided that it
might be best to install sysv-init in Debian 10, to stop systemd running as
the 1st application. My notes about this are probably in a file on that other
machine, which is not running at the moment, but from what I remember, I used
one of the high level installation programs, possibly aptitude, to do the
Trinity installation that time. The high level installation program informed
me that to install sysv-init, I would have to uninstall essentially the whole
of KDE. I did not want to do that, so I did not install sysv-init. I then
used the high level installation program to install Trinity, and the
installation went perfectly, it would have been the standard version of TDE at
that time, which was late September to mid October last year. I am pretty
sure that the Trinity installation did NOT uninstall KDE, but as I only use
that machine about once per month, and it's not running at the moment, I'm not
absolutely certain about that.
As you are using Devuan rather than Debian, and I found in Debian Buster that
to install sysv-init, so as to stop systemd from running as the 1st
application, I would have to uninstall essentially the whole of KDE, it might
perhaps be reasonable to guess that the Devuan workarounds to avoid systemd
are fragile, and somehow break the compatibility between KDE and Trinity.
Being able to use KDE programs in Trinity, and being able to boot into KDE
instead of Trinity, on the rare occasions when I need to, (because of the
problem with the 3-d rotation part of OpenGL in Trinity), are very important
for me, so if Devuan really does break the compatibility between KDE and
Trinity, I will try to stay with Debian.
Regards,
Chris Austin