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