The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is a fork of KDE 3 which maintains the classic KDE approach and style. Trinity has received a new update, version 14.1.4, which introduces several small improvements:
"The key highlights of this version are: support for Unicode surrogate characters and planes above zero (for example emojis); new modern vector wallpapers and new colour themes; new control module to manage deb/rpm alternatives; tab support in kpdf; better context menu for tderandrtray and fixes to the handling of gamma settings; clickable links in calendar events; support for transparency, top and shadow borders and inactive windows in Dekorator; better integration of kxkb with setxkbmap, new options and various fixes for the tray feedback; ability to create VPN connections in tdenetworkmanager once again; several improvements to the codeine player; support for Ubuntu Plucky and upcoming Fedora 43." While not widely used, some projects, such as Q4OS, will likely have packages of Trinity 14.1.4 soon.
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https://9to5linux.com/trinity-desktop-environment-r14-1-5-released-with-support-for-debian-trixie
This release also adds support for the openSUSE Leap 16, Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Linux 43, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 operating systems.
Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) R14.1.5 desktop environment has been released for nostalgic KDE 3.5 users as the fifth maintenance release of the R14.1.x series with various new features and enhancements.
Coming almost six and a half months after Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4, the Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5 release introduces support for recent GNU/Linux distributions, including Debian 13 "Trixie", Ubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka), openSUSE Leap 16, Fedora Linux 43, and RHEL 10.
The nightly builds also support the upcoming Debian 14 "Forky" operating system (Debian Testing). Support for older distributions that are no longer supported has been dropped in this release, including Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur), openSUSE Leap 15.5, and Fedora Linux 41.
New features in Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5 include tiling support on multi-monitor setups, along with user-friendly tiling band settings, support for a paste command to the KRDC remote desktop client to let you send clipboard content as text, and FFmpeg 8.0 support to the K9Copy DVD backup and DVD authoring program.
This release also brings various aesthetic improvements and new blur options to the Kicker application menu, a mute toggle button to Codeine's volume slider, support for the unzip v6 date format to the Ark file archiver, and improvements to various TDE-branded artwork and a new Flying Konqi wallpaper.
Last but not least, Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5 adds a new option to center the pop-up menu when using the Baghira style, support for the libgpgme 2.0 library to the tdepim component, support for OpenLDAP 2.5, and smooth resize as the default selection at start to the KolourPaint paint program.
Of course, numerous bugs were fixed, so check out the full release notes for more details about the changes included in TDE R14.1.5, which you can download for Linux distros, as well as BSD and DilOS systems from the official website.
Has anybody here used it? Any comments?
- Previously:
Trinity Desktop Environment 14.1.4 Released
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday April 30 2025, @07:11PM (3 children)
However, is "tderandrtray" a typo? If not, what is it?
I'll certainly try this distro out.
Donald Trump is a mixture of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, multiplied by ten.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday April 30 2025, @07:18PM
My *guess* is that its a system tray icon under TDE for rest and relaxation. My second guess:
I prefer my first intepretation though. It just feels right.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday May 01 2025, @02:44PM
As a TDE user, it's not a typo. It's TDE xrandr tray application.
Xranrd is X rotation and Resize - a program which allows to direct screens, resolutions and rotations. Tderandrtray sits in the system tray offering a right-click menu for changing resolutions or monitors. So if You have e.g. a laptop, all these projector settings can be set from there.
Contrary to arandr it seems to have less logic bugs when synthesizing xrandr commands.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday May 02 2025, @02:12PM
TDE isn't a distro, it is a desktop like Gnome and KDE. From what I know TDE is a fork of KDE 3.5, they kept the general look and feel of KDE and didn't add all the bloat of KDE4 and associated eye candy.
I've forgotten when I switched to TDE, I pretty sure it has been well over a decade or two. The only thing I've hard to remember is to search for a "-trinity" version of some package I want to install. Like "ark-trinity" that has been tweaked to integrate with TDE.
I would highly recommend trying it out. I've had good experiences with this liveCD when I've needed to test older hardware before fully installing Devuan/TDE.
https://exegnulinux.net/ [exegnulinux.net]
Good luck
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Wednesday April 30 2025, @09:15PM (2 children)
I know of the main issues with forking Gnome (for those who didn't like the interface changes of the newer versions) is that it is tightly integrated with GTK, so even if you did fork it, GTK3 would break things unless you forked GTK2 and developed that in tandem.
Looks like the TDE guys did exactly that, not only forking KDE3.5 but forking and maintaining QT3 to keep it all working on newer systems. Impressive for a project that is not mainstream (I sure was not aware of it until today), and looking on their wiki [wikipedia.org] it was forked in 2010, so they have been going for 15 years in the background.
It was also a nostalgia hit to see the screenshots, reminds me of the old KDE3 themes that I used to have. While I mostly use fluxbox and windowmaker because I don't like full integrated DE's, I am tempted to install TDE and test it out.
Is it just me or were GUIs much more customisable and themable back then? I remember you used to really be able to customise KDE3 and Gnome2. Seems now both Gnome and KDE6 are more about forcing the user to adapt to their interface rather than adapting their interface to how the user wishes to work, which I think is a regression in computer interface usability.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Wednesday April 30 2025, @11:29PM
TDE is also one of the regular spins for PCLinuxOS.
I like it, but find it not quite as complete and stable as current KDE. However, TDE is a lot better for making things look exactly as I wish.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 30 2025, @11:38PM
2010 was about the last time I was using KDE on a regular basis.
As I recall, around 2013 the super high resolution laptop screens started coming out, and KDE was super slow to handle the font scaling well - many fonts were appearing 1/2 size due to the double resolution screens.
Further hazy memories say something like the Unity desktop was the first in Linux to get that right, then of course Unity gave way to the GNOME resurgence. I loaded Kubuntu a couple of times through the years but it was never compelling. Xubuntu is a nice alternative today. XFCE is pretty refined compared to where it was 10-15 years back, and by refined I mean: works better without getting bloated.
KDE never felt as heavy to me as GNOME, but it was heavy enough.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dx3bydt3 on Wednesday April 30 2025, @10:06PM (1 child)
Now I'm using KDE 5, and it works pretty damn well. Not perfect, but neither was KDE 3.
I remember how my Mandriva 2008 was set up so nicely, and that got ruined on some later release with KDE 4 where nothing worked the same, and lots of customization options were changed or removed.
That this fork exists is a good thing, while Plasma has evolved to be fast and functional again, it's good to have other options.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday April 30 2025, @11:32PM
I have KDE6 on the Fedora box, and yeah, it's slick even with Fedora under it (which has nowhere near the performance of PCLOS or OM). One thing that's come along is really nice support for Wacom tablets (who knew pressure sensitivity was supposed to work like that?) Otherwise not really different from 5.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday May 01 2025, @03:13PM
I use this desktop in Debian since it had 3.5.x numbering. What can I tell:
- It is extremely configurable. A lot of things can be just clicked out, without patching a single line of code, more, even without knowledge about obscure CSS implementations (I look at GTK). In every new version there are more options to try.
- It has low requirements. A few hundred MBs is normal for typical usage, i.e. having a few windows of Konqueror (OK, I have 8 of them now), some PDFs, a few tray applets and a few tabs of terminal. I successfully use it on my small 2GB laptop, it has 2x800MHz Core 2 Duo CPU (it's 2x1.2GHz, but it does not like this frequency because cooling is poor) and it's great on it. I also have it in my 16GB Core i7 and even more powerful workstations, and it's not intrusive with its operations to halt programs because window switching suddenly requires 100% of GPU (looking at modern Gnome).
- The UI is compact. Or it can be configured to be compact. Without editing code. That's why I considered switching to it at first.
- It will not clog a 32GB RAM workstation because you dared to open a drive with >10K 8MPix raw scans and it wants to generate their thumbnails right now, simultaneously, all of them (that was the reason I dumped later KDEs, whoever let this into codebase damned a whole KDE for me, that's when I switched).
- Konqueror has a sidebar and this sidebar works, contrary to the reason they removed it "because it does not work" (this made me dump KDE4 totally).
On the other side:
- It is dependent on X. So in newer distributions, it will work only if there is some X window system in packages.
- There are small incompatibilities between object embedding in complex applications. KParts are not compatible.
- Mixing Trinity's stuff with the same newer KDE stuff results in entering a peculiar state, in which some settings are configured by Trinity's options, but for these newer KDE applications You have some of options in Trinity, and some in the newer KDE's configuration options. If the package management is fine-grained, You usually need to launch specific configuration panel from the terminal to e.g. change sounds for events known for later KDE, but not Trinity.
- Konqueror was designed as a very modular thing. While Win9x's "Internet Explorer - Explorer" was a totally entangled hybrid, in Konqueror the web component lives along other UI components. It means that running Konqueror does not start instantly a whole HTML/JS engine (at most a very limited "HTML view" for list and sidebar), but also viewing files specific ways (galleries, icons, lists, details) are separate modules with their own philosophies (like viewing web is another one). It means that, for example, some file presentation methods will allow to rename without auto-selecting extension, some will not. Some will allow to save their settings per folder, some are per session. The difference is visible.
- Newer versions of libraries don't like the "per-object" formalism of drag and drop, they like text. It means that dragging and dropping between TDE and them will end with e.g. lack of selecting file type window, getting the textual URL instead of desktop file (Firefox) or just not be understood at all (latest FileZilla, dragging from Konqueror).
- For the Great Old Ones sake, get one power management system and stick to it. Not like suspending to disk is from the console tools, and battery management from TDE. This will lead to very embarrassing situations.
- I found TDE's KOffice quite poor. To make LibreOffice not looking like Gnome application (which is NOT compact) start the LibreOffice with option: SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN=gen .
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday May 02 2025, @02:19PM
I've been using it since the original fork from KDE 3.5 and love it.
TDE runs flawlessly on every version of Debian, and now Devuan that I've tried it on.
Of course being just my opinion YMMV but if you want to give TDE a try
https://exegnulinux.net/ [exegnulinux.net]
has a nice liveCD so you can see what TDE looks like.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."