The Trinity Desktop Environment, a fork of the KDE 3.x codebase, has released its latest version.
This release comes with a new D-Bus based polkit authentication agent, new markdown document viewer, support for HTML5 in Quanta, support for Let’s Encrypt certificates, some improvements to GUI options, better cooperation between tdm and plymouth, fix for ICEAuthority ownership stealing when using sudo, various other bug fixes and improvements. It also adds support for Ubuntu Jammy while it drops support for Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Trusty. C++11 is now allowed in the code base.
I doubt the audience for a KDE 3.x desktop is massive, but thanks to the wonders of open source – the people that want it, can have it.
I`ve used Trinity on my old notebook, but it had some problems with portable hdd. Maybe it`s fixed now, I`ll check it.
Trinity uses that odd media:/ path that only works within TDE applications, just try opening a video from Konqueror to VLC or mpv! It’s easy to change your default file manager though (or start using absolute file paths)
Would be great if they abandoned TQt and ported to Qt6.
It’s a fun concept (and I do still love the KDE3 desktop design) but I don’t trust it on a practical level. Not enough maintainers to handle security on such an old code base IMO, and last I checked they hadn’t removed the archaic version of KHTML – I don’t want to think too hard about what kind of bugs lurk in that.
Yeah, seconded. I see kde3 inspired designs every now and then and its a mind trip. But security alone is a pretty good reason to avoid it some of the applications. Others might still be worth it, I loved kdevelop3. I got to be productive on kdevelop4, but not the same for lack of better term “vibe”. I was def on the kde4 hype train, but the things that had be excited about it never really came to fruition ( mobile interface, some of the more exotic widgeting possible). I think the critics of kde4 were fair in their assessment of its stability, even after the 4.0 ( not for users) whole debacle. I don’t think its ever come close to the level of stability that kde3 had. There were good stable point relases of 4/5 but then there would be a bad one.
I hated KDE4 but honestly I’ve found KDE5 to be really good. Still has some stability issues on Wayland, but they’re improving quickly and steadily, and Wayland support is almost complete at this point. KDE5 on Wayland is my daily driver.
The biggest weak point IMO is the panel and other plasma widgets, which… still seem about as clunky and finicky to me as they did in KDE4, and have been the biggest source of Wayland issues. I work around by just using Latte Dock, which is a bit less clunky and buggy (but still not great).
Good to hear its improved a bit. I largely abandoned it when copy /paste on wayland was awful. It would randomly paste my clipboard contents. Never understood if that was kdevelop or just kde’s wayland compositor implementation, but had a few embarrassing commits of bizzare random clipboard contents in random spots that I didn’t notice. One of those bugs I’ve submitted before to bewilderment from the devs. Which I totally get, this nonsensical thing happens. when? Sometimes! Can you reproduce? Not on demand. Is there a stack trace? Its not a crash, so no…
Wow. Yeah, I can safely say I’ve never had that happen (thank goodness).
You can disable JavaScript globally, TDE can’t handle the modern web anyway.
That would help but it’s not really a solution. The HTML renderer itself is probably going to have vulnerabilities, and overall there’s just going to be a vast amount of dead or poorly maintained code, all of which is attack surface. Remember the .desktop file autorun vulnerability? There could be dozens of issues like that lurking in there.
“KSSL: added Let’s Encrypt certificates support”
This piques my interest. I searched but couldn’t find a detailed description of what they mean. Does this merely mean they added let’s encrypt to the verified CAs, or are they doing something more novel in the OS? Does anyone know?
The OS? TDE is a desktop environment. To be honest I don’t even understand what this thing is about. TDE mustn’t have its own certificate store, it should use what your Linux distro offers. Having/maintaining your own copy of certificates is a waste of resources and is a recipe for disaster.
Yeah, I know what Let’s Encrypt is, but I’m not sure what this changelog entry means in terms of the Trinity desktop.
It’s not listed here, but then again I don’t understand why a desktop environment would be, like you said.
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/which-browsers-and-operating-systems-support-lets-encrypt/4394
My guess is they probably added support for the certs to Konqueror. Which they shouldn’t, because see what I said earlier about the codebase.
BTW, there’s an error in the headline: “Trinity Ddesktop Environment R14.0.12 released”
I was thinking it would be cool to get this working on my SGI Octane.