The KDE Restoration Project was a personal pet project which was born around last QtCon, and I took as a letter of love for the project that basically formed my professional life.
What you’re seeing here is the last KDE 1 release running on a modern system from 2016!
This is amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly,_Robin,_Fly
Just found it walking in my way:
https://i.redd.it/giuk78qakfsx.jpg
[via Reddit]
This advice works, for any Country.
How fun!
It reminds me of the April Fool’s Day joke, when everyone was whining about how terrible KDE 4 was, someone released a live distribution of the latest release of openSUSE with KDE 2 as the GUI.
I’m sure KDE 1, 2, and 3 absolutely FLY on modern hardware. …And they probably most of the features that anyone uses in a desktop environment… :/
Probably.
But, certainly missing a ton of features developers use.
Which ultimately ends up as missing features on the desktop
The features the developers use should be part of the IDE… merging them into the runtime is frankly stupid and has resulted in the mess of bloated applications we have today.
Also I am super tempted to get ebuilds for this on Gentoo, so I can roll it into a stage4 for sparc32.
Edited 2016-10-18 00:20 UTC
Yes, though some would argue this to be a good thing. Many developers seem to use everything they can because it’s there.
Actually if you would have to run something so old, you would probably start to notice how important are little things like font rendering, drop shadows in window compositing, support for international characters and such.
KDE2 brought antialiased fonts, and internationalization… so not far past KDE1 bloatwise.
https://www.kde.org/screenshots/images/large/kde2final_3.jpg
“ICQ Registration Wizard”
(/me feels old)
I was very unsatisfied when beautiful KDE 3.5 was replaced by ugly and buggy KDE 4.
So evidently somebody else has similar feelings
I’d agree that KDE 3 was more stable, but prettier? Uck, completely disagree with that. KDE 2 was better than three in the looks dept.
I ran KDE 1.x on a 486 with 12 Megs of RAM. It actually worked well, but my 1MB video card only supported the 256 colors at a time (didn’t matter which 256, but once 256 colors had been allocated I would have to restart X to get anything other than grayscale). I believe this was on Mandrake, and later Slackware.
For my 13th birthday, my parents spent the $$$ so I could get the 30-pin SIMMS to upgrade to a whopping 40 Megs of RAM. But still only 256 colors. And still a 486. KDE ran much better on that system. I think I ran xmms for music and Netscape for browsing and KDE introduced me to something called mahjongg.
So this brings back good memories. Sometimes I think modern environments try to do too much.
I’d love them to rerelease this version of KDE – the best KDE release to this date.
( Don’t tell me about TDE please – I have reasons to shun this project ).
While I did dislike KDE 4 at start, when I access old RHEL/CentOS machine w/ KDE 3.5 theses days, even ones that I’ve customized to the teeth, they feel outdated and old.
Once you get used to it, activities is far more flexible than KDE 3.5’s virtual desktops. Plasma widgets are far more capable then their SuperKaramba ancestors and Dolphin is miles ahead of Konq file manager.
Sure, KDE 5 is still slower and has more bugs than KDE 3.5.10+, but as someone that lived through the transition from KDE 1.x to 2.x and from 2.x to 3.x, nothing really changed.
KDE 1.x aside, I’m still missing a number of KDE 4.x specific kwin features (certain advanced rules, grouping, etc).
– Gilboa
I don’t and I won’t use plasma widgets. I don’t actually interact with the desktop that much thus the main component of KDE 5 is simply useless for me.
At the same time many absolutely useful applications from KDE 3.5 days are not and will likely not be ported to KDE 5: knetstats, ksensors and others. And I simply cannot live without them.
Also, tell me how can I have kicker, or whatever it’s called these days, fully transparent without installing extra broken themes? No way? WTF?! Even XFCE allows this.
KDE4/5 just like Gnome 3 are for devs themselves. KDE 3.5.x was the last series for people.
Give the rant above, this claim is purely subjective and carries little weight. Please provide evidence to support your claim.
Edited 2016-10-18 11:48 UTC
It’s not 2004 any longer– computers have changed a bit, and I suggest you take a look around. Not all the changes are improvements, and I admit, there’s a certain amount of “change for change’s sake” in modern Linux desktops– but the good outweighs the bad as a rule.
Aside from Akonadi, KDE is by far my preferred desktop. It has some annoyances, and sometimes I wonder what the developers are smoking, but I vastly prefer it to Gnome 3.
Cinnamon is mostly tolerable, but has some quirks that irritate me that I have yet to configure my way around.
Your wish has been granted, for quite some time too:
https://www.trinitydesktop.org/
Except the parent poster apparently has a specific grudge against that project.
Out of pure curiosity, what issues do you have with this project. I’ve been eyeballing this (& a few other alternative DEs) project for awhile.
They started by simply patching the official KDE 3.5.10 release to make it compatible with modern Linux libraries and new Linux subsystems (for instance KDE 3.5 depends on HAL which was replaced a long time ago).
Then their leader decided to make their project really stand alone by rewriting all KDE3/QT3 classes and their methods, so every KSomething class was renamed to TDSomething and every QSomething became TQTSomething). At that time the justification to this madness was the fact that they wanted to port KDE3 to Qt4/5 but then they realized it was above their paygrade so KDE3 was never ported to modern Qt, but the renames persisted so if you want to have vanilla KDE3.5 you cannot use TDE patches any longer.
Also at the beginning of TDE you could trivially `diff -urN KDE-sources TDE-sources` and see what changes had been made. Nowadays the diff is unwieldy and impossible to read and understand.
And I simply have no reasons to trust TDE developers because there’s no code audit whatsoever and no one has ever verified that their code changes are not malicious. Perhaps less than a thousand people in the world use TDE on a daily basis. That doesn’t make me feel good.
Another minor problem is that of recently TDE hasn’t been showing any signs of life.
I can confirm that there are likely >1000 users of Trinity due to the number of likes on Facebook.
There has indeed been criticism regarding the renaming. The KDE3 project on OpenSUSE is much more authentic in that sense. They have integrated a lot of patches from Trinity as well. (The renames are trivial to undo.)
I didn’t know there are mentally challenged KDE fanatics amongst OS news readers.
1. Your Chrome/WWW comparison is totally invalid. Plasma widgets to Chrome are like Chrome’s printing subsystem to html/js rendering. I can totally use Chrome without printing a single document during my entire life. That’s actually a fact of life.
2. There are no replacements for KNetStats and KSensors. KnetStats allows to have blinking lights for every network interface and have some easy to read stats (painted on top of the black screen, not on top of the semi transparent screen background). KSensors shows voltages and fan speeds – both unavailable in a Plasma widget because it can only show temperatures.
3. Don’t tell me about porting these applications to KDE5. I’m a f*cking user – I don’t give a flying f*ck about these problems – I want to have them installed without extra hurdles. And I know for a fact that future Linux distros will not include KDE3 libraries and they are already incompatible with modern GCC releases, so there’s no way to compile the aforementioned applications in modern distros unless of course you install an old GCC release and also install some … incompatible libraries which cannot coexist with modern libraries. In short, it’s a dead end for the end user.
While we are at it, I don’t give a flying f*ck about “attractive” apps. I want featureful applications which are easy to use, to interact with, and read their information. KDE5 widgets are anything but this: they are hard to use, they give information in a very convoluted way (transparency and shat), they lack most critical features.
4. KDE devs have repeated this great many times: “We won’t implement kicker’s transparency – do it via themes”. Too bad 99% of currently existing themes for KDE5 are broken. Even the official themes which come from kde.org are _broken_. So, again, tell me how am I supposed to have my kicker in KDE5 transparent.
5. Not all changes are improvements? Then why the hell did you downvote me for? Why the hell are you defending the abomination of inusability with shiny visual effects which is KDE5? With gray unreadable icons instead of KDE3/XP style where just one glance was enough to understand every feature of your application.
Do you know what HIG stands for? It stands for Human interface guidelines, not for “make every icon gray, make everything except the needed things translucent/transparent, make everything eat gigs of RAM, remove some features, make other features less usable”. This totally applies to almost everything created for the past 10 years: KDE4/5, Gnome 3, Windows 8/10, Android (>=5.0), iOS (>=7).
KDE 3.5.10 shone in regard to usability/simplicity/richness/completeness. It was almost fully usable without mouse.
KDE 5. OMG. It takes roughly 5 minutes to start loathing it.
Keep downvoting me. I love that. Just make sure your arguments are a little bit more sound/valid and substantiated without “I think this can replace this because it exists as a replacement”. No it f*cking cannot: something that has less than 30% of features of the original doesn’t replace it.
As you are incapable of having a civil discussion without resulting to personal insults (“mentally challenged”, “fanatics”), childish curses (“f*ck”, ” f*cking”) and general rudeness and as you are completely incapable of generating coherent arguments (as opposed to irrelevant shout-matches), I can only choose to ignore you.
Beyond that, in the interest of keeping discussions civil @OSNews, I can only hope other readers will downvote you to oblivion. (Whether they agree with you or not).
– Gilboa
Edited 2016-10-19 06:02 UTC
Oh,
You’re so above everything you’ve been offended, so again instead of valid arguments I see some etiquette drivel. Sorry, I don’t give a darn about votes – you may ^^^^ off to them.
Meanwhile for instance /. guys wouldn’t say a word about my wording.
So, here we have it. No arguments on your side, my strong arguments with some strong language and you’re already running away.
You start off by calling me “mentally challenged”, continue by claiming that I’m a “KDE fanatic” and than you are shocked that I refuse to waste time reading the rest of your childish rant? Really?
Behave like an adult and maybe you’ll be treated as one.
– Gilboa
Edited 2016-10-19 17:43 UTC
I always thought KDE1 was the most beautiful and functional DE, and some years ago recompiled 1.1.2. Unlike this poster, I went about it by compiling an older version of gcc (2.95.3) that could compile the KDE code without too many complaints. That also meant I could compile the bulk of the applications (kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, etc.) Since it’s not changing any time soon, I just left the binaries on my box, and they still work fine.
I really wish QT1 could have been released under a better license. TT had their reasons obviously, but it always seemed like the lightest weight and most developer friendly UI toolkit around.
The current owner of QT could technically relicense it to something nicer if they wished…
Is it Microsoft? The Owner?
Owner of QT is finnish company named Digia.
http://www.digia.fi
The owner of Qt is “The Qt Company” https://www.qt.io/about-us/ http://digia.com/en/investors/demerger/
They could, but what would be the point? Trolltech’s decisions affected past versions of QT and KDE. Relicensing old versions now wouldn’t change how things turned out.
Hi all, this is my first comment after years of peeping 😎 This is definitely a very interesting idea. I miss KDE 1.1.2 as it was my first Linux experience on a Celeron 300mhz, 32mb of ram and a 4MB videocard. It was very simple, fast, lightweight and polished, and I loved its themes, it felt like a giant leap coming from Win98! Now I own a nice gaming laptop and any new DE I use, even if they mostly look nice and sexy, they feel bloated, heavy, and resource hungry, and often glitchy… I feel almost like I’m wasting my CPU and GPU power just for the sake of doing the same things I did 20 years ago, such as showing menus and moving stuff here and there. I am a simple person and I use the graphical UI mostly the same way I did on Win9x, so all the modern bells and whistles feel like a burden/distraction to me, they rarely really make my experience easier, while modern lightweight environments don’t look polished and feel limited. I also use Windows and OS X for my work, and I always get rid of any fancy things to make them look as plain as possible. So welcome back KDE 1.1.2
