I always loved the look and feel of KDE 3, and I’ve always especially loved the stock system sounds. It felt super modern back when it was current (way more modern than any Windows OS at the time) and there’s something nostalgic about it, having grown up learning about Linux starting in the KDE 3-era. I still use KDE today, and it’s still my desktop environment of choice, but there’s something about KDE 3 that was changed with KDE 4 and still isn’t the same in Plasma today.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because I’ve seen a lot of posts about it recently for some reason. I’ve taken a look at the Trinity desktop environment, and it looks like a cool initiative by other people who have the same opinion I do about KDE 3. I’ve tried it out quickly a couple of times in a VM before and it felt like KDE 3, but I didn’t have time to test it extensively.

Does anyone actually run Trinity as their main desktop environment? I’m genuinely curious as to how it performs in 2018, being forked from a 10+ year old codebase now. I plan to finally test it out more extensively, but am interested in other people’s opinions first.

At first glance, it looks like the project’s development is quite slow (probably due to a lack of developers), which concerns me that it’s nearing the end of its lifecycle as well. I could be completely wrong; but looking at their main website, releases seem few and far between.

How viable is it as a main option in 2018, and is it actually stable? Have modifications on the KDE 3 and Qt 3 codebase by the project actually been extensive enough to keep up with the kernel and other packages a modern Linux system use, or are the devs really just applying band-aid fixes to the 10 year old code and crossing their fingers here? How well does it run modern applications, and is it able to keep up with a 2018 workload? Does it crash a lot, if at all?

I ask all of this because I remember actually comparing the source of a few KDE 3 modules to the source of the corresponding Trinity modules a little while back, and from what I saw there were a lot of bandaid fixes in the code, which again concerns me a bit. Some things were fine, but in other places you’d have if statements that would completely bypass segments of KDE 3 code if a certain version number of a package wasn’t met, for example.

I don’t know. The whole project has just always sketched me out a bit, so I’ve been a bit reluctant to take it seriously. I could be completely wrong, and for all I know it could be just as stable and up to date as any other desktop environment, which would be awesome.

Thoughts?