Other Trinity Desktop Environment on FreeBSD

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Trinity, also known as TDE, is a desktop environment for Unix-derived and Unix-like operating systems. It is a continuation of KDE 3.5 much like MATE is to GNOME 2. TDE contains a substantial amount of KDE applications that lost features or were cut entirely in the Plasma era, such as aRts, KVirc, Noatun, Ksquirrel, Konqueror with profiles, and more. TDE is extremely customizable and follows traditional desktop paradigms rather than compensate for mobile devices. It still features the Crystal icon set and the Plastik and Keramik themes.

snapshot4.png

Screenshot from my second successful install of TDE.

TDE is not in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, and likely won't be anytime soon, as even in the Linux space it is only found in very few distributions such as Q4OS. TDE uses Qt3, which has not been supported in years and was quickly replaced by Qt4 and Qt5. To compensate, the TDE team maintains their own fork of Qt3 called TQt3 patched with security fixes. While TDE is not officially available, a port exists maintained by the lead developer of TDE.

This thread is for people who enjoy TDE and/or KDE 3.5. Its rather underrated so I decided to inform people on its existence.
 
kpedersen said:
Looks really sleek, modern and consistent. Hopefully one day other DEs catch up!
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Its great if you have the time to install it. It shows its age when you use newer Qt applications or GTK but that's just the result of the toolkits becoming more than they should've been.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Shouldn't it be easy to make a port of it ?

FreeBSD Trinity Installation Instructions - Trinity Desktop Project Wiki

wiki.trinitydesktop.org wiki.trinitydesktop.org
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Technically speaking yes, the port is there, but some of the things done for convenience would need to be changed. I have never maintained a port and not good with Makefiles but I'm pretty sure that "trinity.port.mk" file would have to go. Everything would also need to be put in the respective places instead of /opt. TDE is a much larger project that maintains everything lost with KDE 4+ so its not easy maintenance like MATE.
 
Trinity R14.0.13 is set to release at the end of October with general bug fixes and security patches. Ktorrent has been added as a port for FreeBSD. Screenshot candidates to appear on the release announcement can be sent to the Trinity users mailing list.
 
Compiling trinity failed for me. So i had to copy part of the git clone to /usr/ports/x11/trinity as it was looking for files there. Trying at new.
 
Alain De Vos said:
Compiling trinity failed for me. So i had to copy part of the git clone to /usr/ports/x11/trinity as it was looking for files there. Trying at new.
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I had a few issues too. Tdelibs fails because its missing devel/pcre, if you built or installed that it installs fine. Ksquirrel depends on librsvg2 but something else installs librsvg2-rust, and tdesdk fails for whatever reason (thus tdewebdev and tdevelop can't be built). I just commented the latter three out from the Makefile.
 
Alain De Vos said:
I removed trinity. It was too-instrusive. And has alot of dependencies. Long compile time.
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'Intrusive' in what way? I would say its less intrusive than its Plasma descendant since it doesn't have Akonadi, Baloo, or geolocation services enabled through "Night Light".

With that said, even if its the better version of KDE its still much like using KDE today. Lots of dependencies, long compile times, and overcomplication.
 
Hello folks,

Not sure there's much interest around this, but I wanted to report that I have managed to build Trinity 14.0.13 on FreeBSD 13.1

It has been a long and sometimes painful and frustrating journey, I must say. It's complex and I am not knowledgeable of the FreeBSD ports environment enough for this to be smooth sailing.

I have compiled it on two separate machines, a very old laptop that only supports 32 bits (it took more than a full day!) and a more modern one in 64 bits.

I had to apply 3 patches to 3 source files that caused compilation errors. Mostly because of implicit conversions that didn't pass the compiler rules. Adding a few casts made compilation succeed, although I might well have hidden a problem that will show up later (like crashes). We shall see,

Also, on the 32 bits machine, a handful of PNG files were not generated and thus caused the installation phase to fail. I had to copy these few files over from a working installation on a Linux box. Cause undetermined. The build process is too hairy for me to follow it through.

It's untested at this time. I am facing yet unresolvable issues with FreeBSD 13.1 on the machine I want to run it on the most. It's ready to be tested a secondary machine that runs 13.1 OK, but this will be done later.

At this time I'm concentrating on trying to build it on FreeBSD 12.4, which is quite a challenge because the page linked in the OP explicitly says that 13.x is required. But I need 12.4, because 13.1 is a no go on that machine.

If there's any interest, I might share some details on what I've been through and my patches.
I would be very interested in finding out whether others have gone the same way.
 
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