Trinity Desktop

[elijathegold]

Even with the thread title I'm going to start by talking about Linux Lite OS. It's an Ubuntu derivative based on Xfce and I used to love it. I installed the latest version on my old play box today and it has really come on since I last tried it. The thing that really struck me was just how unpolished Xfce feels compared to KDE and I didn't think I'd be saying that this time last year!

I decided to install Trinity on it to finally see what it is like.

The first thing I noticed after booting is that it calls itself "Kubuntu powered by Trinity." Is this official?
The second thing I noticed is how complete it is and it's more responsive, on that little machine, than Xfce.
The third thing that struck me is that it looks quite old fashioned, but that may just be the settings I chose on first boot.

It's going to get played with a bit as I'm trying to find out what's wrong with it; there must be a reason Mate gets all the love while Trinity is virtually ignored.

[claydoh]

Yes it is old fashioned. Trinity is a maintenance of the old KDE 3 desktop, last seen in Kubuntu in 8.04. They guy forked KDE 3, and probably the now long-unmaintained Qt3. I don't know how well security flaws and other bugs are rooted out and fixed on such ancient code, but they probably do some hacking on it I am sure.

So, yeah it will feel fast because it is....old And (now) old fashioned. It is complete probably because KDE is a complete desktop environment and can have all the doodads and (equally old and often crappy imo) KDE 3 programs included

Xfce is, or rather can be very lightweight, as well as lite on features, but that depends on how it is set up, and what other services and features that run under the hood are added. Such as what Ubuntu provides. I have no experience with Linux Lite, but the more widely used Xubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavour featuring Xfce is known to be a little bit heavier than other distros that use it for this reason. Polish? That is possibly quite debatable. KDE 3 was known for it's menu heavy and very inconsistent UI tendencies, for example. But again, it can be down to how things are set up and presented. I say try Xubuntu or other Xfce distro a whirl, and maybe even Lubuntu (using Lxde) if you want something very light but still useful.

[elijathegold]

I noticed a lot of qt4 packages being installed with Trinity so it may be based on that, I'll have a dig around later. You are right about the occasional inconsistency in design, though even Plasma 5 suffers from that at times (I'm looking at you ksudoku). I don't understand why Mate got all the developer and press love though; think what Trinity could be with as much effort spent on it as Mate.

As for Linux Lite, I always thought it was the distribution Xubuntu could be, and it while coincidences happen, it was after it's initial release that Xubuntu really stepped up it's game.

I really only chuck distros at that machine to see what happens. It's old (ish) being a core 2 duo, has only 2GB RAM and an 8GB hard disk, and it has Broadcom wifi so used present fun in that regard also. I'm not looking for anything useful, just entertaining. It runs both Ubuntu and Kubuntu 16.04 with no more effort than the lighter distros. Apparently there is a new release of OpenBSD if I have the patience for compiling nearly everything.

[sithlord48]

if you want lightweight that can use kde parts try LXQT. It is what lubuntu will eventually use for its desktop LXDE + RazorQt were both working on being light desktops and LXDE decided it was going to port from gtk2 to qt since gtk3 was not gonna work for them . They joined up with RazorQt and the joint effort is called LXQt .. if you want to use LXQT you can follow instruction here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu/LXQt . i use lxqt for any machine i want to create remote X sessons to, otherwise i use plasma5

[elijathegold]

As I said, I just throw things on that computer to see what they are like. LXQt is an environment I want to try at some point. RazorQt was looking quite promising.