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DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT
Trinity
Version: Trinity Web: http://trinitydesktop.org
These days there are very few Linux distributions that support the legacy KDE 4 desktop. Despite that, there is a vibrant community that looks even further into the depth of time and supports development of the yet older KDE 3 branch under the name of Trinity, or TDE for short. This is a stunning example of a project that’s managed to successfully resurrect the historic software and breathe new life into it. Lately there was the new Trinity 14.0.7 release with lots of goodness, plus a generous selection of ready-to-use packages for many mainstream Linux distros, so it is easy to give it a try.
Essentially, TDE is KDE 3 updated to work with modern Linux apps and services. It retains all the benefits of its parent – speed, a low-resource footprint, impressive selection of settings and things you can change or tune (spoiler: almost anything), plus it eliminates bottlenecks that an older desktop would cause if used nowadays: the inability to mount drives, outdated certificates, broken IM protocol support, no PulseAudio integration, etc. TDE fixes all these points, and in version 14.0.7 it even brings back the AIM and MSN support in Kopete.
We had a great time working with TDE. It felt very snappy, very smooth and fun, and not flat or boring. Unlike MATE, where Gnome 2 parts were renamed en masse, TDE kept any original names whenever possible, so that we have Konqueror for file and web browsing, Kview for opening images, Kate for a text editor, and so on. The TDE installation usually resides in /opt or somewhere else outside /usr, so the desktop can co-exist with newer KDE and Plasma.
If you have low-end hardware, TDE can give it a new lease of life. The desktop is insanely fast and beautiful without any effects, CPU-heavy indexers or other background processes. Most components and apps open with one second or less, even on a slow PC, and most of them are useful – like KMail 1.9, which can successfully manage modern Gmail mailboxes.
