A Love Letter to Trinity

While I had always used modern desktop environments, I always felt like they were missing that older touch. The design of older desktops were much cooler and usable, and sometimes even had more features. It was all hacked together in the best way. From the titlebar app menu in KDE4, to the square widgets in GNUstep, it always felt very unique.

I'm tired of the modern themes for Linux desktops. They all look the same now, feel the same, and you are lucky if they don't have macOS style buttons (WHY!?). Nevermind that nearly every theme has somewhat more bulky buttons and styles than the last one. And can we even forget the styles out there that have a blur or effect that takes up processing time?

I'm no stranger to trying out the old environments either. I used to main WindowMaker for a long while and it was alright if it wasn't a buggy mess to use with modern software. CDE wouldn't even compile on my system. About three months ago, I took the plunge to try out Trinity for a week, and it was way more than I expected.

With KDE, I had faced numerous problems that I just accepted was the norm on my desktop. Trinity wasn't bothered by the modern annoyanced, and it felt nearly bug free. There were still some problems, but they were way more tolerable and not the end of the world. Besides, it was worth the struggle with some crashes here and there for the experience I would get.

Perhaps the appeal to an older desktop still maintained got me, but I think it's also to do with efficiency. Buttons are small and space-efficient, applications are so much faster, and memory is hardly consumed. It feels as if years of KDE updating and migrating to newer Qt versions have left it a crippled mess than what it was before. Opening a 5GB text file in Plasma Kate is a laggy and screeches the system to a halt compared to the smooth viewing of TDE Kate. It's absolutely insane the difference.

Trinity is still being maintained and updated, so it's still getting support for all the things we end up using today, but without the destructive transitions to modern frameworks. This is how it should be. This is the desktop I am daily driving now.