Penguin Spirit
Some time ago, I read about a KDE 3.x fork named “Trinity”. Some IT magazines and news sites called it “zombified” and said it has no future. I strongly disagree with those claims.
First, Trinity is a very active project coordinated by Timothy Pearson, the KDE 3.x coordinator of previous Kubuntu releases. This guy is a real expert; he’s the boss behind a well-polished KDE 3.x distribution. He knows the internals of KDE 3.x. He has the skills to to work with large code repositories, large package repositories and definitely has what it takes to make Trinity a great open source project. So far he did a very good job; Trinity 3.5.12 is indeed a great desktop environment that is, undoubtly, a significant improvement over KDE 3.5.10. Trinity moves on and improves over the the wonderful work done by the KDE e.V.
Also, KDE 3.5.10 is dead; it simply won’t compile with recent distributions and toolchains. It heavily relies on legacy components that no longer ship with today’s distributions, as lots of progress in the fields of hardware abstraction and graphics has been made since the early days of the KDE 3.x backend. That’s not the case with Trinity; it will build just fine with recent distributions. It has its own wrapper for the legacy Qt3, which Perason intends to use, eventually, to translate Qt4 calls into deprecated Qt3 calls in order to bridge between Trinity and the more modern world of KDE 4.x. That’s a great ensurance plan that prevents Trinity from lagging behind in the long-term, as other transitions from legacy technologies (like HAL) to more modern ones (such as libudev and KMS) can be performed in a similar fashion.
Additionally, many distributions show interest in Trinity; Slackware, Ubuntu and Debian are only the first distributions that have their own Trinity repositories. Package builders of RPM-based distributions such as Mandriva already attempt to package Trinity. With the interest of major desktop distributions comes fast-paced upstream development, integration and support. Once Trinity becomes more popular, it’s just a matter of time before it expands and desktop distributions behind it appear all over and flourish.
To conclude, I truly believe Trinity is a great project that has a long future full of great, exciting development ahead of it. I wish it good luck and hope it’s here to stay for years to come.
