Yukinu's Forum

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am Do you by any chance know what ever happened to the Ubuntu releases that were bundled with TDE? Recently Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Cinnamon have been accepted as official Ubuntu flavors, it makes me wonder if anyone has attempted to submit Ubuntu with TDE as a flavor, considering there were already downloadable Ubuntu ISOs. My guess is that there are already too many resource constraints as is.

Unfortunately not. But if I had to make a guess; TDE itself is hanging onto its last threads. It admittedly is full of bugs and little paper cuts simply owing to its age and how modern distributions' standard program stacks are moving faster than we can keep up. It's a massive technological debt issue.

There are already a few distributions that focus on coming with TDE out of the box and providing a good (i. e. not constantly crashing repeatedly) experience by default, like EXE GNU/Linux, or Q4OS. Those are about the extents that community resources go, and it's better to focus on a few things and do them well rather than spreading wide and thin. I don't have any concrete information, but I can assume that the TDE Ubuntu spin was cancelled due to such a lack of interest and resources.

I feel like with the limited resources we have, even keeping it operating is straining the limits. We still haven't gotten around to changing each piece of branding from K-something to T-something, even! Some of the documentation is a decade old or doesn't exist at all anymore. Most of the desktop's programs are entirely unmaintained or maintained by a person who also "maintains" like twelve others at best.

To speak the unspeakable: I think TDE as a project is genuinely dying, dying from a lack of skilled contributors willing and able to take on more than the very very basic necessary tasks to keep it booting. The TQt move was very cool, necessary and a long time in the making, but a lot of the more peripheral programs of TDE are abandoned. New features are very rare, and if they do come, they get added to the main components such as the recent window snapping update, but definitely not to the side programs. There is simply not enough skilled people in the TDE community.

Konqueror is practically unusable on the modern internet, for example, because writing a browser is a task of Lovecraftian dimensions these days and would probably need a dozen full time developers (just look at how much community power Firefox needs to make a serviceable browser).
Not even to mention the massive looming clouds on the horizon, like most of the multimedia and office programs having no support for contemporary document formats, that nobody is documenting how everything works, that standard system components of GNU/Linux desktops are being phased out as we speak leading to random crashes on some distributions like Arch, that someone has to go through all the super obscure TDE programs to make sure every even more obscure feature works...

As long as most TDE programs have no active specialized maintainers, they will rot. Something like KOffice or Kate will get updated to new Qt versions alright, but that's like maintenance work. But is there anyone really focusing on KOffice or Kate, trying to implement new features, or fix old bugs? No. And that's sad. It's on life support.

It's not the maintainers' fault. It's a manpower thing. But who with the relevant skills wants to put their hearts and time into maintaining a program that perhaps 20 people globally are using on a regular basis?

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am Interesting, never really looked into Enlightenment. Only time I've used it was when I tested out Bhodi Linux in a VM a couple of years ago.

I feel like Bodhi/Moksha is actually the best way to experience an Enlightenment desktop anyway these days. Enlightenment itself feels eerily abandoned from its community, even though the developers still exist. I have not even seen a single fan-made theme for the newest versions, and older themes are not supported fully... so it's default theme or bust.
Moksha is at least a fully featured, surprisingly amazingly polished experience. It's my secret tip-off for people looking for a cool GNU/Linux desktop that nobody outside its bubble knows.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 3:47 am It's quite difficult to find useful info and guides for creating desktop themes these days. I've gotten used to GTK themeing a bit, but it took a lot of greps, digging through source of other themes, using the GTK inspector, and a lot of trial and error to figure out the pieces. The amount of work to get into themeing is enough to deter most casual themers from making any changes to themes that are not provided through GUI options.

Yeah, me too. The only thing I ever got close to finishing was a scene girl/emo theme for IceWM, but that was a huge hassle to do too.
There's just so many interlocking parts (FreeDesktop standards, different standards for how icons are supposed to be named, ...) that it's daunting to start.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:07 pm and how modern distributions' standard program stacks are moving faster than we can keep up.

That will definitely be a compounding problem over time. As more of their dependencies are dropped from package repos, they'll start having to pull and maintain an ever increasing nubmer of packages into their repo just to build everything. Given enough churn, at some point it would make be less work to maintain an entire distro that functions properly with TDE and simply backport patches and packages than it would be to bring TDE forward.

On that note, I would love to see a distro that has a completely frozen software stack and only provides security updates and new packages (so no breaking API changes by replacing existing packages). I suppose Ubuntu with ELTS support is good enough, since you get 10 years of security updates, although this wouldn't solve the breaking API problem, just delay it for a while (and at a financial cost as well). Perhaps OpenBSD with Perl 5 scripts and C89 programs is the current best shot at having a longterm API stable *nix system.

Leva wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 11:07 pm To speak the unspeakable: I think TDE as a project is genuinely dying, dying from a lack of skilled contributors willing and able to take on more than the very very basic necessary tasks to keep it booting. The TQt move was very cool, necessary and a long time in the making, but a lot of the more peripheral programs of TDE are abandoned. New features are very rare, and if they do come, they get added to the main components such as the recent window snapping update, but definitely not to the side programs. There is simply not enough skilled people in the TDE community.

...

It's on life support.

It's interesting, there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. TDE needs more developers across the entire stack (from documentation to code changes), but it's difficult to attract more people without frequent marketing of the DE, and it's difficult to market the DE without a flagship distro that is well known and frequently in the press. Quite the predicament for such and ambitious project.

Yukinu wrote: ↑Wed Jan 10, 2024 3:47 am It's interesting, there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. TDE needs more developers across the entire stack (from documentation to code changes), but it's difficult to attract more people without frequent marketing of the DE, and it's difficult to market the DE without a flagship distro that is well known and frequently in the press. Quite the predicament for such and ambitious project.

Another problem is also just that a vast majority of people, including skilled developers, actively dislike or ridicule more traditional desktops and their designs. They want and enjoy the modern minimalist low-information-density design choices and would be much more likely and willing to throw their money, attention and contributions at something like a Wayland compositor with flat dark neon design than some traditional KDE 3.5 continuation.

In mainstream web spaces, I have been laughed at or even attacked for liking TDE (when I wasn't even being negative about modern desktops, but just showing off my own). "Oh god is it 1999 still", "My eyes are bleeding", "this is the ugliest window manager i have ever seen".

We're a dying breed.

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