The Desktop is right again!

[Michael Butash]

Funny you mention this - been struggling with KDE4 and 3x monitors when 
NOT using the binary drivers of late.  I really liked KDE, using that 
predominantly for the past few years on 5-6 montiors just dandy, but 
with amd drivers setting up the screens that worked mostly ok.

I moved to 3x 4k displays, got rid of amd binary drivers for radeon/mesa 
drivers that were much better (amd binary drivers were terrible @4k), 
except it seems a 5 year old bug stilll affects KDE's screen 
setup/placement.  This was never fixed until kde5, and using xrandr 
manually with a script isn't entirely reliable, forcing me to restart 
lightdm after it glitches the driver about 1 in 3 times.  YaY, began 
looking at other desktops to defect, yet again for more ancient bugs no 
one sees fit to fix.

TDE looks interesting, but being based on 3.x I wonder, as I hated KDE 
back then.  Does it do compositing at all?  My pref was always disabling 
compositing, but with radeon drivers that work sanely, I'm actually 
liking kde4 now with kwin/plasma.

I was looking yesterday at getting KDE5.x on this thing, and of course 
there isn't a version for 14.04.  Upgrading is always significantly 
painful with Ubuntu since 11.04, so moving to 15.0x isn't an attractive 
option, and 16.04 seemed as big a basketcase as I had tried it recently 
on my htpc (*still* can't get intel sound to work by default!? really?).

I might go back and try Cinnamon/Mate, compositing driver bugs with amd 
had made every desktop batsh!t crazy I've found, maybe even (gasp!) 
unity.  My experiences might be different without crappy video drivers 
for all their rampant compositing.

Thanks for sharing!

-mb


On 04/20/2016 09:48 AM, Nathan England wrote:
>
> I have been a KDE fan since the early days of 1.0. I have stuck with 
> it through the ups and downs and loved it when others hated it, and 
> rallied for it when people were jumping to Gnome or something else.
>
> A couple of years ago I switched full time to Xfce with a full KDE SC 
> install so I could use all the apps I love and just not have to deal 
> with the horrible Plasma desktop shell. I really do like everything 
> about Plasma...in theory. It looks great, and on a single screen it 
> works great! But on a workstation with 3 or more monitors it really 
> comes apart at its seems.
>
> But no more! I heard of TDE several years ago, but never looked into 
> it. Yesterday, I setup the repo for my Fedora 22 and Fedora 23 
> machines and installed the full Trinity suite. I gotta say, KDE 3 
> *never* worked this well. I setup shortcuts to many of my preferred 
> KDE 5 apps like Dolphin and everything is right with the desktop again!
>
> https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/Trinity_Desktop_Environment
>