KDE, Trinity
Last weekend I retreated with the Trinity Desktop Environment.
It seemed appealing because of its potentially lower footprint
than say KDE5. I of course sometimes get nostalgic for the early
Linux days of me running KNOPPIX and the first release of OpenSUSE
on KDE3 but it was not the driving force.
It's surreal to see many of the familar applications we take for granted
in their old form.
Amarok is a reminder that music players should probably not ever
get that complicated. Then I tried my hands on the TDE version of
KDevelop named TDevelop and it is surreal how many great features
were already present back then... however what is shocking for
the entire environment is that none of it seemingly has support
for git integration. Back in the KDE3 days I could understand that
the focus was still on Subversion and CVS... however considering
that the TDE team seems to do development on git I found that
refraining from modernizing components like that very odd.
The same could be said with some of the security mechanisms - when
I tried hooking up my Mail to their version of KMail.
No support for any of the security protocols I use over SMTP is
quite bizarre. It seems some of the apps are distributed not
because they're maintained in a meaningful capacity, but because
they'll compile and run.
Somehow GTK3 theming is supported. I guess that would be more
useful to the average non-developer user than git integration...
but still.
I think there's a place for an environment like this in the modern
era - projects like NEXTSPACE is another one that is very cool
but they need to really be convenient and snappy.
And contrary to what some on the GNUstep team think... no, people
don't care that it 'looks old'. People are turned off because
there is no reference environment. The only thing GNUstep has to
present itself is an community LiveCD that throws very unpolished
applications together in a manner that is not inviting.
GNUstep is such a specific environment, with its own way of thinking -
show users that you've got Services. Show graphical applications talking
to eachother like UNIX shell programs do - convince developers
to make it their environment for the reasons of 1. Speed 2. Consistency
as well as 3. Solid foundation and APIs that are proven.
It may be anecdotal, but the NEXTSPACE GitHub page has more engagement
than any of the GNUstep repositories do... why would you think that is?
If people didn't like 'old looking', you'd have thought it was the other
way around.
TDE may be snappy but it isn't always convenient.
It definitely makes me appreciate how good KDE5 is out of the box -
I only ever have to change the theme to Breeze Dark and change the
'Application Dashboard' to be the 'Application Menu'.
I still think that one should be the default.
I've been pushing a lot to the Nuclide main repo and some of the sub-games.
For HL and CS we're in the last 90% so to speak. I want to make a stable
release and have wanted to for a while... but that will bring another
wave of interest that I am not quite ready for yet. There still is
a bunch of glue that is holding some old components together.
Focusing on throwing that out is my top priority right now
so developers don't talk to glue that will be discarded
shortly after.
TODO for when I get around to them
----
Nuclide/FreeHL game tat:
- Gunman weapons still need more work!
- Team Fortress support is laughable in the weapons department, core ents
needs more testing (2fort works perfectly last time I tried)
- Poke646 is practically on halt until the other two are done
Counter-Strike still has animation oddities I need to look at with Spoike.
It's related to how we compose the animation blends in-engine. The basebone
field manipulation crap kinda sucks. You shoot a gun while crouch and your legs
which are _NOT_ supposed to move, bob back and forth. What's going on there?