Turns out it's a fork of KDE 3, with comparable goals to the Cinnamon fork of GNOME 3. I guessed it had some connection to KDE from the logo, but for whatever reason the home page doesn't say anything about KDE. So I went into the FAQ, which does mention KDE, but does so in a way I find odd:

>What is TDE?

>TDE is the Trinity Desktop Environment. The project was initiated by Matthias Ettrich in 1996 and originally called the K Desktop Environment.

>Why the rebranding and renaming efforts? Why not continue calling the software KDE?

>The "KDE" name, various logos, and related efforts are trademarked by the KDE Foundation. Since the Trinity project is not affiliated with the KDE Foundation, legally we can't use their trademarks.

It's like the FAQ is trying to hint that TDE is the "real" KDE, a continuation of the same project initiated by Matthias Ettrich (who, afaict, has no connection to TDE), and that the KDE Foundation's project is an impostor. But the FAQ page doesn't quite make that claim explicit, or provide justification for it, so I don't know what to think. The Wikipedia page on TDE is also of no help. Does anyone know if there's a backstory?

The fact that TDE exist is great and proves that unlike other OSes where you are forced to upgrade everything to whatever the OS developer wants and have no choice in the matter (aside from not upgrading, which isn't a real option because both hardware and software support drops like flies over time) regardless of how this affects your workflow, on Linux you can simply get to have all the latest stuff under the hood (kernel, drivers, etc) while at the same time preserving the workflows you want.

Some elbow grease might be necessary - like all the time the TDE developers have put towards their project - but the important part is that it is possible.

That said, i do think that TDE would benefit from a couple of more aesthetically pleasing themes in the screenshots - even the original KDE3.5 default theme (preferably with a bit less gradient galore) would be better than the current shots that look like a hodgepodge of themes thrown together.

This was a lifesaver during the early KDE4 years. Most projects it's wise to avoid .0 releases, but for KDE4 even up to .4 or so it was questionable. Thankfully this catastrophe didn't repeat for KDE5.

There are still KDE3 features I miss that neither KDE4 nor KDE5 has ever had. The one that sticks out in my mind is the ability to edit the start menu directly, rather than having to move to a weird parallel world.

That does remind me though - why isn't "icons on the desktop" a thing by default anymore? I'll admit I stopped bothering to go edit the defaults for every new install, but why?

In related tech media reporting:

    A new version of the Trinity desktop is out, with a new window-snapping feature. And that's not the only way it's snappy.

    The Trinity Desktop Environment (latest release 14.1.1), or TDE for short, is a fork and continuation of KDE version 3.5, the last release of KDE 3. It's loosely comparable to MATE, which is a continuation of GNOME 2 after the developers moved on to the radically different GNOME 3. KDE 4 wasn't as radical a change, but it introduced a significantly different design based around customizable widgets called "plasmoids."

The Register Thu 2 Nov 2023 (12 months ago)

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/trinity_desktop_q4os/

KDE 3.4/3.5 was gourgeous.. must have been around 2002 when I had just ditched windows for good and went all in on gentoo linux. Over and over, I had following impressive experience: I would have an intuition of where I would expect a feature to be or how a widget would interact, then while executing on it, quickly retract my expectation ("nah, this probably won't work this way, even though it should..") only to find it actually did work as expected. That was so0Oo amazing xD and it obviously disintegrated completely with the botched release of #plasma KDE4".0". That was when I moved on to xfce.. When I learned about TDE a bunch of time later though, I actually used it for a couple of years. It was still "kool" , even though the aesthetics felt somewhat aged. Back to xfce for a long time now..

I went to look at the screenshots, saw armarok 1.4.10, got excited thinking they'd brought it back, and then got sad when I realized the screenshot was from 2011.

Many people still love it. For me, KDE 3 was fine but caused sever eyestrain when I used it. I never had an interest on going back.

But I am glad it exist, it proves you do not have to make changes "just because", but just change to make it run a bit better, eliminate bugs but keep the same "soul".

FWIW, I stick with fvwm, now on v3.