Follow-up to the Trinity Desktop

This was originally published on Feb 4th as a follow-up to my prior post, included for completeness.

Enjoy, Curt-

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Trinity has shown a few problems to me that I consider difficult enough to try to move on to Xfce.

Konqueror-Trinity has failed to authenticate ANY https certificates. I constantly have to "continue anyway" "forever" every time I go to a new site.

K3b-Trinity has not been fixed to correctly verify CDs and DVDs. This was a known problem leading up to KDE4, but was not fixed then due to the excuse we have all heard, "We're not going to bother, because we're not going to be supporting that code base going forward."

Little things like that really inspire confidence.

Anyway, I've used K3b (as in KDE4) and I like it very much. Disk writing is something I do on a regular basis, so it matters to me that my chosen tool works well.

So here are the hurdles to abandoning KDE3/Trinity for me: Kmail, Kaddressbook, Kwalletmanager, Konqueror's bookmarks that I've acquired over the decade of use.

Claws-Mail can, and I've tested to make sure it does, import the Kmail mbox files just fine. And I don't mind going to directories full of individual emails rather than the single mbox files, both can be searched and compressed for backup just fine. The seamless GPG function in Kmail is not quite there, but the known problems with Kmail/Kaddressbook and the KDE4 "everything with a database behind it" give me great pause to consider Kmail to be workable going forward.

Konqueror's bookmarks are stored as XML files, which is annoying but not impossible to work through if that's what I end up having to do. At least it's plain text and not some kind of binary format trying to be "helpful".

I can still use Konqueror-4, even though I find it very frustrating that the favicons aren't being correctly used. Almost as if Konqueror-4 rejects any favicon that was stored by Konqueror-3, just out of spite.

And one thing I am looking forward to: clean menus. There are a number of entries in the KDE3/Trinity menus that are "cruft" from having the entire .kde directory restored from backups each time I've (re-) installed my system, in order to keep such things as the password wallets, bookmarks and GUI settings.

Anyway, this is kind of a sad thing for me to say, finally giving up my dream of continuing with KDE3 style into the future. Hopefully KDE4's Kaddressbook/Kwalletmanager will be reliable enough to work while I try to move them over to more generic and agnostic tools.

Onward,