> High guys.  This may have been spelled out somewhere, but if so I
> missed it, so please bear with me.
>
> I've been a KDE user since 1.x which was part of SuSE v5.3.  Up till
> KDE4, I was always found KDE to do what I needed.
>
> I have some questions about the future direction of KDE3:
>
> 1.  Qt4 port - I saw that this is one the roadmap.  Is this really
> neccessary?  I know that a lot of my complaints about KDE4 was the
> useless revamp of the interface, but having to have both Qt3/4 libs
> was also a huge pain.  I'm not against a port if there are compelling
> reasons for it, but I have seen no compelling reason for KDE4.  It
> uses more memory and space.

Well, KDE4 performance is not indicative of Qt4 performance; rather, it
shows the level of bloat that KDE e.V. introduced with their
rewrite/reboot of the KDE series.  Qt4 should in theory be faster compared
to Qt3 when it is executing equivalent code, primarily due to the improved
graphics support.

I am currently looking at the possibility of absorbing most of Qt3 into
the Trinity project, and only using the core portions of Qt4 for the
abstracted access to low-level system interfaces.  The Trinity project
needs to add support for multitouch, true window transparency etc. to both
stay relevant on newer hardware and to improve performance of existing
components where possible.  A good example of this is the Amarok OSD;
since it uses fake transparency it both presents a very dated/bad
appearance to the user and eats CPU cycles unnecessarily.  Graphics
devices from 15 years ago have had hardware shader capability, and if the
Qt4 base components will allow such tasks to be offloaded to the GPU
instead of slowing down the CPU, I would consider that an improvement.

The Trinity codebase will keep full Qt3 support for quite some time; Qt4
support and the enhancements that stem from it are a separate project at
this time.

>
> I have a lot of older laptops that I find KDE3 to be snappy and KDE4
> to be like molassas.
>
> 2.  What about the other KDE projects like KOffice?  I've always made
> use of KOffice instead of anything else.  I find OpenOffice to be
> bloated.

The last KDE3 version of KOffice is part of the Trinity distribution, but
no active development is occurring at this time.

>
> 3.  Removal of HAL in favor of udev - Is this something that is going
> to affect KDE3?

That's why its on the roadmap.  If Trinity does not support udev soon,
then compatibility issues will eventually arise with newer distributions,
primarily in the areas of power management and hotplug support.

>
> 4.  Dependencies - I'm not sure how it is on other distros, but I've
> always found SuSE/openSUSE to suffer from unneccessary dependencies.
> Not everyone has a Palmpilot device, and most PIMs assume you do and
> force you to install support for something you don't have.  I'm not
> sure how the core KDE and the other projects handle this.  How is
> Trinity planning to do it?

You may want to ask Robert Xu; he is in charge of the
OpenSUSE/RedHat/Fedora packaging.  You can find him on the trinity-devel
list.

Hope this helps!

Timothy Pearson
Trinity Desktop Project