Hello, Nixers (and possibly TDE enthusiasts lurking out there)!
I am now officially releasing my first Nixpkgs overlay: nixpkgs-tde!
For those who need a quick introduction: TDE, acronym for Trinity Desktop
Environment, is a fork of KDE from 3.x series, for those who like the oldschool form of desktop. From the time I am writing it, they are in the R14.0.8 release.
My first step on this task is to open this thread on Discourse, containing my insights and progress, and also the questions and doubts eventually arising.
I am also talking with the guys from TDE via IRC in order to get some insights on this huge task. For now, my idea is to maintain this overlay syncronized with the most recent stable releases of both NixOS/Nixpkgs and TDE.
I am seriously newbie on this thing; excuse my mistakes and please help me improve my Nix programming skills.
Many thanks in advance!
P.S.: I want to use this thread as an all-in-one place regarding discussions of this overlay.
I hope this goes well , as I just tried q4os and “kworldclock --dump --size %xx%y -o %f” didn’t redraw the wallpaper from kworldclock every 5 min. ; like on my old box . And I’m willing to avoid dependency problems . I’m also a fan of lxqt and jwm . With eye-candy-ometer slid 100% left KDE 3.x was a lightweight .
Nostalgia or older hardware, maybe? I really don’t know, to be honest.
I am not too eager to compare DEs because they are too different to be compared.
One that I can imagine, is running on CPU drawings. My Raspberry Pi and its GPU bandwidth on the normal memory is not happy about the enforced GPU rendering of modern KDE releases.
@AndersonTorres I am ready to set this up. Do you think, it is ready for prime time?
I am curious, to create or better use an ISO.
Not really. The issue is the bandwidth of the memory. On modern systems, the GPU is clearly better, and the GPU of the Pi could handle the drawings easily.
But the memory bandwidth is so limited - and shared between CPU and GPU ! - that the roundtrips back and forth become hell.
You can try it out, if you have such a device. Plasma 5 used to run like butter on the Pi 4, now its barely usable. More a slideshow than anything.
That was one of the reasons, why people freaked so out, since Gnome 3 required GPU acceleration, and back then, even much integrated GPUs in laptops couldnt handle this.
The conclusion is: Yes, GPUs are better than CPUs. And GPU memory is much, much better than shared memory between GPU and CPU.
I am stuck on arcane things about CMake. Recently TDE changed many things on their build system, including a set of custom CMake macros that look like a hell of reimplementations of new features.
I am now on a cross of understanding how cmake install procedures work and in a sword of understanding how TDE is using them to install things.
Since the other packages I maintain captured my attention and kept me very busy over the last months, I put this on hold.
Many thanks for pinging me. I will upload the Python script I used to generate the download list.
How about sticking to plasma 5 on the device for now or use something like lxqt? From a feature point of view, tde has a years of work ahead of them simply to reach feature parity with other modern DEs of today.
People are successfully using the rpi for htpc purposes - surely whatever graphics issues exist with plasma6 on the rpi can be solved.
Even if tde is made to run on NixOS, you are looking at a niche DE on a niche distribution - you are not going to have a lot of users and despite the tde development velocity being so low that the risk of breakage from tde itself is going to manageable, changes to the rest of the ecosystem is probably going to make it painful.
Plasma 5 also got rid of XRender (the CPU render) already a while ago.
Lxqt is an alternative. I do see Lxqt and TDE on about the same level, with Lxqt having the obvious benefit of being compatible with Qt6 and Wayland.
Its mostly a personal preference, as I like the look and feel of Trinity more.
It has also a very good documentation, and I like the part of preserving KDE 3, personally.
Otherwise, I agree that Lxqt and Plasma 6 is a more sensible decision.
I dont think NixOS is a niche distribution - I used niche distributions before, this is definitely not one of them.
Or only in the sense, that NixOS technically dominates the niche of immutable distros …
Its objectively not small, or low on resources. Its mid sized, I would say.
I also do not have any plans of marketing NixOS TDE as an official distribution.
