Nixpkgs-tde: a new project (pre-alpha)

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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.

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Great initiative!

This is effectively the first Desktop-flavored NixOS distribution outside of nixpkgs. Just like what Kubuntu is to Ubuntu.

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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 .

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I gave up the idea of an overlay. I am now convinced it is better to include it as a regular NixOS feature. After all, Nixpkgs was always a monorepo.

Also, TDE releases things very fast - now they are cleaning up deprecated code, switching to cmake, merging libraries, resurrecting KDE apps…

I am reviewing my own old code in light of these changes.

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Speaking as someone who used to use KDE 3 (and loved it), what use-cases are better served by TDE than Plasma?

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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.