On Wed, Mar  9, 2016 at 04:23 (+0100), Thomas Maus wrote:

> Now see how the two champions Gnome and KDE were significantly loosing ground 
> with their follies (and as the 2016 survey is from February I expect many 
> Plasma5 users yet to loose patience and switch ...)

> That shows, IMHO, clearly that many users want to have a classical, stable, 
> functional, ergonomic desktop. This lead to a proliferation of desktops -- 
> IMHO opinion detrimental, as it binds and splits resources.

> XFCE is prominently profiting from this -- not undeserving, as it
> has massively improved since 2011, when I last tried it. While it
> was clearly inferior to KDE3 2011, it is now quite on par with TDE
> -- lacking in some areas, better in others.

> Given that -- IMHO -- TDE is still having a competive edge in many areas, the 
> interesting questions are: 
> * Why does TDE not benefit from the user migration away from Gnome and KDE???
> * Especially, why did TDE not soak up the migrating users and soared between 
> 2010 and 2012 and perhaps 2014, when it was clearly superior to XFCE (which 
> soared)?

Perhaps one of the reasons why TDE is not benefitting is because of
the lack (AFAIK) of installation packages for non-debian, non-redhat
systems.

I use Slackware, and I have an older version of TDE compiled, thanks
to getting a bunch of slackware build scripts from a person who, I
believe, has moved away from the efforts of compiling TDE for
Slackware.

I tried updating his scripts for R14.0.2, and got the base system
compiled, but when I try to compile the other packages, it rolls over
and dies.  After poking and prodding for a while I decided I couldn't
keep playing with the build files forever and gave up.

At this point I suppose my next move is to convert the debian or
redhat packages to slackware install packages, install them, and see
what happens.  But I am not confident of that working because of some
low-level system dependencies.

I realize that a "lot" of Linux users use debian-based systems, and so
looking at it one way it makes sense to concentrate on those.
However, I would not expect the average Ubuntu user to try to install
a desktop environment that isn't in the official Ubuntu repositories.
And I could say similar things for other Linux distros designed for
"non-sophisticated" users.

Further, I speculate that the tourists who randomly "distro-hop" and
those who bounce around from one desktop environment to another are
probably going to try out the ones that are easy to install through
their package management systems.  It might be easy enough for one of
us to d/l a pile of .deb files and install them, but the instructions
on https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/UbuntuInstall might be a bit
daunting to the average "I just want to use it" person.

Further yet, are any people thrown for a loop that
        https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/UbuntuInstall
has "TDE R14.0.3" followed by
   deb http://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/trinity/trinity-r14.0.0/ubuntu 
?
To me it looks like the link is wrong, and should be
.../trinity-r14.0.3/ubuntu, but then again, I'm not a debian/ubuntu
person, so maybe such people expect these (apparent) version
mismatches and take them in stride.


For what its worth: personally, I could care less about what the logo
is, and whether the screen shots look like the themes are "modern" or
not (whatever that means).  What I do care about is whether I can
install it easily.  Perhaps there are other potential users with the
same concerns as me.

Cheers.

                        Jim