Install TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment) on Jessie

[cagehooper47]

I've been an old KDE3.5 advocate since the split. I have NEVER liked KDE 4. From the beginning it felt like it was coded for developers and slowly lost it's polish and gained too much bloat. I remember when KDE 4 came out the developers claimed that to continue KDE3.5 into the new hardware/kernel it would require a complete rewrite. Hence KDE 4 being so different from 3.5. I have tinkered with it from time to time. And for the last 3 years Even Debian has been relegated to a minority role on my main boxes. Windows XP was ok enough but times change. Networking changes. I dealt with converting to Windows 7 two years ago because my last WinXP box died (I have a laptop that still has XP but trying to get wifi to work in the changing security atmospheres turned out to be a killer, though the wired network still works) Anyway. I've got two main boxes and a Thinkpad w700. The W700 is great because of the ease of swapping out hard drives in the interest of testing. My gaming box had a Ryzen 3 cpu that I think Debian has issues with (I could be wrong) but my main work box is an HP Z400. with an ATI gpu added. Iput debian wheezy on it when I bought it and it ran fine. I had issues with Debian Jessie and Stretch. Probably could have figured them out but absolutely HATED what had become of KDE. So that's when Windows 7 became my go to. All this time I also was tinkering with Trinity. It almost worked on Wheezy. But had major issues with Jessie. And Stretch I kept hitting issues with sound for some reason. Since Windows 7 was ok and wheezy was doable I didn't dig too far in to finding fixes. Well then came Debian Buster (10). As I said I've always been a KDE advocate (even when I hated 4) I just couldn't find myself to warm up to Gnome (eh, to each his own. Not knocking those who like it) I really liked LXDE since it came along and was a good backup. But I found the images for Debian buster with non-free and cinnamon. OH MY GOD! I WAS BACK! It has come back to bring Debian back in line with my Win7 setup. I've kept even time on both.

So last night (since I've got time on my hand due to a corona virus layoff) I spent the night mashing test installs on the W700. First with old Wheezy. Then Stretch, then Buster. I downloaded netinstall images of all 3. I hit a few issues with Wheezy trying to get my non-free iwlwifi to load. Stretch gave me sound issues though the wifi worked. And Buster, clean from the netinstall image came close. Had a few minor bugs. But then I pulled out my faithful install dvd of Buster Live with cinnamon and non-free. Of course that loaded all fine. DVD's play good. Wifi loads fine. Internet worked as it should. So for my 4th try I loaded Trinity on top of the Buster/Cinnamon install. Now of all 4 installs, Trinity never really gave me issues. They were underlying Debian issues. I could have looked them up but I wanted to get it up an running quick. But with Buster I ran into that issue with ldconfig no in path. and the auto-start daemon. I found the post on the Debian newsgroup and tried it. BINGO! Got the Trinity webkey to load and got Trinity in. Holy crap was I impressed. It was as I remembered most of that system ran. Many of my old tweeks I remembered still worked, and some were now features. Yes cinnamon is a good desktop. But if you don't need to draw the resources, why do it? I love keeping my old hardware humming until they shyte the bed. So I've decided to get things ready and tonight I'm going to do the load Trinity on top of Buster on the Z400 and move my primary work environment back to my Debian side.