I just said this above but this desktop is still available. It is called The Trinity Desktop now.
LeFantome
joined 1 year ago
You can still use old KDE. It is called Trinity now. It is a pretty decent desktop if you have an older machine.
I just noticed that, in the screenshot, it is running in 86box. So, you know for sure it works there and 86box works great on modern machines ( Windows, Mac, and Linux ).
Confirmed. The minimum requirements are a 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 100 MB of drive space. Incredible.
It should work fine in a virtual machine. Just make sure you provide suitably ancient hardware like IDE storage and old ethernet cards. On something that old, I would only provide a single CPU. To be safe, I would also try installing with a low amount of RAM and then increase it later. Older kernels could not handle multi-processor or RAM above a certain size. I think I might start with 700 MB of RAM to do the install. That might sound like nothing but it probably runs in 8.
It is easy today in our era of resource richness to forget just how meager the hardware was when these distros were new.
A distro that old is going to require some fiddling to get XFree86 ( x11 ) up and running. It should be ok in a desktop VM but I have had problems with older versions of X in Proxmox in case you are using that.
I kind of want to go install this myself now. Or an old version of SLS ( pre-cursor to Slackware ). I ran them both at some point in my Linux journey but it has been a while.
What I really want to do is to make OCI containers from these old distros and try to run them in Distrobox on top of a modern kernel. Has somebody done that already? Really old versions of Red Hat ( not RHEL, Red Hat, < 6 ) would be cool too.
The Motif look, what we are looking at here, is driven by the same UI guidelines that early Windows and OS/2 followed. You will notice a lot of similarity between them.
If it was a real UNIX workstation, you were almost certainly using CDE ( Common Desktop Environment ).
Looks like FVWM2.
I just learned that OpenBSD still defaults to that look.
I “switched to Linux” from Windows 2000 but I have also had machines running with Windows and macOS during that time. My last work computer was Windows 11 ( but I hardly used it ).
Hard to really put into words what kept me in Linux. At times, it has required work and knowledge Windows would not have demanded of me. At the same time, Linux has been largely free of “nonsense”. It just always felt like home.
[ Edit: thinking about I more. I have used Linux since 1992 and honestly moved from primarily OS/2 to mostly Linux. I really liked Windows 2000 though and used it well into the XP era. ]
I saw a few good commits in there. Sadly, I think we will have to wait for the next one before things really become usable.