Trinity Desktop Environment

Trinity Desktop Environment
Developer	TDE development team
Initial release	April 29, 2010 (2010-04-29)
Stable release	R14.1.6 / April 26, 2026 (2026-04-26)
Written in	C++ (TQt)
Operating system	Unix-like with X11
Platform	FreeBSD and Linux
Predecessor	K Desktop Environment 3
Available in	Multilingual
Type	Desktop environment
License	GPL and other licenses
Website	www.trinitydesktop.org
Repository	git.trinitydesktop.org/cgit/

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is a complete software desktop environment¹²³ designed for Linux and Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software. Born as a fork of KDE 3.5 in 2010, it was originally created by Timothy Pearson, who had coordinated Kubuntu remixes featuring KDE 3.5 after Kubuntu switched to KDE Plasma 4.⁴

TDE is now a fully independent project with its own development team, available for various Linux distros, BSD and DilOS. It is currently led by Slávek Banko.

TDE releases aims to provide a stable and highly customizable desktop, continuing bug fixes, additional features, and compatibility with recent hardware. Trinity is packaged for Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Mageia, OpenSUSE, Raspberry Pi OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Slackware, Ubuntu and various other distributions and architectures.⁵ It is also used as the default desktop environment of at least two Linux distributions, Q4OS and Exe GNU/Linux.⁶⁷ Since version 3.5.12 (its second official release), it uses its own fork of Qt3, known as TQt, so as to make it easier to eventually make TQt installable alongside later Qt releases.⁸ Trinity also maintains its own versions of several KDE software applications using TQt,⁹ while still providing feature updates and ensuring compatibility with recent distributions and hardware.¹⁰¹¹

Early releases of Trinity used a versioning scheme based on that of K Desktop Environment 3.5, from which it was forked. The R14.0 release adopted a new versioning scheme, to prevent comparisons with KDE based on version number alone and a new visual theme.¹² This new visual theme was based on the "KDE Lineart" background included in the wallpapers package for KDE 3.4 and covered the desktop background and was named "Trinity Lineart" along with the splash screen, "application info screens" (for some apps like Konqueror and Trinity Control Center), and banners (for some other apps like KPersonalizer and Kate).¹³ The window, widget, and icon themes were left intact, aside from replacing all KDE logos with Trinity logos.

Prior to this, Trinity kept the KDE 3.5 visual theme, but replaced the "KDE 3.5" branding with "TDE" branding, in a font that is not the "Kabel Book"¹³ font KDE used, although the K-Menu had its side image branded as just "Trinity" instead of "TDE". Kubuntu versions, on the other hand, used the included "Crystal Fire" background as the default desktop background, along with the K-Menu "side image", larger menu items, and menu layout from Kubuntu 8.04.