Trinity Desktop Environment

Resources

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is a free and open-source desktop environment forked from KDE 3.5. Due to the fact it is forked from an old version of KDE (which is itself a resource-heavy desktop environment) it is considered light-medium weight by today's standards.

Note
Please don't report bugs to the Gentoo bugzilla, instead report issues at the upstream repository.

Installation

Installing TDE

Profiles

It is highly recommended to run a desktop profile when running a Desktop Environment, using amd64 as an example this can be done by running:

root #eselect profile set default/linux/amd64/23.0/desktop

root #emerge -vauDU @world

Enabling the Overlay

TDE is packaged in the trinity-official overlay. To enable this overlay:

root #eselect repository add trinity-official git https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tde-packaging-gentoo.git

To add this overlay manually:

FILE /etc/portage/repos.conf/tde.conf

[trinity-official]
location = /var/db/repos/trinity-official
sync-type = git
sync-uri = https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tde-packaging-gentoo.git
auto-sync = yes

Sync the overlay with emaint:

root #emaint sync -r trinity-official

The packages on the overlay are keyworded under the unstable ~amd64 keyword, so users on a stable system should unmask the packages on the repository.

FILE /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords/trinity-official

*/*::trinity-official ~amd64

Emerge

To install the Trinity Desktop Environment meta package run the following command:

root #emerge --ask trinity-base/tdebase-meta

Display Manager

TDM

Trinity Desktop Environment has a matching display manager called TDM.

Emerge

To install the Trinity Display Manager package run the following command:

root #emerge --ask trinity-base/tdm

Change your Display manager to "tdm." An example for display-manager users:

FILE /etc/conf.d/display-manager

DISPLAYMANAGER="tdm"

Boot Service

To start TDM on boot, add display-manager to the default runlevel:

root #rc-update add display-manager default

To start TDM now:

root #rc-service display-manager start

LightDM

By default, TDM does not build a systemd unit file. If you wish, you can add -DBUILD_TDM_SYSTEMD_UNIT_FILE="ON" to the TDM ebuild.

However, you can also install LightDM.

Emerge

To install LightDM, run the following command:

root #emerge --ask trinity-base/tdebase-meta

Enable the LightDM service.

root #systemctl enable lightdm

To start LightDM now:

root #systemctl start lightdm

Pipewire

Trinity Desktop Environment does not pull in a sound server, so we will have to enable one ourselves.

elogind

First, ensure elogind is enabled:

root #rc-update add elogind boot

Emerge

Enable the pulseaudio USE flag globally:

FILE /etc/portage/make.conf

USE="pulseaudio"

Then, emerge PipeWire:

root #emerge --ask media-video/pipewire

gentoo-pipewire-launcher

Add gentoo-pipewire-launcher to your xprofile:

FILE ~/.xprofile

gentoo-pipewire-launcher &

pavucontrol

Trinity's default sound server application is unable to use pipewire, so you will want something like pavucontrol:

root #emerge --ask media-sound/pavucontrol

Reboot, and you should have sound.