When comparing Equinox vs Trinity, the Slant community recommends Trinity for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux desktop environments?” Trinity is ranked 16th while Equinox is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Trinity is:
Trinity is every customizable, almost every aspect of the GUI can be changed to look like you want. Need a button in the toolbar? You can add it. You want a specialized toolbar in a certain part of the screen? You can add it. You can configure the GUI in the setup before the first run too.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Customizable through a user-friendly control panel
The control panel lets you customize Equinox through various applets with which you can customize everything from the wallpaper to the fonts to use.
Pro LIghtweight
Equinox only consumes and needs tiny memory space.
Pro Highly configurable
Trinity is every customizable, almost every aspect of the GUI can be changed to look like you want. Need a button in the toolbar? You can add it. You want a specialized toolbar in a certain part of the screen? You can add it.
You can configure the GUI in the setup before the first run too.
Pro Traditional desktop experience
As a fork of KDE 3.5 Trinity is designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model.
Pro Works fine on old computers
It is very responsive in 7+ years old computers
Pro Low resource usage
Cons
Con Ubuntu and Debian packages are outdated
The only way to get Equinox for Debian or Ubuntu is to build it from source because the package for both of these distros are outdated.
Con Slow development
Two years from one patch release to another and instead of fixing bugs it adds new ones.
Con Huge and obsolete codebase
Trinity is based in Qt 3, which is unmaintained by upstream. The KDE 3 codebase is also unmaintained. As new technologies like Systemd become a new standard the lack of developers make Trinity more incompatible and error/bug/security risk prone.
Con Looks Old
The desktop and everything looks outdated and very similar to Windows 2000.