When comparing TDE (Trinity) vs Common Desktop Environment, the Slant community recommends TDE (Trinity) for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like Desktop Environments for everyday users?” TDE (Trinity) is ranked 12th while Common Desktop Environment is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose TDE (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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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 Low resource usage
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 Stable system that does not change everything every 6 months just for the sake of it
Pro Works fine on old computers
It is very responsive in 7+ years old computers.
Pro Looks like Windows XP
Pro Many themes by default
including themes that look like Windows 95 and Windows XP
Pro Looks old
Pro For conservative users
Pro Useful for low-end devices
As Linux moves into low-end territory with the likes of Raspberry PI, CDE's level of consumption seems extremely small. When it was first developed, 128MB or RAM was a lot.
Pro Stays out of your way
Has the drawer concept and the middle button on the mouse has a use again.
Pro Mature
CDE was developed more than 20 years ago to work as a unified DE for all the various forms of commercial, proprietary Unix operating systems that dominated the market back then: AIX, TRU64, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIX etc...
Nowadays it's released as an open source Desktop Environment for Linux. It comes as a free tested, widely deployed and enterprise-level product even if it's recently re-release as FOSS for Linux.
Cons
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 Ugly UX
Con Missing many modern features
Con Not supported on most Linux distros
Con Settings
Every now and then you might have to reset something. I had this happen a few times with the mouse setting for single click.
Con Looks old
The desktop and everything looks outdated and very similar to Windows 2000.
Con Outdated UI
The graphical interface is very outdated and ugly. It's mostly for lower-end machines and for people who want to give their Linux machine a true UNIX feel.