Pinderkent

I have worked with various UNIX systems many times over the years. One of the most prevalent systems in industry has been Sun's Solaris. While I tend to use FreeBSD and KDE these days, I saw a post at Slashdot that talked of Solaris and CDE that I wanted to comment on.

I know many people who consider CDE to be too "ancient" to use, and I think it's a shame that they feel that way. No, CDE does not offer all of the modern features of desktops like GNOME, KDE and even XFCE. But I think that may be one of its strengths today. What we end up with is a desktop environment that is very lean, and not nearly as cluttered as many of today's environments.

To me, it's a great thing that Sun still ships CDE, even with Solaris 10. For some of us, it's a reminder of days long past. But when it comes to just plain getting work done, CDE is often a great environment. The distractions are minimal, and it'll even run well on older systems that are considered far too insufficient to run KDE or GNOME.

So in closing, I have to say that I hope Sun continues to ship CDE for a long time to come. Even today, when I do use Solaris, I tend to choose CDE when logging in. Part of the reason is that I don't care much for their GNOME-based Java Desktop System, but the other part, I must admit, is that I just happen to like using CDE.