William: >> Unfortunately, there are some things that CDE does considerably better >> than Gnome. I expect that companies in the financial markets (i.e. >> "Wall Street") are using CDE quite heavily on Solaris to support this >> mission critical application and will not be happy with Gnome as it >> exists today. > > Do doubt anyone is happy with JDS as it stands today in Solaris. Its > slow, memory hungry and overloaded with lots of colorfully, bouncing > gimmicks and bugs
Change is always painful. I don't think GNOME is quite the hornets nest of bugs that people seem to suggest. The GNOME 2.6 in Solaris 10 is probably not the best version of GNOME to judge. Try GNOME 2.20 in Nevada and you'll see how far we've come in the past few years. I agree that there are some things that CDE does better than GNOME, but overall I think most people will find that GNOME is a better, more modern desktop than CDE. Especially in Nevada/OpenSolaris where HAL integration makes automatic discovery of removable devices work as you would expect. No more having to manually mount your USB flash drive by hand in a terminal, as you need to do with CDE. Probably the most significant complaints I hear from people migrating from CDE to GNOME are the fact that we don't have a standalone calendar program and session management (the ability to save you workspace and have it start-up as you left it) doesn't work so well in GNOME. While you may criticize GNOME for its overloaded colorful, bouncing gimmicks, you can also criticize CDE for its 8-bit look and feel. Most people left behind 8-bit graphics when they tossed their Atari 2600. Likewise, its gray color palette reminds me of the world wide web before people discovered you could set background/text color. Overall, I think the CDE gives the impression of a slightly less exciting desktop than Windows 3.0. Lastly, CDE is proprietary. It's proprietary nature is one reason why it hasn't received any significant improvements in the past decade. If you think there are problems with GNOME, now at least you have the option to get involved and help fix problems that bother you. Something not possible with CDE. Brian
