I honestly tell you, I do not miss anything while I am using CDE on Solaris.
This might sound strange to most people, but I have a very well designed CDE environment for my purposes. Everything looks clean and neat and technical. I am using antialiased fonts, my own high color scheme, my own high color icon set which replaces most of the ugly old ones. CDE is as colorful as you want it, and you get non-CDE programs to look all well integrated by defining appropriate Xdefaults. Though, it is a little work to get it there. I do not know why standards created on Unix were always shipped looking as ugly as possible and why nobody ever seemed to do something about it (maybe except some mad people like me). I fell back to CDE after many annoying years with Gnome. CDE is very fast (compared to Gnome), very stable, and complete: There is a realplayer for multimedia (which is still the best player around, none of those Gnome or Java players on Solaris can compete with the perfect clear sound of the Helix engine up to now, at least on my boxes) and a flashplayer to integrate into firefox, there are command line tools for CD ripping and CD burning (which could be easily wrapped into a small Tcl/Tk program, for GUI integration). Well, there is firefox, thunderbird, NetBeans, Emacs, professional CAD programs and so on. Clearly it is still the #1 Unix desktop for seriously working people. Everything that comes with Gnome is running slow and it crashes and wants you to fill bug reports. After changing some design elements, logging into a gnome-session next time will most probably freeze. And Gnome has an unsafe design by it's core design. No, I do not want all my applications to be able to talk to each other and over a network. Who guarantees there isn't a key logger in one of these ? No, friends. Gnome is not better than KDE, which is not better than Windows. I urgently ask this community to convince Sun ***not*** to stop shipping CDE. Guys, you might just leave it in there as it is, without any support (not needed -- it is working). There are (secretly) hundreds of thousands of people who have other things to care about than trying out 10 different media players, browsers, mail clients, IDEs for Gnome, which are mostly simply not working at all. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
