Linked by Kostis Kapelonis on Tue 14th Mar 2006 18:59 UTC
The desktop metaphor has served our computing needs well for the last decade. It has started however, to show its age over the last years. For office users it is still adequate but for everyone else it is often awkward and slow. Since a computer is no longer confined in the office, but in some cases serves also as the entertainment hub in our living rooms, new User Interfaces are required. In some areas the foundations are already in place while in others users are silently suffering every day, having to cope with inefficient and unproductive UIs.
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Member since:2005-07-12
Member since:
2006-03-14
The problem with CDE is that it pretty much sucks.
I used it quite a bit as an undergrad on Solaris 8 and never liked it.
The CDE implementation of drawers for various apps and actions never worked for me. I consistently had to check all the drawers every time I needed an app I used on an infrequent basis.
There is not a digital clock in the interface by default (the analog is impossbile to read) and my solution of running a xclock in the lower right corner of all desktops never struck me as elegant.
I never did figure out how to set the browser button to launch mozilla.
The interface is ugly.
The docs are unhelpful, describing the obvious (this is a square!) rather than explaining how to accomplish anything (how to change what is launched).
When you minimize windows, they go UNDER your other windows so that you have to shuffle through everything to restore them again or you have to adjust your habits to leave a 30px gap at the left edge of the screen.
In short, there's a pretty good reason for CDE being unpopular. Sun has even dropped it and I believe they invented it. I don't know exactly what the desktop is changing to, but I'm pretty sure it's not CDE.