OSNews

CDE is the BEST desktop environment when it comes to consistency, both graphically and behaviourally.

ANY other DE can learn a great deal from CDE, because next to CDE, every other modern DE, be it Finder, Explorer, GNOME, or whatever, is an unpredictable incoherent mess.

UI design is about more than flashy graphics. It saddens me to see that current-day computer users are too shortsighted to look beyond the external appearance.

True, true; at least with Motif applications; sure, they weren't flashy, they didn't set the world alight in terms of eye candy, but they did, however, integrate well with the desktop environment, and were consistent - a Motif application, regardless of vendor, worked as a Motif application expected.

The Application Manager, file manager, the whole kit 'n caboodle is easy to understand and navigate, my old man was able to sit down and start using Sun's Solaris CDE without any need of learning a thing, the icons were self explanatory, the system configuration features were straight to the point.

I had to work on a CDE desktop for 3 years.

As far as I am concerned CDE is:
- not providing the functionality I need
- wasting TWO (!) iconhights of my precious desktop space
- cannot be configured to provide the functionality I need and wasting less space.
- When I maximize a window, the CDE Panel hides part of the maximized window.

I never found out if this behaviour can be changed or not, although searching for several hours on the web.

To me, CDE is the tightjacket version of a Desktop. Sorry, but that was exactly how it felt.
Maybe they have good and consistent HIGs and stuff, but what they offer the user is too inflexible. I had loads of buttons in my panel which I never needed, and loads of stuff I would have liked there was not available.

And what is so difficult to navigate about that CDE design? the CDE way is alot more intuitive than what Microsoft, or the opensource community could achieve.

CDE is not difficult to navigate.
It is difficult or impossible to customize, and the default settings are stupid for me, politely said.

- The desktop switching panel is 2 rows high, and cannot be made to be only one row high.

- When maximizing a Window it either hides the desktop switching panel, or the desktop switching panel hides a rather large part of the maximized Window. This behaviour made the maximize button on the window corner unnecessary for me, I could not use it.

- The desktop switching panel is not as broad as the whole screen, so that when I enlarge an application window to be its maximum size without colliding with the desktop switchin panel, there is always unused space in the bottom corners.

- The desktop switching panel has no task bar. I need a task bar.

- That all resulted in having to use many more mouseclicks and drags than in any desktop I ever used before, with the notable exception of Windows 3.x

All of above mentioned annoying behaviour cannot be changed, at least not for the version I was using (2001).

Both KDE and GNOME can be customized to look and feel like CDE, or Windows, or OSX or, or, or. That is why CDE sucks for all users who do not think like CDE programmers and CDE HIG writers. So mybe for a small amount of people CDE is the best Desktop ever, but the vast majority will bring up exactly the points I mentioned.