In an attempt to convince The Open Group that they finally want to fully Open Source Motif and CDE Peter Howkins has started a petition to help gauge how much interest there is. CDE, the Common Desktop Enviroment, was the default desktop on several commercial UNIX distributions. Motif is a X Windows widget
API used in many programs, including CDE
and other projects such as nedit and DDD. Howkins is not going to try to convince anyone to use either of them, but if you use them and would like to see them Open Sourced please sign the petition. For more background information about CDE and this petition visit the petition site or go straight to signing the petition.
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Member since:2006-01-19
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.
Member since:
2005-07-06
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.