NsCDE is a retro but powerful (kind of) UNIX desktop environment which resembles CDE’s look and (partially feel), but with a more powerful and flexible beneath-the-surface framework, more suited for 21st century UNIX-like and Linux systems and user requirements than original CDE.
NsCDE can be considered as something between a heavyweight FVWM theme on steroids, combined with a couple of other free software components and custom FVWM applications and heavy configurations. NsCDE can be considered as lightweight hybrid desktop environment.
Be still, my beating heart.
I’ve never been a fan of these old school, CDE style desktops.
Too cluttered and all the components are all over the place.
Apple and Windows style ones, where the whole GUI gets out of the way, except a bottom dock with a launcher, and an optional topmenu that shows time, a global menu, and notifications, is much better, imo.
I agree. I didn’t like CDE when it was current (Solaris 2.5.1 workstations at school). I opted first for the Sun-specific OpenWindows and then in rough order twm, fvwm2, AfterStep, briefly Enlightenment, and WindowMaker. I had WindowMaker on a VM recently (it’s in Ubuntu’s repo) for its relatively light weight and it was pretty solid for launching a couple tools and moving windows around.
I’ve come to like GNOME3 for the keyboard ease of use; I suspect I’d like a tiling WM if I could be bothered to learn the keyboard commands.
I don’t know, Windows used to get out of my way. These days it’s a bit more invasive (excessive notifications, automatic crapware installation, etc). MacOS is still pretty good at getting out of my way, but even there, excessive permission requests can really get on my nerves especially when I’ve already granted that request one os or app version previously. It’s Vista-style UAC, the Apple way.
CDE has sometimes worked for me, usually not. This might be an acceptable substitute, so I’ll give it a spin.
It completely messes up all GTK apps as well as Firefox after logging into Plasma again, but it’s really fun and quite snappy. We had CDE on HP UX machines and apart from the colours changing palette every time I opened up another app, I distinctly remember it being extremely slow.
Still, this is a lot of fun and actually quite useable. I even installed the Nirvana editor to edit the fvwmrc.