Guest post by EDE is a desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply put, a desktop should not get in your way. This is the final 2.0 release, a major rework. Summarizing previous alpha and beta releases, 2.0 is now fully FLTK powered (eFLTK is deprecated) and freedesktop.org friendly. Specificaly, this release adds a new notification daemon, replaces the old edewm with the pekwm window manager, fixes a lot of issues and memory leaks, and more. Grab the release and try it. You can also try ede netinstall, a single command that will download and compile EDE for you.
Familiar if you haven’t upgraded your Windows installation in 15 years, anyway 🙂
Edited 2012-05-21 01:27 UTC
There’s something charming about an old school, no frills, GUI. “Modern” GUIs are suited for people with messy/disorganized minds, which is most people. Other people have no problems with a hierarchically structured user interface for general purpose use.
For ease of use, I like modern GUIs, but I also prefer the speed of use of a more structured interface for things I do all the time.
True.
And then, for those of us who have organized minds but are shallow enough to insist on a good-looking desktop, there’s LXDE with a theme like the Lubuntu default. ;P
The sad thing is that my brother’s Win7 setup (dual-boot gamer) still looks like that because it’s the only alternative to bogging things down with Aero.
Edited 2012-05-21 02:24 UTC
And then, for those of us who have organized minds but are shallow enough to insist on a amazingly good-looking desktop there is gnome shell 3.4
There’s something charming about Windows 95 look and feel?
Yes. In the same way a lot of classic cars have a “charm” about them, but they run like a dog in their heyday.
OCD is hardly a virtue… ;p
Sorry, I didn’t realize basic organization skills is OCD. And here I thought organizing files by purpose and type was a rational thing to do. Where I’m from, you have to keep your tax related stuff for at least 5 years, but now that you mention it, it does seem pretty silly to keep them all in one place and labelled rather than strewn about.
Well OCD is a spectrum (quantitative not qualitative, disorder not illness; tons of people have it to some degree …enough for majority of them to fall, in fact, under “most people” “with messy/disorganized minds” label; it’s most likely adaptive to a point)
But see, contrasting those two UI approaches seems like going where “hierarchically structured user interface for general purpose use” is no longer a virtue. They are not exclusive like that, they’re complementary – rationally “organizing files by purpose and type” would seem to mean keeping track of what’s important, sure, but also knowing what’s trash and letting “modern GUIs” more or less handle it.
(but most importantly, overall, I use smileys for a reason)
And if you read back, you would see I’ve already written something to that effect…
And if you read back, you’ll see “sure” (implying my recognition of that point; you even quote it now) and, higher, “;p” (below your first post, which does speak about an UI basically forcing only one of those approaches as hierarchical nirvana)
14 years
Why the f#?k is that “familiar look and feel” automatically means Windows 95???
FYI, some of us have actually used something other that Windows 95 and its progeny or visual clones.
Of course, that alone automagically makes it “unfamiliar look and feel”. They should be ashamed for not using 5 sigma descriptions of the true DE landscape representation.
Bad DE, bad!
And yet you immediately recognized it. And I’m fairly certain you could smoothly jump into using it (also because you most likely had plenty of practice with using such UI, considering how ubiquitous it is, how one is “forced” to use it from time to time)
That is exactly what “familiar look and feel” means – not whether or not it’s the look of your personally preferred darling from the old days.
Edited 2012-05-21 12:55 UTC
Wow, that’s a great news! I remember using EDE back in the years. It was kinda buggy, but going into right direction IMHO. I am now using XFCE, as it shares kinda same concept of desktop simplicity and integrity. One of the great weaknesess of EDE was FLTK, but it still looks pretty damn classy good.
I’m glad EDE incorporates PekWM which I find very good WM. Let’s see how it works for this DE.
Windows 95 looks classy?
Yeah why always Win9x, why not System 6/7? [snort]
Yes, and for others, XFCE 3 mimicking CDE would be “familiar look and feel” (as CDE was the common dersktop environment on many UNIXes, such as Solaris, HP-UX or AIX). I even had customers who insisted on having XFCE 3 installed because CDE was what they knew and wanted to keep the “familiar look and feel” even on a Linux platform with a different set of (native) applications. They did love it!
For the graphics department, IRIX’s desktop might have been considered the “familiar look and feel”, similarly for long-time Mac users where pre-OSX might have been considered the typical expectation.
Since “Windows” has become the omnipresent “look and feel” in corporate and therefore home installations (and vice versa), it is often considered the “familiar look and feel” for everyone. But luckily, there are exceptions for those who have never been spoiled with the strange concept “Windows” has about how GUIs should be.
“Familiar” changes over time. I think today many “Windows” users won’t find the “Windows ’95” look and feel familiar. It might already be too complicated for them to understand (remotely cf. “Don’t make me think”)… And what is familiar today might be considered “totally overcomplex and unintuitive” tomorrow. I’m thinking of WMs having the “familiar look and feel” of “Metro” in 2027. 🙂
Anyone else start hearing that hughey lewis song “back in time” as soon as you saw the screenshot?