I <3 CDE



That's ( <3 ) a heart if you didn't know.

Why do I love CDE (Common Desktop Environment), well because it went through decades of developement including over 7 years since Sun Ray's debut for multiuser operation (IIRC there have been over 1000 multiuser bugs filed against CDE since Sun Ray appeared). Consider the fact that dtterm uses less than 5 MB of RAM vs 100 MB for Gnome-Terminal. And that all things being equal, CDE uses 50% less memory and has 60% less processes given the same set of apps for a given user.

Sure it's not sexy, and I've never had someone look at CDE and say "cool", but neither has someone that first set eyes on a Toyota Prius.

Our super smart Xserver guru Alan Coopersmith had this to say to me during a recent internal rant of mine (I'm good at those):

Most of GNOME is not developed with multi-user in mind since it comes from an open source community used to the one user per desktop model.

The community at large at least seems to be tackling memory use, now that they've expanded their target audience via the One Laptop Per Child project, which is still one user per desktop, but with a much more limited system than the average modern PC.

Hope Alan isn't mad for me posting this. But I am happy that there may still be hope for Gnome. Less resources = less power required and that's always a good thing.

Posted on: Oct 09, 2006

Posted by: ThinGuy

Category: Sun Ray

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Comments:

Yes, after all these years I still do prefer CDE. Maybe because my desktop is still an Ultra60 which does not cope well with Gnome even though it's maxed out to 2 GB.

BUT one big caveat about CDE is that it is still not open sourced. There is OpenMotif but they never seem to get around to releasing the source to CDE proper...

Regards -- Volker

Posted by Volker A. Brandt on October 10, 2006 at 12:57 AM PDT #

Volker, Great point. With so much open sourcing going on, its forget that CDE is not included.

Posted by ThinGuy on October 10, 2006 at 06:34 AM PDT #

[Trackback] the thinguy, a.ka. craig bender, blogs on why he’s in favor of cde over gnome for sun ray environments. his main point is that gnome is not designed as a multi-user-per-desktop system, which is definately true. ever tried logging into a gnome-sys...

Posted by stotti.blog() on October 11, 2006 at 12:29 AM PDT #

OpenWindows has a smaller footprint than CDE, runs *very* much faster, and is multi-user aware (I have used 4 X-terminals and 2 Linux PCs running mixed OpenWindows sessions on a 60MHz Solaris server without any problems; that's fully remote sessions where only the X server itself runs on the "terminals"). And as your article points out, CDE was not always as slimline as it is now - when introduced back in 1994, it was a snails'-pace option for most # desktop Sun workstations. Nice to see things improving!

Posted by Mike Spooner on October 11, 2006 at 05:04 AM PDT #

Mike. Point taken. Truth be told, there are some of engineers that still run OW. Couldn't make them change if you held a gun to their held.

Posted by ThinGuy on October 11, 2006 at 05:17 PM PDT #

OK, that came out all wrong. I meant to say is that with some of our engineers you could not make them change even if you held a gun to their head.

Darn keyboards.

Posted by ThinGuy on October 11, 2006 at 05:20 PM PDT #

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