It’s always good to still see CDE in use.
I’ve met a lot of end users over the years. Some I have quite disliked, most I am indifferent about, but some I will remember forever. One such user I met today at an insurance company. His job was to perform some actuarial tasks for the company. The work he does is apparently quite computationally-intensive, so he had some pretty modern, high-end Sun and IBM workstations at his disposal.
The one thing I noticed, however, is that all of those workstations were running CDE. It didn’t surprise me that his AIX systems were running CDE. But I was somewhat surprised that he chose CDE over the Sun Java Desktop System on his system running Solaris 10. I was surprised, because most other Solaris 10 users I’ve dealt with in the past year or so have opted to use JDS instead of CDE.
So I asked this fellow why he still used CDE. And he was quite blunt in his response, “JDS sucks.” With a bit more digging, I found that his main complaint was that of performance issues, even on his high-end Sun workstations. Compared to CDE, he found the GNOME-based JDS to be bloated and slow.
In many ways, I’d have to agree with him. I’ve found GNOME’s performance to be suspect. And on Solaris 10, I also switch back to CDE. That usually isn’t due to it being more responsive and less memory-intensive. It’s more just a matter of me being very familiar with it, and thus more productive. Nevertheless, I do like to see others use CDE, especially when it does make them productive, as well.
However, I did recommend the use of Xfce to this fellow. It is perhaps the closest thing to a modern version of CDE. He said he’d consider it, and would let me know what he thought of it if he did end up using it. So I’m now looking forward to seeing what his experience is with it.