Not just Solaris. Old school DE found in other commercial unices, e.g. HP-UX. It was pretty bitchin' for it's day. That was before Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, and indeed, even Linux were even a gleam in their developers eyes....

Kde 4.3

KDE is the best of the DEs available. It provides the intrgrated approach towards the desktop. e.g. KDE has KWin which provides the destop effects integrated. Compiz as a replace for metacity or Kwin is just too bad.
GNOME is famous as it is default with Ubuntu (and Fedora) and they do most of their customizations for which feature on their release page. Later they are ported to KDE.

KDE just needs more attention and some polishing in terms of bug fixes and artwork to competete with GNOME.

CDE = Common Desktop Environment.

It was like the standard DE on 1990's Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and many other Unix/Linux systems. About year 2000 most people started switching to the "new" GNOME, XFCE and KDE desktops. CDE continued to be used on Solaris until about 2005 though.

The modern-day Xfce used to take part of the look-and-feel from the CDE environment, but no longer does.

Hardly use any of them but I've been looking at LXDE and it's looking pretty good I think.

I use KDE 4 <point><something> and love it.
Cant understand why there's factionism... "KDE is dumb, and so are people using it", "KDE resembles windows", "KDE is maintained only because torvalds uses it".. keep hearing it all the time from gnome fans! (especially the last one! hilarious!!) Guess freedom of choice is here to stay with open source and one should quit resorting to such methods of factionism.. If the KDE you used was buggy, its mostly the distro to blame and not the desktop environment.

P.S.: BTW i tried kubuntu 9.10, and hated it for all the bugs it had... but guess what.. the problem is only with the combination of my laptop hardware and 9.10.

Much to my surprise, I have found that I like KDE, it's been very usable since 4.2, but I prefer Gnome.

I absolutely despise Rox though, that program needs to be taken out and shot.

I voted XFCE:
It really had a bump in my life since KDE ditched the excellent konqueror i got so used to.

And without my most productive application, KDE4 has nothing besides eye candy to offer to me.

I use krusader and work in XFCE now. Thanks to Robby Workman, i ain't missing KDE4 at all, maybe jut a little the excellent KDE3.5 series

All for speed and nothing than speed.


Besides speed, XFCE is so easy configurable and user (like in real world) friendly

Konqueror is still in KDE 4.xx, still works as it has in the past, and can be made the default file manager so you don't have to use dolphin.

Used to be a KDE user. Until KDE4. I here its improved. So I might check it out again. But for the last couple years I have been content with Gnome. It is functional and stable. And with Compiz it is pretty slick looking.

Gnome baby!

Gnome is good and has been a favorite as far as desktop environments go but my vote goes to LXDE. It is impressive for being light weight and goes well with the increasing popularity of netbooks.

Gnome keeps me olden days, but kde to the new !

I know that, but where is the "tree view" gone?