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EasyOS, Easy Excalibur Series version 7.0

 
It reminds me a bit of old LXDE.
I believe it's Desktop: JWM 2.4.7

Yes it does look like a bit like LXDE or old Windows 98.

I like it cause it's plain and simple and very configuable.
 
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Yes it does look like a bit like LXDE or old Windows 98.

It also had hints of CDE, which most folks here have probably never experienced. CDE was Common Desktop Environment and used on many UNIX systems back in the day. It was pretty solid, it visually efficient.
 
It also had hints of CDE, which most folks here have probably never experienced. CDE was Common Desktop Environment and used on many UNIX systems back in the day. It was pretty solid, it visually efficient.
Yes it is similar.

Kinda reminds me a bit of the early 3.1 days of Windows OS.
 
It also had hints of CDE, which most folks here have probably never experienced. CDE was Common Desktop Environment and used on many UNIX systems back in the day. It was pretty solid, it visually efficient.
I saw that the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is still supported in Sparky linux here: https://repo.sparkylinux.org/

There's also a sourceforge download site for it here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/, with the latest update reported there as: 2025-04-16. The site includes some pics of what it looks like.

It was proprietary software until around 2012 from my reading so its appeal to linux distros was going to be limited I guess. It's plain old-fashioned appearance did appeal to me at some time after it became freely available because I was interested in UNIX history. I didn't get around to installing it though because my desktop usage with all its little tweaks was pretty firmly established by that time so I passed on it. These days, as tiler, it's rather out of the market for me.
 
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It also had hints of CDE, which most folks here have probably never experienced. CDE was Common Desktop Environment and used on many UNIX systems back in the day. It was pretty solid, it was visually efficient.
Call me old-fashioned, even a "dinosaur" if ya like.......but that kinda thing really appeals to me. If it weren't for being as invested in - and proficient with - Puppy's ROX-Filer/JWM combo as I am, I'd quite happily give it a go.

I guess I'm just not as excited about Wayland as many others seem to be.

@KGIII :- Definite hints of "retro-computing", yes..? :D And still eminently usable on a day-to-day basis, I would guess...


Mike. ;)
 
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EasyOS, Easy Excalibur Series version 7.0

@The Duck :-

It's quite astonishing, isn't it? Despite "retiring" from Puppy development more than a decade ago, for a guy who's now well into his 70s Barry DOES like keeping "busy", doesn't he?

All credit to him, I say.....from EasyOS, and developing/building his own FF-control 'trike', to all the outback-related 'survival' gear he regularly writes about on his blog, etc. He's one very active pensioner, that's all I can say!

He certainly gave the Puppy community a darned good start.....


Mike. :P
 
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Barry Kauler Genius.

I cannot even imagine doing what he does.

Barry Kauler's Linux distros incredible.

Until you use one you will not understand the genius of them.

I'm a bit biased no other Linux distro can come close.
 
I saw that the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) is still supported in Sparky linux here: https://repo.sparkylinux.org/

Yup! I saw that recently when I did a mental dive into CDE. I didn't try it, however.

There's also a sourcefoge download site for it here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/, with the latest update reported there as: 2025-04-16. The site includes some pics of what it looks like.

Indeed. There were two active-ish projects when I looked it up not too long ago.

Thanks! I'm not sure if I'd go back to CDE, but the nostalgia is nice. Even when we had Windows machines, we'd forward the CDE from UNIX and open that in full-screen. So, we'd be using our Microsoft computers much like dumb terminals. If your role could be supported, you could pick which OS you wanted to run at my company. We had a fairly large percentage of employees with a background in formal academia, and so we had a lot of call to use UNIX. Linux existed at the time and we'd eventually use it on some servers. Some folks would opt to run Linux on their workstations, but they were largely expected to support themselves.

I was never a big stickler on things like assigning tools. I assigned tasks and hired people to do things that I could not do. If I could have done those things, due to time or even skills, I wouldn't have needed to hire them. As such, I operated under the premise that they knew more about what they were doing than I did. Then again, employing programmers at this time (for example) was expensive and not unlike herding cats. These days, you can organize them nicely in cubicals.

If it weren't for being as invested in - and proficient with - Puppy's ROX-Filer/JWM combo as I am, I'd quite happily give it a go.

I poked around reading about it recently. I just wanted to see if it was still supported, and to verify some memories.

It was quite usable, advanced in its day. It was truly multi-task capable, meaning you were able to do more than just one application at a time. You could have your windows sized so that you could read multiple applications at the same time.

It looks pretty basic. What'd I call it above? Ah, 'visually efficient'. It doesn't have the frills and bells and whistles you can get with modern DEs, but we didn't need those things back then. If you wanted to put the effort into it, it supported an entire widget toolkit. It was pretty basic but easy enough to code for, as I recall.

Alright... I'll boot a VM and play with CDE sometime soon -- ideally. I make no promises but I'll look into revisiting it with a more modern eye. Who knows? Maybe I'll convert one of my real machines into using CDE as the default desktop.
 
EasyOS, Easy Excalibur Series version 7.0

Looks like Australia.

...of course it's Australia, Barry Kauler hails from near Perth in Western Australia.
 
I suddenly felt really nostalgic about Brand New Animal (an anime series by Studio Trigger released on Netflix), and also about my very first time using Gentoo Linux on my entry-level laptop (I had the exact same Brand New Animal wallpaper I am using again now), so I took a spin at making a refresh of my desktop customization / rice of back then, this time on KDE instead of GNOME + Extensions, feeling happy. :cool:

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