LinuxPlanet: The StartX Files: U Stands for UDE and Uncharted Territories

“Aesthetically, UDE is not as full of eye-candy as GNOME, though
there are some interesting looking themes available. There are also
some workflow occurrences that make dealing with UDE a bit like
dealing with my seven-year old: smart, but apt to get wacky on you
every once in a while.”

“The first smart/wacky feature I found (by accident) was
navigation the multiple desktops. This is done by holding the left
mouse button and then clicking the right, which moves you forward a
desktop. Holding the left and clicking the center button moves you
back. It makes sense after the fact, but its one of those quirky
things that makes you really buy into the UDE development team’s
slogan: ‘UDE–Get used to it!'”

“The development team has also worked a bit of interface magic
with the window control tool. Instead of the typical drop-down menu
in the upper-left corner of the window, in UDE all you have to do
is click on any part of the window border to see a six-button
“honeycomb” control that will iconify, minimize, maximize, and
otherwise control that window. It took me a minute to figure out
what each icon did, but after I grooved to it, it made a lot of
sense, too.”

“One other thing that makes sense about UDE is the fact that
this C-based desktop environment does not use QT or GTK+ libraries.
Instead, it manages quite well using the standard Xlibs. The
development team claims this lends more speed to the GUI. I
certainly can’t dispute that, because when I ran it, UDE clipped
right along.”

Complete
Story