It’s funny that I hate Windows 8, Unity and Gnome Shell so much as I fucking love CDE on Solaris and it’s the most arcane, schizophrenic interface in the world combined with the most odd Unix system ever used en masse.

It’s like a bunch of engineers get together and smoked a Kilimanjaro-sized crack rock and designed an OS and its user interface. I know how to use it fine (though most of the time I’m in it, I’m at the command line and not actually using CDE), but when other more new-school IT people are watching me use it, the questions go like this:

• How do I log-in? What are all these options?
• Why did you tell me to be careful because “root can blow everything up?”
• What just happened?
• How did you know to click on that?
• What the hell did you just type? (After I type some arcane command in the terminal I recalled from the ’90s.)
• How did you know what that means? (After something like “SIOCGLIFFLAGS: igb2: no such interface” appears on screen.)
• What’s “grep?” What’s it doing? That’s a weird word.
• Why do you keep typing “more” behind everything?
• Why do you keep typing “man?”
• What’s the difference between console and xterm?
• Why do you keep cursing about “fucking korn shell can bite my ass, rat bastard piece of crap?”
• How did you learn this? (Much pain, young padawan, much pain.)

But still, to borrow/paraphrase/steal some thoughts from an old essay of Neal Stephenson’s, Solaris and CDE is like a tool used on a construction site. It’s extremely powerful, very dangerous in the wrong hands, and it does exactly what you tell it to do, no questions asked. In Solaris, you aren’t flying by the seat of your pants because your pants have already been torn off by the windshear and jettisoned 100 miles back.

Want to accidentally wipe the whole system! Go right ahead, motherfucker, we won’t even say a word about it! rm -rf / to your heart’s content! Run a nice sys-unconfig too, we don’t give a crap!

I love it. Just love it.